The spread of wireless portable devices is pushing towards service provisioning over dense Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs), i.e., limited spatial regions, such as shopping malls and airports, where a high number of mobile peers can autonomously cooperate without a statically deployed network infrastructure. The paper proposes the REDMAN middleware to manage, retrieve, and disseminate replicas of data/service components to cooperating nodes in a dense MANET. The guideline is to exploit high node population to enable optimistic lightweight resource replication capable of tolerating node exits/failures. REDMAN adopts original approximated solutions, specifically designed for dense MANET, that have demonstrated good scalability and limited overhead for dense MANET configuration (node identification and manager election), for replica distribution/retrieval, and for lazily consistent replica degree maintenance.