This chapter asks where and how Rome (and, by extension, polemics self-consciously characterized as reactions against Rome) figures in efforts to determine what the living owe to the dead, and what the dead can do for the living. Latin occupies a controlling position within this inquiry; so, too, do texts that cast the world of the living as the home of the dead; so, finally, do Reformation-era debates about the soteriological stakes of praying for the dead. These topics span a period of time in which Rome is the gravitational centre of a sequence of massive upheavals in vernacular piety and attendant debates about the relationship between the living and the dead. The chapter argues that interpreting these debates as facets of the fact of Rome alerts us to the role that the human voice plays in probing the limits of mortality and the nature of the human as such.

This final chapter discusses a letter, attributed to Pope Gregory IV (d.844), to the bishops of Francia. In 833, Pope Gregory IV made the journey across the Alps to mediate in the conflict between Emperor Louis the Pious and his sons. The chapter addresses the issue of the identity of the author who composed the letter. It discusses both the content of the letter and the details of its transmission, because this text is highly relevant to the reception of classical ideas on free speech. The unidentified author draws upon the late antique tradition of free speech in an attempt to persuade the bishops of Francia to speak out to the emperor. An analysis of this letter shows that the classical vocabulary of free speech, which disappeared in letters and literature of the Latin West after the sixth century, was reintroduced in political discourse. The chapter shows how within the ninth-century movement to bolster spiritual authority, the old vocabulary of free speech found a new place.