Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations and Figures
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Staking out Aristocratic Identities at Roncevaux
- 1 Death and the Cadaver: Visions of Corruption
- 2 Embodying Nobility: Aristocratic Men and the Ideal Body
- 3 Here Lies Nobility: Aristocratic Bodies in Death
- 4 Shrouded in Ambiguity: Decay and Incorruptibility of the Body
- 5 Corruption of Nobility: Treason and the Aristocratic Traitor
- 6 Dying in Shame: Destroying Aristocratic Identities
- Conclusion:Death and the Noble Body
- Appendix 1
- Appendix 2
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Shrouded in Ambiguity: Decay and Incorruptibility of the Body
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations and Figures
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Staking out Aristocratic Identities at Roncevaux
- 1 Death and the Cadaver: Visions of Corruption
- 2 Embodying Nobility: Aristocratic Men and the Ideal Body
- 3 Here Lies Nobility: Aristocratic Bodies in Death
- 4 Shrouded in Ambiguity: Decay and Incorruptibility of the Body
- 5 Corruption of Nobility: Treason and the Aristocratic Traitor
- 6 Dying in Shame: Destroying Aristocratic Identities
- Conclusion:Death and the Noble Body
- Appendix 1
- Appendix 2
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
If aristocratic patronage of and burial in religious houses was to a large extent influenced by ideas about social, economical and political status, how does the concept of multiple burial fit in? Sometimes regarded as a means of increasing the efficacy of prayers, multiple burial, I would argue, is also tied up with issues of nobility and social status, and to some extent with secular lordship. I will suggest that rather than enforcing decay and fragmentation, these practices were partly geared towards creating a fantasy of wholeness and incorruptibility suggestive of saintly corporeal preservation found in hagiography, which served to underscore these ideas of nobility and social status. Both embalming and mos teutonicus not only enabled a delay between death and burial, but also served to avoid the premature putrefaction of the cadaver during this period, decay which would reflect negatively on the deceased in spiritual and social terms. In relation to this representational aspect of the noble body, it will also become evident that the separate interment of the heart or viscera was a means of asserting one's personal nobility in relation to communal ideas about identity, and also of proclaiming one's personal spirituality while conforming to dynastic or social pressures. What we see, therefore, is a distinction in the perception of the body and its interior between personal and communal identities, not too dissimilar from ideas about the abstract and concrete body of the king discussed by Ernst Kantorowicz.
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- Information
- Death and the Noble Body in Medieval England , pp. 75 - 95Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2008