Afterlives examines stories about the return of the dead in corporeal and incorporeal forms recorded in medieval sources from the eleventh to the fifteenth century. Caciola divides her book into three parts, each comprising two or three chapters. Part i offers a long prelude that surveys patristic discourse about the the possibility of the soul's survival and its location after its separation from the body at death from Tertullian to Isidore of Seville (ch. i) before shifting somewhat jarringly to the topic of late medieval medical theory about human vitality and the end of life (ch. ii). Part ii treats stories about revenants, that is, risen corpses, written by a wide range of authors from Thietmar of Merseburg (ch. iii) to Orderic Vitalis and William of Auvergne (ch. iv) to Geoffrey Burton, Walter Map, William of Newburgh and Caesarius of Heisterbach (ch. v). Caciola argues that these tales were the product of a syncreticism of ‘earlier cultural systems … with Christian teachings’ (p. 110) in northern Europe. Part iii turns our attention to stories of the returning dead from ‘regional cultures of the meridonial sphere’ (p. 255), which includes the abbey of Cluny and points further south closer to the Mediterranean coast. In contrast to the northern undead, with whom they shared some affinities, Caciola maintains that ‘the unquiet dead of the Mediterranean … were presumed to be purely spiritual presences that moved invisibly and anonymously among the living’ (p. 255). This north/south dichotomy struck me as being too blunt an instrument to do justice to the local variation between these stories. Caciola misses an opportunity here to examine the wide semantic range of Latin terminology that medieval authors used to describe the risen dead. For example, around 1400 ce an anonymous author used spiritus for otherwise corporeal undead in late medieval Yorkshire, while Orderic Vitalis employed biothanatus, a Greek loan word associated with suicides. This rich linguistic diversity calls into question the applicability of Caciola's geographical dichotomy. Throughout the book, Caciola advances that overarching claim that medieval Christian authors systematically adapted pre-Christian traditions about the return of the dead rather than displacing them completely, that ‘originally pagan cultural logics were imported into Christian texts’ (p. 207), but this is an argument ex silentio as there are no surviving pagan sources against which to measure the method or degree of Christian adaptation that allegedly took place. Lastly, her treatment of images of the dead must be read with caution, as most of the images reproduced in the book did not actually illustrate the manuscripts of any of the stories that she discusses. Moreover, it is often open to question whether these images depicted the risen dead or personifications of death or something entirely unrelated (like fig. 5.2).