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To: internet:[log in to unmask] I too find Gurevitch's essay on the Divine Comedy before Dante to be very intelligent. But I am not so sure that the distinction "official=Church" vs. "unofficial=popular" works all that well to describe the circulation and impact of visions and other lurid depictions of hell and purgatory. Rather, my impression is that the "officials" of the Church used such material in a variety of ways in communicating not just with the unwashed rabble, but also with the nobility and even the members of the Church. From Hincmar to Richard of St. Vannes, visions of hell and purgatory played a key *rhetorical* role in urging monastic reform, both in communicating with the princes who patronized monasteries and with the errant monks themselves. Similarly, apocyphal matter on heaven/hell figured in officials' pastoral communications with the laity; by way of example, the Carta Dominica (n.b., a variant which probably drew on the vision reported by Richard of St. Vannes mentioned just above, which itself draws on an odd variant of the Visio Pauli) played a key rhetorical role in urging the adoption of a particularly spiritualized variant of the Peace of God toward 1033/34 in Picardy. Is it possible that such matter on hell and purgatory comprised part of the evangelical, catechetical and rhetorical "tool kits" of the "officials", such as bishops and reforming abbots, in the central M.A.? If so, then we may have an interesting problem to work out in regards to the articulation of such beliefs with doctrine, at least in the minds of the "officials" who made up the "official" Church: what did they know, what did they believe, what did they teach, what did they preach? Indeed, the vision texts with which I am most familiar don't treat the lurid accounts of otherworld punishment and refreshment as a matter of vulgar superstition, but rather as one of powerful revelation. Dave Van Meter %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%