Performing death in medieval Iberia: an introduction to the end of life

ABSTRACT

This article serves as an introduction to a discussion on cultural practices relating to death in late medieval Iberia. It contends that an intersectional approach is necessary to study this topic because, while all humans die, the way they are buried, memorialized, and remembered is tied to factors such as culture, religion, class, wealth, gender, tradition, legal practices, medical knowledge, technology, and historical context. The second part of this introduction offers an overview of the articles that form this special issue, the goal of which is to gender death in order to better appreciate how late medieval women prepared for it, and how they were commemorated by those they left behind.

KEYWORDS:

• Death
• gender
• medieval women
• memorialization
• burials
• Iberia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Manrique, Coplas, trans., Alan Steinle. Six of the scholars involved in this special issue collaborate in the research project “Paisajes monásticos. Representaciones y virtualizaciones de las realidades espirituales y materiales medievales en el Mediterráneo Occidental (siglos VI XVI)” (2019–2022) PGC 2018-095350-B-100, supported by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ and “FEDER Una manera de hacer Europa.”

2 Alfons (d. 1196) and Jaume I (d. 1276) were already buried at Santa Maria de Poblet when Pere the Ceremonious (d. 1387) established the monastery as the royal pantheon. Pere is interred there, along with three of his four wives: Maria of Navarre (d. 1347), Elionor of Portugal (d. 1348), and Elionor of Sicily (d. 1375). The Ceremonious's two sons, Joan I (d. 1396) and his two wives (Matha d’Armagnac, d. 1378 and Violant de Bar, d. 1431), and Martí I (d. 1410) and his first wife, Maria de Luna (d. 1409), also rest in Poblet. The first Trastámara ruler, Fernando de Antequera (d. 1416), also chose Poblet, as did his two sons, Alfons the Magnanimous (d. 1458) and Joan II (d. 1479) and his wife Juana Enríquez (d. 1468). Only two kings and a queen are buried in the Cistercian monastery of Santa Maria de Santes Creus (Tarragona), Pere II (d. 1285), Jaume II (d.1327), and his second wife, Blanca d’Anjou (d.1310). See Arco Garay, Sepulcros de la casa real. For comparative antecedents in royal burials across the Iberian Peninsula, see more recently Isla Frez, Memoria, culto y monarquía hispánica; Alonso Álvarez, “Enterramientos regios y panteones dinásticos,” and “Los enterramientos de los reyes;” Franco Mata, “Iconografía de sepulcros góticos,” 47–86.

3 The first kings of Portugal, Afonso Henriques (d. 1185) and Sancho I (d. 1211), were buried in the Monastery de Santa Cruz (Coimbra). The third ruler, Afonso II (d. 1223), was the first to be interred at the Monastery of Alcobaça along with his queen Urraca of Castile (d. 1220), his son, Afonso III (d. 1279) and his wife, Beatriz of Castile (d. 1303), and three of their children. Also, in Alcobaça are Pedro I (d. 1367) and his beloved concubine, Ines de Castro (d. 1355). See Vasconcelos Vilar, “Lineage and Territory,” 163–70.

4 For an overview on Castilian royal burials, see Arias Guillén, “Enterramientos regios,” 643–75; Cabrera Sánchez, “La muerte de los miembros,” 97–132.

5 Varela, La muerte del rey, 23–25.

6 The royalty of the Iberian Peninsula did not practice embalming regularly until the death of Felipe IV in 1665, despite the fact that earlier kings, like Alfonso X, had favored it. Valera, La muerte del rey, 18–19; Schmitz-Esser, The Corpse in the Middle Ages, 273; Cabrera Sánchez, “Técnicas de conservación,” 175–98; Silleras-Fernandez, The Politics of Emotion, 265–70. Regarding the connection between contagion and corpses, see Lynteris and Evans, “Introduction,” 1–25.

7 Laqueur, The Work of the Dead, 4.

8 Cascone, “Archeologists Have Discovered.” It is difficult to pinpoint a precise moment for the origin of ritual, the awareness of death, and ideas regarding an afterlife. Archeologist Paul Pettitt, The Paleolithic Origins, 8, sees “the development of hominin mortuary activity – like many other aspects of hominin behavior – as regionally variable and discontinuous, but in the long term essentially cumulative in nature.”

9 Laqueur, The Work of the Dead, 5.

10 Laqueur, The Work of the Dead, 10–11. For a medieval and Castilian perspective, see Guiance, Los discursos sobre la muerte, I.

11 Stearns and Stearns, “Emotionology,” 813.

12 Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” 837. For a psychological perspective, see Granek, “Mourning Sickness,” 61–68.

13 Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, 124. For a critique of this work, first published in 1919, see Arnade, Howell, and van der Lem, Rereading Huizinga, 11–21.

14 Varlık, Plague and Empire, 1–5. For a global perspective and a study of the plague's origins, see Hymes, “Buboes in Thirteenth Century,” 3–60; Green, “Putting Asia on the Black Death Map,” 61–90. See also Green's webinar for the Medieval Academy of America, “The Mother of All Pandemics.”

15 Silleras-Fernandez, The Politics of Emotion, chap. 2. See also Sanmartín, El arte de morir; González, Ars moriendi.

16 Carr, Prologue to Enrique de Villena, Tratado de la consolación, LXXVII; Cátedra, “Prospección del género consolatorio,” 1–16.

17 Villena, Tratado de la consolación, 5–18.

18 Vovelle, Piété baroque, and La mort et l’Occident; Geary, Living with the Dead, 2.

19 Tenenti, “Ars moriendi,” 466; Chaunu, La mort à Paris.

20 According to Ariès, Western Attitudes, 58, 66, the profound emotional experience of mourning emerged in the nineteenth century, specifically during the Romantic period. He discerns in this era a resistance to acknowledging death. However, it is noteworthy that numerous examples from medieval Iberia challenge this assertion. See Silleras-Fernandez, The Politics of Emotion, 9.

21 Edwards, “España es diferente?” 159–60; Rucquoi, Valladolid en la Edad Media, 2:383–88; Royer de Cardinal, Morir en España. For an overview on Purgatory, see Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, who relates its emergence to developments of the late twelfth century.

22 Nalle, God in La Mancha, 191–92. See also Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory, 19–25.

23 Recent edited collections have approached death from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective: Classen, Death in the Middle Ages; Rollo-Koster, Death in Medieval Europe, 1–30; Molas and Guerra, Morir en femenino.

24 Meagher and Balk, Handbook of Thanatology, chapters 3, 9, 16, 30, 36; Davies, Death, Ritual, and Belief, 53–78.

25 The first indulgences were granted in the mid-eleventh century in the context of pilgrimage and crusade. Luther dismissed Purgatory as an invented “third place” not mentioned in the Bible. See Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, 1.

26 Valera, La muerte de rey, 30; Vivanco, Death in Fifteenth-Century Castile, 155.

27 Šterbenc Erker, “Gender and Roman Funeral Ritual,” 44–46. Some elite and philosophically inclined Romans considered such practices vulgar.

28 For a short overview, see Gasull, “La muerte en el Antiguo Testamento,” 83–97.

29 “Que non tiene pro et tiene daño facer duelo por los finados.” Scott and Burns, Las Siete Partidas, I:35.

30 Some “became insane with grief; and those who did not go to such extremes as this, disheveled their hair and cut it off, and disfigured their faces by gashing them and scratching them,” Scott and Burns, Las Siete Partidas, I:35.

31 See the rubric, “What Punishment Those Who Mourn for the Dead Are Liable to, according to the Holy Church.” Scott and Burns, Las Siete Partidas, I:36.

32 Colmeiro, Cortes de los antiguos reinos, II: chap. 18, “Reinado de Juan I;” Lawrence, “La muerte y el morir,” 17–18.

33 The last years of the Catholic Monarchs were marked by the loss of many family members. See Silleras-Fernandez, “Consoling the Catholic Queen,” and The Politics of Emotion, chap. 7; García Gallo, “Pragmática sobre la manera,” vol. II, fols. 308v–309v. Regarding black as a color of mourning, see Nogales Rincón, “El color negro,” 227–28, and “Duelo, luto y comunicación, 330–33; González Arce, “El color como atributo simbólico del poder;” Harvey, The Story of Black; Pastoureau, “Les couleurs de la mort,” 103.

34 Lansing, Passion and Order, 58–72, and “Gender and Civic Authority,” 33–59.

35 Singing and playing musical instruments at burials was also forbidden. See Titone, “Bewailing the Dead,” 240–41.

36 Cohen-Hanegbi, “Mourning under Medical Care,” 38–39, and Caring for the Living, 186–88.

37 For comparable studies on different geographical areas, see Rollo-Koster and Reyerson, “For the Salvation of My Soul;” Sperling and Wray, Across the Religious Divide, chapters 4, 5, 10, 16.

38 Butler, “Gender Trouble,” 396, and “Performative Acts,” 519.

39 Booton, “Commemorating Duke John IV.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nuria Silleras-Fernandez

Nuria Silleras-Fernandez is an Associate Professor at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Humanities Program of the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research focuses on medieval and Early Modern Iberian and Mediterranean Studies, cultural and intellectual history, gender, and literature. She is the author of Power, Piety, and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship. Maria de Luna (New York: Palgrave, 2008), Chariots of Ladies: Francesc Eiximenis and the Court Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Ithaca: Cornell, 2015), and The Politics of Emotion: Love, Grief, and Madness in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Ithaca: Cornell, 2024). She has also co-edited three volumes: In and Of the Mediterranean. Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Studies (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2015), Teaching Gender through Latin American, Latino, and Iberian Texts and Cultures (Rotterdam: Sense Publishing: 2015), and Iberian Babel: Translation and Multilingualism in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean (Leiden: Brill, 2022).