In Pope Gregory’s Dialogues, we see the formation of an authoritative tradition that death did not end the relationship between the living and the deceased. With the exception of the saints or especially wicked individuals, ordinary Christians would not proceed directly to heaven or descend irrevocably to hell when their souls departed from their bodies at the moment of death. Rather, weighed down by the accumulation of countless minor sins, almost everyone could expect to spend time in an otherworldly place where their souls awaited God’s final judgment at the end of time. Some would suffer in cleansing fire to purify their souls; others would rest in peaceful repose, their only anguish caused by the absence of the direct presence of God. In the seventh century, a generation of Christian thinkers influenced by the writings of Gregory the Great set down in writing some of the earliest descriptions of the otherworld where the souls of the sinful dead resided. Long before the notion of purgatory became an official doctrine of the Christian church in the thirteenth century, early medieval monks imagined the ecology of a realm of souls with a vividness intended to inspire their readers to cultivate virtue in this life before death sealed their fate in the world to come.