1 - Introduction

Summary

ley es de toda cosa biviente que ha de morir

(Córdoba 1964a: 61)

Death and the fifteenth century have long been closely associated in the minds of historians and literary critics. Johan Huizinga, for example, stated that ‘No other epoch has laid so much stress as the expiring Middle Ages on the thought of death. An everlasting call of memento mori resounds through life’ (1924: 124). Huizinga’s influence has been considerable: for example, Erna Ruth Berndt referred to him when she argued that ‘Ninguna otra época, con excepción, quizá, de la nuestra, ha dado tanta importancia a la consideraci ón de la muerte como los siglos XIV y XV’ (1963: 74), adding that in Spain the theme of death ‘quizá nunca preocupó tanto a escritores y poetas como durante el siglo XV’ (1963: 85). Jacques Chiffoleau spoke of ‘la Grande Mélancolie qu’évoque si bien Huizinga’ (1983: 128) and, according to Jeremy Lawrance, ‘El tono dominante del arte y literatura elegíaca y funeraria del siglo XV, esbozado en unas páginas brillantes de Johan Huizinga, se caracterizaba por la nota sorda y adusta de las Danzas macabras y por las imágenes plásticas de cadáveres y gusanos’ (1998: 3). Huizinga’s analysis suggested that fifteenth-century society was obsessed with death and that individuals responded with either an extreme and austere repudiation of the body and its pleasures or else embraced such worldly delights in a frenzy of individualistic hedonism: ‘the pious exhortations to think of death and the profane exhortations to make the most of youth almost meet’ (1924: 126). Thus, though some individuals, including Juan Álvarez Gato, may have been moved by such sights as ‘vna pared hecha de huesos de defuntos’ (1928: 136) to advise ‘que mires / en ser en vida mejor’ (1928: 136), we know that others reacted to similar displays in a very different manner. Huizinga, for example, described one location in which macabre imagery was unavoidable:

Nowhere else were all the images tending to evoke the horror of death assembled so strikingly as in the churchyard of the Innocents at Paris. There the medieval soul, fond of a religious shudder, could take its fill of the horrible. (1924: 133)