Medieval and Early Modern Emotional Responses to Death and Dying, Parergon 31.2 (2014), 1-10 (original) (raw)

Emotions were intrinsic to how people in medieval and early modern Europe prepared for death, said goodbye to loved ones, commemorated their dead, and meditated on life after death. But although death is universal and inescapable, can we say that these are the same emotions we expect to find today in situations of death and bereavement? Which emotions were foregrounded in the past, and how were they expressed and contextualised in historical moments? How did these emotive responses shape literature, art, popular opinion, the press, bonds between community members, the state? The field of the history of emotions is well placed to address these affective issues by situating such questions in the context of historical understandings and practices of emotions related to death and dying. This special issue of Parergon brings together a range of disciplinary approaches to show how the lens of emotion contributes to our understanding of death in the premodern world and, also, how processes and rituals of death and dying shaped emotional practice in the past. Arranged chronologically from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and drawing contributions from social and cultural historians and literary scholars, this range of articles allows case studies to portray the great variety of historically contextualised emotional responses to death and dying. Under investigation are topics that appear firmly rooted in a Europe of the past, such as the didactic ars moriendi ('Art of Dying') genre, and others that are still perceived as problematic issues today, such as suicide, chronic illness, and appropriate public and private comportment around death. The articles collectively demonstrate how emotional responses to death and dying were formative for the self, family relations and community structures, didactic and artistic media, and government policy in medieval and early modern Europe.