Death in Medieval Europe: Death Scripted and Death Choreographed explores new cultural research into death and funeral practices in medieval Europe and demonstrates the important relationship between death and the world of the living in the Middle Ages. Across ten chapters, the articles in this volume survey the cultural effects of death. This volume explores overarching topics such as burials, commemorations, revenants, mourning practices and funerals, capital punishment, suspiscious death, and death registrations using case studies from across Europe including England, Iceland, and Spain. Together these chapters discuss how death was ritualised and choreographed, but also how it was expressed in writing throughout various documentary sources including wills and death registries. In each instance, records are analysed through a cultural framework to better understand the importance of the authors of death and their audience. Drawing together and building upon the latest scholarship, this book is essential reading for all students and academics of death in the medieval period.
Author(s): Joëlle Rollo-Koster
Publisher: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group
Year: 2017
Language: English
Pages: 257
Tags: Europa, Death: Social Aspects: Europe: History: To 1500, Funeral Rites And Ceremonies, Medieval
Cover......Page 1
Half Title......Page 2
Title Page......Page 4
Copyright Page......Page 5
Dedication......Page 6
Table of Contents......Page 8
List of illustrations......Page 10
Acknowledgments......Page 12
List of contributors......Page 13
Introduction......Page 16
1. Writing and commemoration in Anglo-Saxon England......Page 24
Written in heaven: the model for writing the dead......Page 26
Memorial books and libri vitae......Page 30
Salvation written in stone: Anglo-Saxon memorial inscriptions......Page 35
From tomb to manuscript: Anglo-Saxon epitaphs......Page 45
Writing the special dead: relic tags and lists......Page 51
Conclusion......Page 53
Introduction......Page 55
The case of Glámr the Revenant: unclean spirit as the reanimator of the dead......Page 60
Christian influences in the case of Glámr the Revenant......Page 63
The subordinate dead in Eddic poetry and fornaldarsögur......Page 67
Demonized practice of (pseudo)pagan magic?......Page 71
Latin necromancy in Iceland......Page 74
Waking up the dead in the poetic tradition......Page 77
Who are the awakened and how do they behave?......Page 80
Concluding remarks......Page 84
3. Animated corpses and bodies with power in the scholastic age......Page 86
Explaining medieval revenants......Page 90
Mummies and mumia......Page 94
Cruentation......Page 96
Dissection......Page 100
Corpses and scholastic theology......Page 103
4. Women, dance, death, and lament in medieval Spain and the Mediterranean: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim examples......Page 108
Official traditions in overview......Page 109
Christian and Islamic stances to the practice......Page 113
Medieval processional and graveside practices......Page 115
Considering ritual; considering history......Page 123
Conclusion......Page 127
5. Wills and testaments......Page 129
The Merovingian era to the twelfth-century shift......Page 133
The consolidation of purgatory and testamentary practice......Page 136
Conclusion......Page 142
6. Spectacular death: capital punishment in medieval English towns......Page 145
7. Ghostly knights: kings’ funerals in fourteenth-century Europe and the emergence of an international style......Page 164
8. Death of clergymen: popes and cardinals’ death rituals......Page 179
9. A dead zone in the historiography of death in the Middle Ages: the sentiment of suspicious death......Page 201
A sentiment of the Late Middle Ages?......Page 202
Expressions of suspicion......Page 210
Triggers of suspicion......Page 211
A constructed and instrumentalized sentiment......Page 217
Conclusion......Page 222
10. Registering deaths and causes of death in late medieval Milan......Page 224
Milan’s civic death registers......Page 226
Recognition through registration......Page 230
Milan’s Sanità: extramural and intramural procedures......Page 232
Record formatting......Page 233
Paperwork prior to a permanent register......Page 235
Paperwork management in a great plague (1485)......Page 238
State plague surveillance and the diagnosis of causes of death......Page 241
Conclusion......Page 250
Index......Page 252
