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

Nuestras vidas son los ríos / Our lives are like the streams

que van a dar en la mar, / that flow into the sea

que es el morir; / and terminate;

allí van los señoríos/ that's where the manors go—

derechos a se acabar. / they meet their end and they

y consumir; / disintegrate;

allí los ríos caudales, / just as the rivers large,

allí los otros medianos/ the medium and small

y más chicos, / go to the sea,

y llegados, son iguales / we all arrive as one,

los que viven por sus manos / as workers in the field

y los ricos. / Or rich and free.

Jorge Manrique, Coplas a la muerte de su padre /

Verses on the Death of His Father (third stanza)¹

Jorge Manrique (d. 1479) wrote his Coplas a la muerte de su padre to honor his father, Rodrigo Manrique, Maestre de Santiago (d. 1476), who, despite fighting many battles, died at home, an old man surrounded by his family and dependents. With solemn simplicity over the course of forty stanzas the knight-poet highlights the fleeting nature of life; wealth, fame, and reputation are nothing compared to eternal life. Nevertheless, and quite paradoxically, by composing a “classic” text that still resonates with us centuries later, Jorge Manrique perpetuated his father's fame and good name, endowing him with immortality through poetry. Literature is one of the most enduring forms of commemorating the deceased, along with the elaborate and monumental sepulchers that the wealthy placed in cathedrals and monasteries during the Middle Ages.

In his couplets, Manrique characterizes death from the perspective of fifteenth-century Iberia. The old maestre is portrayed as an exemplary Christian knight who understands that resisting mortality is futile, so he appears as accepting his demise, and entrusting himself to God. The third stanza, cited above, recounts that death pays no heed to status or money: “ríos caudales (the rich), medianos (those in the middle) y más chicos (the poor),” and takes us all. Nonetheless, while death has an egalitarian component – in the sense that we all die – what follows after death is by no means equal.

Death has its own materiality, and even in death, the powerful and wealthy felt obliged to remind the world of their stature in life and of the importance of their familial line. For this reason, so many royal and noble lineages established pantheons. Thus, in the Crown of Aragon, most rulers selected the Cistercian Monastery of Santa Maria de Poblet (Tarragona) as their place of burial, until Fernando the Catholic (d. 1516) broke with tradition by choosing the royal chapel of Granada instead.² The Portuguese House of Avis buried their dead in the Dominican Monastery of Batalha (Beira) – a location that had the added symbolic significance of being the site of the 1385 Battle of Aljubarrota, where the Portuguese vanquished invading Castile. When Manuel I (d. 1521) ascended the throne of Portugal in 1495, after the death of his cousin and brother-in-law, Jõao II, he founded a magnificent Hieronymite monastery in Belem on the banks of Tagus River (Lisbon) that became the new burial site for the dynasty.³

In Castile Alfonso VIII (d. 1214) and Leonor of Plantagenet (d. 1214) founded the female Cistercian monastery of Santa María la Real de las Huelgas (Burgos), in part to serve as a pantheon for their line. They are buried there, together with many other royals, but the monastery did not last long as pantheon: Fernando III (d. 1252) and his first queen, Beatriz of Swabia (d. 1212), were laid to rest instead in the cathedral of Seville, which their son Alfonso X the Learned also chose for his own burial. The Castilian Trastámaras did not privilege any monastery, choosing instead to scatter their remains around various monastic houses and churches in their lands.⁴ For example, Isabel I of Castile (d. 1504) is buried in Granada, a site that symbolizes one of her signal achievements – the conquest of the Nasrid sultanate in 1492. She lies there alongside her husband, Fernando I of Aragon (d. 1516), her daughter, Juana I of Castile (d. 1555), her son-in-law, Philippe I “the Handsome” (d. 1506), and her grandson, Miguel de la Paz (d. 1500). On the other hand, Isabel's predecessor, her half-brother Enrique IV (d. 1474), is buried in the Hieronymite monastery of Santa María de Guadalupe (Cáceres), while Isabel's parents, Juan I of Castile (d. 1454) and Isabel of Portugal (d. 1496), were laid to rest in the Charterhouse of Miraflores (near Burgos). It was the Habsburg rulers that later established a Castilian royal pantheon, in the fashion of Saint-Denis in France or Westminster in England, when Felipe II (d. 1598) founded San Lorenzo de El Escorial as a monastery, palace, and mausoleum.⁵

The ways people were memorialized, remembered, buried, mourned, and prayed for after death varied, intersecting with factors as diverse as religious affiliation, laws, social norms, status, money, gender, customs, tradition, medical knowledge (regarding the care of the corpse, the embalming, the fear of contagion during epidemics), materiality, and their particular historical and cultural context.⁶ This culture of dying, like any other aspect of culture, was not static but was continuously readjusted and renegotiated, and grief was performed through a variety of forms and rituals. The articles in this special issue, including one focusing on Jewish women, examine the cultural practices, rituals, and material culture associated with the death of women – whether noble, common, wealthy, or poor – in the late medieval Iberian Peninsula, in order to better understand how they prepared for their mortal end, how they sought to be buried, mourned, ritualized, and remembered, and to what extent their wishes were respected or ignored.

“We live with the dead”⁷

The observation of death and the experience of grief is one of the most enduring human characteristics, predating even the emergence of homo sapiens as a species, with the oldest known burial in Africa some 80,000 years ago.⁸ As Thomas Laqueur put it in his monumental cultural study of mortal remains: “we care for the dead because humans have always cared for our dead.”⁹ Thus, taking care of the dead seems to be a sort of universal obligation, both social and personal. Sociologist Émile Durkheim (d. 1917), a forerunner in seeing society as a moral construct and framing death as a social problem with social implications, and his nephew and fellow scholar, Marcel Mauss (d. 1950), studied death as comprising two entwined aspects: natural death, when the body dies, and cultural death, that involves aspects like bereavement practices and commemoration.¹⁰ Both could be ritualized.

Cultural death, of course, is also mediated by emotional norms and changing social attitudes. Every society defines what is normal and acceptable and, therefore, what is abnormal or unacceptable, and each has its own “emotionology,” defined by Peter Stearn and Carol Stearn as “the attitude or standards that a society, or a definable group within a society, maintains toward basic emotions and their appropriate expression; ways that institutions reflect and encourage these attitudes in human conduct.”¹¹ According to Barbara Rosenwein, individuals moved around different “emotional communities” that had their own rules: “Emotions depend on language, cultural practices, expectations, and moral beliefs. This means that every culture has its rules for feelings and behavior; every culture thus exerts certain restraints while favoring certain forms of expressivity.”¹²

This issue focuses on the late medieval period, a moment of transformation in attitudes towards death. A century ago, in his classic 1919 study of Burgundian court culture, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, Johan Huizinga (d. 1945) declared that, “No other epoch has laid so much stress as the expiring Middle Ages on the thought of death.”¹³ Huizinga perceived “a somber melancholy” in the iconography and literature of the period. Death was all the more at the forefront of people's consciousness because the late Middle Ages was a period of war, famine, and plague. The Black Death arrived in 1347 and 1348 but would return in recurrent outbreaks until 1722.¹⁴ These factors contributed to a high mortality rate among people of all ages and stations of life, provoking important social and economic transformations, and giving rise to new attitudes towards death, as manifested in last wills and testaments, literature, and art.

Thus, plague, war, and famine had made death ever-present in the European and the Mediterranean consciousness and, therefore also in the Iberian Peninsula. This can be attested, for instance, in the development of consolatory literature and in bestselling texts, like the Tractatus artis bene moriendi (Treatise on Dying Well) or an even more successful shorter version, the Ars moriendi (The Art of Dying), that demonstrated how Christians could die virtuously.¹⁵ Literature at the time had several functions: to teach, edify through exempla, entertain, and console. Consolation literature could even contribute to a “cure” of those afflicted by grief, whether writer or reader, an idea that had taken root in the Peninsula by the early fifteenth century. The nobleman and author Enrique de Villena (d. 1434) is credited with having written the first consolatio mortis in Spanish that follows Classical models.¹⁶ Villena wrote his Tratado de la consolación in response to a letter (dated 13 December 1423) written by Juan Fernández de Valera, who was seeking consolation after losing all of his family to the plague in Cuenca in 1422.¹⁷ Villena's text inaugurated what would become a popular genre in Iberian letters.

For Michel Vovelle, such changing attitudes towards death were also tied to the growing importance of Purgatory, while Patrick Geary saw the biggest adjustments with the Reformation “when reformers rejected the involvement of the dead in the affairs of the living.”¹⁸ For his part, Alberto Tenenti held that between 1450 and 1650, there was a cultural transformation that made death become part of life – what Pierre Chaunu defined as a “new eschatology,” which ended in a growing secularization of death in the eighteenth century.¹⁹ Similarly, Philippe Ariès, who transformed the study of death, saw consistency in the period from the end of the Middle Ages and up to the eighteenth century, when grief had two main objectives: allowing the expression of sorrow while protecting those in bereavement from excess, thanks to rituals and communal support.²⁰ These changes can also be attested in Castile. John Edwards, building on Adeline Rucquoi's work on Valladolid, noted that, towards the end of the fifteenth century, testaments showed an evident “anxiety about death and Judgement and concern for personal salvation,” which like Vovelle he tied to the growing importance of Purgatory and indulgences.²¹ Likewise, for Sara Nalle, sixteenth-century Spain was the “Golden Age of Purgatory.”²² More recently, “Death Studies” or “Thanatology,” which involves the study of human death and dying, grief, and social attitudes towards death, have benefitted from developments in archaeology and genomic analysis in the study of mortal remains found at cemeteries.²³ There is also a renewed interest in the emotions linked to bereavement and the development of comparative scholarly perspectives embracing psychology, history, literature, cultural studies, and anthropology.²⁴

From a Catholic point of view, death opened three possible outcomes for an individual's soul: Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory. Heaven was to be striven for and Hell to be avoided through the grace of God and practice of virtue in life. In pursuit of salvation, the dying were expected to confess, receive communion and last rites, and write a will. The souls sent to Purgatory had their sentences alleviated with masses, prayers, and eventually, with indulgences, although the Reformation ended this practice for many Christians, as Protestants did not recognize Purgatory or the selling of indulgences.²⁵ Whatever the supposed outcome for the deceased, survivors were meant to maintain their dignity. Ostentatious displays of grief were not only discouraged but even forbidden. In the Iberian Peninsula the Third Council of Toledo (589), the Provincial Council of Valencia (1255), the Council of Toledo (1323), and the Council of Alcalá (1335) repeatedly tried to properly ritualize burials by prohibiting, for example, the singing of laments.²⁶ Such prohibitions went against funerary customs that had been entrenched since Roman times, when mourners, including women, publicly lamented and cried, sang dirges, pulled at their hair and scratched their faces until blood flowed, beat their heads and chests, and covered their heads with ashes. The presence of slaves or paid mourners at the funerals of the wealthy was also common, often a long procession of women who, by wailing loudly, signaled the importance of the dead person.²⁷ In fact, the Old Testament had also condemned the expression of excessive sorrow: “You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks on you: I am the Lord” (Leviticus 19:28).²⁸

The right amount of sorrow

This Roman past led Christian moralists to see excessive displays of sorrow as pagan traditions, which by lamenting death, rejected God's will. Moreover, such displays suggest doubt of a key aspect of Christian doctrine: the immortality of the soul. Temperance, a cardinal virtue, was associated with patience, and both were expected to be shown even in bereavement. A good Christian ought to be able to endure worldly problems with serenity and in acceptance of God's will, following the example of Job. As the apostle Paul stated,

Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.

(I Thessalonians 4.13–14)

At any rate, overemotional responses to death must have been seen as a problem because Church regulations were also echoed in secular law. For instance, in his thirteenth-century legal code, Las Siete Partidas, Alfonso X the Learned of Castile regulated public mourning under the rubric: “How Mourning for the Dead Is Not Beneficial, but Injurious.”²⁹ It noted, “los duelos que face los homes en que se mesan los cabellos, o se rompen las caras et las desafiguran, o se fieran de guise que venga a lisión o a muerte.”³⁰ The Partidas forbade priests from even entering houses of the deceased if upon arrival one perceived forbidden and exaggerated mourning.³¹ Similar laws, intended to stifle grief, were repeated by subsequent rulers, like Juan I of Castile, who at the Cortes of Soria of 1380 again prohibited disfiguring the face, excessive wailing and lamentations, and wearing mourning clothing for longer than the stipulated period.³² In fact, wearing plain mourning attire made of simple and rough cloth became customary for those in bereavement; from the fifteenth century, this came to mean wearing black. In 1502 Isabel I of Castile and Fernando II of Aragon, the Catholic Monarchs, promulgated a regulation (pragmatica) reinforcing black as the color of mourning and again limiting the public expressions of grief, both in form and duration, and forbidding the presence of plañideras (professional mourners). The Catholic Monarchs’ decree also set the maximum allowable expenditure on funerary ceremonies to 2,000 maravedís and restricted the wearing of black mourning attire to the passing of immediate relatives and members of the royal family, as well as for servants mourning their lord and heirs grieving for their benefactors.³³

Analogous attempts at restraining emotion can be observed across the Mediterranean, where a gendering of mourning developed that characterized those who indulged in such excesses as “feminine.” Carol Lansing's study of Orvieto in Tuscany addresses how the commune prohibited the pulling out of one's hair, loud lamentations, and other “effeminate” expressions of grief.³⁴ For his part Fabrizio Titone has studied how in Sicily since 1309–1324 there was legislation against reputatrici (professional mourners) aimed particularly to restrain women.³⁵ In 1330 Frederick III of Sicily (1272–1337) reiterated previous legislation against excessive mourning and the use of a reputatrici because they were offensive to God. As Naama Cohen-Hanegbi has indicated, even doctors advised against excessive grief: Bartolomeo Montagnana (1380–1452), a physician from Padua, diagnosed Johannes of Milano with “sorrow of the soul” (tristitia anime) when his health deteriorated after his daughter's passing.³⁶

Thus, the study of death in the Middle Ages requires a multilayered approach that integrates the complex expressions of grief that manifested in public ritual, including requiem masses and the processions of clergymen that accompanied the wealthy to their graves, and the paid mourners – mostly women who wailed and scratched their faces – who added a performative quality to the ceremonial, despite the laws that sought to prohibit them.

Gendering death in this special issue

This gathering of articles genders death by looking at bereavement and death in a female context from various perspectives: the writing of last wills and testaments, the donation of belongings and planning of burials, and the provisioning of the soul; and from the perspective of the dying to that of widows for whom death was not an end, but a new beginning (for better or worse).³⁷ In this volume, death is studied in relation to ritual, performance, burials, material and legal culture, religious practices, the politics of memory and remembrance, and emotions. The articles address a range of social levels, including noblewomen, queens, and commoners. The authors are historians working at various European and American universities, some of whom have been collaborating for years, and others who wrote these contributions collaboratively. They share a common interest in Iberian and Mediterranean studies and religion; some concentrate on social history and networks of women, while others are specialists in court culture and the monarchy. Significantly, all of them engage with gender as a category of historical analysis. The articles in this collection highlight the agency shown by women while preparing for death or confronting the consequences of the death of a loved one or relative. Together, the studies show how the rituals surrounding death are performative, like gender itself. Indeed, one sees a dramaturgy around dying developing. It is the repeated performance that makes the ritual, which is analogous to Judith Butler's characterization of gender: “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.”³⁸

In this collection, four studies focus on the Crown of Aragon, and the rest on Castile, Navarre, and Portugal. The cluster opens with a collaborative contribution by the co-editor, Núria Jornet-Benito, together with Irene Brugués Massot, “La muerte de la abadesa: comunidad y ritualización en el monasterio de Sant Pere de les Puel·les” – which showcases this Benedictine community, the oldest female monastery in Barcelona. It explores the ritualization of death associated with the passing of the abbess and how this ceremony was meant to emphasize continuity as the new superior was elected. One of the archival sources it is based on is particularly rich and revealing: the seventeenth-century Ritual d'exèquies i benedicció de les abadesses de Sant Pere de les Puel·les de Barcelona, which recounts in detail the burial ceremony of the abbess and the celebration of her successor. In the second essay, “The Chest of Memory. The Funeral Rites of Maria Álvarez de Xèrica and her Burial in the Convent of Santa Catarina in Barcelona,” Blanca Garí shifts from religious to noble actors, looking at how the politics of memory are linked to the materiality of death. Garí examines how the countess of Empúries (c. 1310–1374) tried to cultivate her memory (and indirectly that of her lineage) through her will, the preparation of her sepulcher in the Dominican convent of Santa Caterina in Barcelona, and the commissioning of funerary rituals, along with the annual commemorations of her death. Drawing extensively from unedited archival sources, Garí unveils the subtle interplay between Maria Álvarez de Xèrica's aspirations for salvation, recognition, and memory.

The following three articles focus on Castile, Portugal, and Navarre through the subject of queens. The first focuses on one of the better-known female medieval monarchs, Isabel I the Catholic (d. 1506), the “proprietary queen” of Castile. María del Mar Graña Cid studies Isabel's spirituality and her preparation for death through the Coplas por mandado de la reyna doña Ysabel, estando su alteza en el fin de su enfermedad, a text the queen commissioned from the Franciscan friar, Ambrosio de Montesino. Then she turns to Isabel's last will and testament, and the queen's decision to be buried discretely under the floor of a convent in the Alhambra, and why she was eventually transferred to a monumental tomb and laid to rest along with her husband in the Royal Chapel of Granada Cathedral. Isabel exerted agency in life, but in dying she inevitably relinquished control of her wishes to those who succeeded her.

Next, with Ana Maria Rodrigues in “Splendour in Life, Humility in Death: Queen Leonor de Lencastre (1458–1525) and the Women around Her,” we move to Portugal. The wife of João II of Portugal (r. 1481–1495) and sister of Manuel I (r. 1495–1521), Leonor was an influential political figure. She was also a cousin of Isabel the Catholic, with whom she shared an intense spirituality. Queen Leonor, along with her mother Beatriz, her sister Isabel, and other women of their entourage, like Isabel da Sousa and Justa Rodrigues, the founder of the convent of Jesus in Setúbal, are the focus of this study. Rodrigues argues that those women followed what she calls a “via mixta” – an expression of piety that avoided excess. In practical terms, this meant that while they enjoyed all the advantages of their privileged secular position, they demonstrated piety by fasting, praying, and donating generously to the Church, mostly by funding monastic houses. Nevertheless, in death they expressed a dramatic and public form of humility by rejecting the pompous funerals and monumental tombs expected for women of their station, choosing instead to be interred discreetly. Some even requested to be buried under the floors of the monastic houses they supported, so they could spend eternity in humility, cloistered, and trod upon by the nuns whom they had patronized, once their subordinates. Through her article, Rodrigues opens a window into the contradictions between a life lived in comfort and luxury, and an “uncomfortable” and modest after-life, epitomizing one aspect of female spirituality in the late medieval Portuguese court.

Queenship is also the focus of Elena Woodacre's “Absent in (Life and) Death? Examining the Tombs of Navarre's Regnant Queens and the Shaping of Memory,” which addresses the sepulchers of five queens who ruled Navarre in their own right to disentangle their complicated political lives and how these were connected to the places they were buried. Paradoxically, none was buried in Pamplona, their kingdom's capital, and only one rests in Navarre. Juana I (r. 1274–1304) and Juana II (r. 1328–49) are buried in Paris, Catalina (r. 1483–1512/17) in Lescar (France), Blanca I (r. 1425–41) in Santa Maria de Nieva (Segovia), and Leonor (r. 1479) is the only one who remained in Navarre, resting at the convent of San Francisco at Tafalla. This is due in part to the fact that Navarre was, in Woodacre's words, “a liminal state” wedged between the two powerful neighbors of France and Castile, and with territories on both sides of the Pyrenees. Such liminality gave Navarrese queens the option to choose which cultural practices they wanted to follow to preserve their corpses. For instance, while the bodies of most Iberian rulers were buried whole, many French monarchs had their hearts removed and buried in a different location. In the course of this study, Woodacre draws on Diane Booton's notion of “shapers of memory” to describe individuals, like the queens she examines, who used their tombs in a genealogical construction of memory.³⁹

The final pair of contributions explore death in the context of social history, testamentary practices, and legal culture. They use notarial sources to uncover how sometimes underprivileged women – some wealthier, others poor, most of them free, some enslaved – approached death and memorialization. In “The Widow and the Notary: Death, Gender, and Legal Culture in the Jewish and Christian Communities of Medieval Catalonia,” Sarah Ifft Decker examines death in the light of judicial practices by comparing the legal strategies deployed by Jewish and Christian widows. As Ifft Decker shows, beyond the potential emotional toll, dealing with the death of a husband had legal and financial consequences that required notarial intervention in the form of writing a testament, grappling with creditors and inheritance, distributing pious donations, and of course, arranging the burial. It also forced widows at times to take a front seat in the safeguarding of their livelihood and that of their children. Based on Catalan notarial documents from Barcelona, Girona, and Vic from 1250 to 1350 and Hebrew responsa, this article shows how Jewish and Christian women managed their conjugal estates. Widowhood is considered by Ifft Decker as “transformative” for both Christian and Jewish women.

Lastly, frequent collaborators Susan McDonough and Michelle Armstrong-Partida take a Mediterranean perspective in “Affective Networks across the Divide: Singlewomen, the Notarial Archive, and Social Connections in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon.” Using notarial documents and wills from Mallorca, Sicily, and Crete, with supporting examples from Barcelona and Valencia, the authors pinpoint singlewomen's places in their communities and social networks. This study is not only remarkable because of the number of singlewomen uncovered in the archives – including both enslaved and free women engaging in a range of occupations, including domestic servants, apprentices, textile workers, and sex workers – but because the authors disentangle these women's larger social and economic networks. Through these wills, McDonough and Armstrong-Partida bring to light overlooked female “emotional communities” – networks of mutual support and friendship, who practiced memorialization through the donation of clothing, jewelry, and other belongings to female friends and supporters.

In sum, the studies in this issue bring death to life, situating it at the forefront of historical inquiry, deploying intersectional approaches that emphasize gender as a category of analysis, and employing previously unknown archival documents or new readings of well-known sources to interrogate the oldest and most unsolvable problem of all: mortality. It bears remarking on the deep current of collaboration that characterizes both the issue as a whole and two individual chapters; two scholars collaborated as editors; two articles were written by pairs of historians, and six of the ten authors are members of the same research group. These historians have found that mutual support is the foundation of success, even in a vocation traditionally regarded as solitary, whether in life or in the study of death.

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

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).

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.”