“Death-Spectacles” in Quattrocento Life and Laude

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-31
Author(s):  
Gioia Filocamo
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Fear Of Death ◽  
High Point ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Mendicant Orders ◽  
Religious Songs

Abstract In the fourteenth century a huge change took place in thinking about death: the kingdom of the beyond became full of dreadful suffering. This new mentality derives from the belief in Purgatory that took hold in the twelfth century, but reached its high point only in the fifteenth: the judgement of the dead would take place immediately after death. Prayers and money invested in order to obtain remission of sins encouraged the expansion of a true “economy of death” manageable from earth. The birth of the Observance movement inside the Mendicant Orders may be connected with this new sensibility, in which the faithful are more concerned with their personal salvation. The “death-spectacles” evoked by Girolamo Savonarola became lenses through which to look at life, but even before him many authors of laude – vernacular religious songs mainly composed for civic confraternities – express the same modern thought on death inspired by Holy Scripture, but excluding high poetic models. The common practice of “cantasi come …” – the reuse of music known with a different text now turned to fear of death – confirms the strong contiguity between life and death, read as a true “extension” of life.

“A rather small genre”: Arabic Works Against Non-Muslim State Officials

Der Islam ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 93 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Luke Yarbrough
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Common Source ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Common ◽  
Medieval Egypt

Abstract:Muslim authors composed a number of polemics against the employment of non-Muslim state officials in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Egypt and Syria. This essay argues that the majority of these works drew directly or indirectly on a previously unremarked sixth/twelfth century common source. Although the common source cannot yet be securely identified, its existence and influence have significant implications for historians’ understanding of interreligious tensions in late medieval Egypt and Syria and for the

Horror and Death: Rethinking Coco's Border Politics

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 41-49
Author(s):  
Orquidea Morales
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Walt Disney Company ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Walt Disney ◽  
Day Of The Dead ◽  
Animated Film ◽  
Border Politics ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The U.S

In 2013, the Walt Disney Company submitted an application to trademark “Día de los muertos” (Day of the Dead) as they prepared to launch a holiday themed movie. Almost immediately after this became public Disney faced such strong criticism and backlash they withdrew their petition. By October of 2017 Disney/Pixar released the animated film Coco. Audiences in Mexico and the U.S. praised it's accurate and authentic representation of the celebration of Day of the Dead. In this essay, I argue that despite its generic framing, Coco mobilizes many elements of horror in its account of Miguel's trespassing into the forbidden space of the dead and his transformation into a liminal figure, both dead and alive. Specifically, with its horror so deftly deployed through tropes and images of borders, whether between life and death or the United States and Mexico, Coco falls within a new genre, the border horror film.

scholarly journals The birth of oppida: small towns in Hungary in the Angevin period

Urban History ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Katalin Szende
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Development Strategies ◽  
Private Landowners ◽  
Private Lands ◽  
Private Interests ◽  
The Right ◽  
Mendicant Orders ◽  
Century Development

Abstract This article revisits the origins of small towns in medieval Hungary from the perspective of their owners and seigneurs. The fourteenth-century development of small towns on the estates of private landowners resulted from the coincidence of several factors. Among these, the article considers the intersection of royal and private interests. The aristocrats’ concern to endow their estate centres with privileges or attract new settlers to their lands was dependent on royal approval; likewise, the right to hold annual fairs had to be granted by the kings, and one had to be a loyal retainer to be worthy of these grants. The royal model of supporting the mendicant orders, which were gaining ground in Hungary from the thirteenth century onwards, added a further dimension to the overlords’ development strategies. This shows that royal influence, directly or indirectly, had a major impact on the development of towns on private lands in the Angevin period (1301–87).

Re-examining Roman Death Pollution

2020 ◽  
Vol 110 ◽  
pp. 5-27
Author(s):  
Allison L. C. Emmerson
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Fear Of Death ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Variable Combination ◽  
The City

AbstractThe idea that the dead were polluting — that is, that corpses posed a danger of making the living unclean, offensive both to their own communities and to the gods — has long occupied a fundamental position in Roman funerary studies. Nevertheless, what that pollution comprised, as well as how it affected living society, remain subject to debate. This article aims to clarify the issue by re-examining the evidence for Roman attitudes towards the dead. Focusing on the city of Rome itself, I conclude that we have little reason to reconstruct a fear of death pollution prior to Late Antiquity; in fact, the term itself has been detrimental to current understandings. No surviving text from the late republican or early imperial periods indicates that corpses were objects of metaphysical fear, and rather than polluted, mourners are better conceived as obligated, bound by a variable combination of emotions and conventions to behave in certain, if certainly changeable, ways following a death.

BLINDNESS AS THE THRESHOLD BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH IN SENECA'S OEDIPVS AND PHOENISSAE

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Ricardo Duarte
Keyword(s):  
Thought Processes ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Dead

Abstract This article looks at the complexity of the thought processes that lead Seneca's Oedipus to choose the mors longa of blindness as punishment for his crime (in his blindness, he is to live in a kind of ostracism, separately from both the living and the dead). It offers an analysis of the consolation of this existence on the threshold between life and death, notably with reference to the end of the Oedipus, but also of the sorrow of this liminal existence. The latter is described in Seneca's Phoenissae, which suggests an escape, by death stricto sensu, from the threshold represented by blindness, by which Oedipus now feels trapped. By examining these three topics, the article shows how the threshold between life and death which Oedipus chooses at the end of Seneca's Oedipus and experiences in the Phoenissae mirrors the ambivalence and the errors of his life before he blinded himself. Ultimately, it also illustrates Oedipus’ continuing failure to achieve self-knowledge.

Fear of the dead, fear of death: is it biological or psychological?

Mortality ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 322-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi
Keyword(s):  
Fear Of Death ◽  
The Dead

scholarly journals The disorderly body: considerations of The Book of Numbers, 19 and ritual impurity after contact with a corpse

2011 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 197-205
Author(s):  
Sandra Junker
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Human Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Dead Body ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Living Body ◽  
The People ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Living Creature

This article deals with the idea of ritual bodily impurity after coming into contact with a corpse in the Hebrew Bible. The evanescence and impermanence of the human body testifies to the mortality of the human being. In that way, the human body symbolizes both life and death at the same time; both conditions are perceivable in it. In Judaism, the dead body is considered as ritually impure. Although, in this context it might be better to substitute the term ‘ritually damaged’ for ‘ritually impure’: ritual impurity does not refer to hygienic or moral impurity, but rather to an incapability of exercising—and living—religion. Ritual purity is considered as a prerequisite for the execution of ritual acts and obligations. The dead body depends on a sphere which causes the greatest uncertainty because it is not accessible for the living. According to Mary Douglas’s concepts, the dead body is considered ritually impure because it does not answer to the imagined order anymore, or rather because it cannot take part in this order anymore. This is impurity imagined as a kind of contagious illness, which is carried by the body. This article deals with the ritual of the red heifer in Numbers 19. Here we find the description of the preparation of a fluid that is to help clear the ritual impurity out of a living body after it has come into contact with a corpse. For the preparation of this fluid a living creature – a faultless red heifer – must be killed. According to the description, the people who are involved in the preparation of the fluid will be ritually impure until the end of the day. The ritual impurity acquired after coming into contact with a corpse continues as long as the ritual of the Red Heifer remains unexecuted, but at least for seven days. 

scholarly journals Impossible Emotions: The Ethics of Mourning and Melancholia

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 74-93
Author(s):  
Tirna Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Impossible Task ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Mourning And Melancholia ◽  
Discursive Traditions

This paper looks at mourning and melancholia, and their ethical implications through the work of Sigmund Freud and mostly Jacques Derrida. The attempt here is to read through Derrida’s auto thanatological oeuvre through questions of fidelity, interminability, impossibility and ethics. In our perpetual struggle as scholars dealing with questions of meaning, existence, loss, life and death this paper tries to navigate the discursive traditions of looking at mourning and melancholia and what their radical potential is or can be where the mourning; melancholic; haunted; living subjects bear an impossible task unto the dead.

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