Laura Vivanco, Death in fifteenth-century Castile: ideologies of the elites, Colección Támesis, Serie A, Monografías, 205 Woodbridge, Tamesis Books, 2004, pp. vii, 211, £45.00, US$75.00 (hardback 1-85566-100-4).

Abstract

Since the studies by Philippe Aries (1949, 1974) and Michel Vovelle (1983), western attitudes towards death have been the subject of many historical works. The one reviewed here has turned its attention to the elites in medieval Castile. Its conclusions are based on a large number of written sources of different kinds, mostly legal texts (codes, wills), historical chronicles, religious works, and literary writings. With no explicit reference to the longue duree, Laura Vivanco's analysis of the responses to death by the fifteenth-century Castilian elites stresses their continuities with the previous and following centuries, and emphasizes death as a everyday reality, beyond the macabre, “gothic” vision with which medieval death has been too often associated. Vivanco's monograph originated in her PhD dissertation at the Department of Spanish, University of St Andrews, and appears to be greatly indebted to the “history of mentalities” tradition. She has organized the discussion around the theory of the “three orders” that, according to Georges Duby (1978), were major structuring elements of the imagery of feudal society, namely oratores (oradores in Vivanco's book), defensores, and laboratores, on the assumption that these orders or states represent ideological paradigms more than properly social groupings. Since her attention is focused on the attitudes of social elites, her work is confined to the narratives of those oradores and defensores belonging to the ruling elites, without forgetting those reflecting positions halfway between both of these states. Examined texts have included not only those written by the elites, but also those addressed to them. Apart from its introduction and conclusion, Vivanco's study is structured into three major chapters where she successively deals with the varieties of dying breaths and deaths (pp. 27–98), the views of the afterlife (pp. 99–135), and the diversity of practices and rituals relating to the deceased's burial and remembrance by the bereaved (pp. 136–77). In all the three chapters, oradores' and defensores' responses have been examined in parallel so as to reveal the similarities and differences between the ideologies of death typical of both states. From the premise that all the members of the elites were baptized as Christians, the dichotomy good versus bad death is an essential axis of the study. Certainly, Vivanco has considered the peculiar case of the Jewish converso elites, and she has not entirely ruled out the presence of hidden sub-texts in their narratives, but she claims that during the fifteenth century they did not show attitudes which significantly diverged from the rest. However, she does notice—and indeed she emphasizes—substantial differences between oradores and defensores in their reactions to death, and in the values they inherited, those of the latter often being non-Christian to such an extent that they formed a coherent code or ideology which persisted despite the Church's teachings. Specific attention has also been paid to the relationship between grief and social status as well as to the varying attitudes of women in the face of death, which are examined with concepts and tools from gender studies. Vivanco successively looks into the narratives concerning deaths both natural and violent (in battle, sudden death by outside agency, death imposed by the judicial system, suicide), with particular attention to premonitory signs or auguries of an imminent death, last wishes in wills, rituals of extreme unction and the variable symbolism of anointing different parts, the insistence on the soul's salvation over the body's health, the question of miracles, the relevance of the geography of the afterlife (with reference to Le Goff), the variety of punishments according to the deceased's sins, ways and places for burials, the issues of the deceased's clothes and of the ornamentation of the grave, the demonstrations of grief, and the values that were extolled or denigrated on the occasion of oradores' and defensores' death. In short, Laura Vivanco's monograph is a valuable contribution to the study of the culture of European elites during the fifteenth century—a period still demanding greater attention by historians. Its main worth lies in the systematic and exhaustive analysis of the relevant Castilian written sources of that century, which the author has carried out with a mastery of textual criticism.