Cover illustration:
Funerary Chapel of King John I of Portugal and Phillipa of Lancaster in Monastery of Batalha, Portugal © Direção-Geraldo Património Cultural / Luís Pavão.

Series Complete

LOCI SEPULCRALES. PLACES OF MEMORY AND BURIAL IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Ed. Carla Varela FERNANDES, Catarina Fernandes BARREIRA, João Luís Inglês FONTES, Maria João Violante BRANCO and Mário FARELO

Basel 2023; XVII + 594 p.; ISBN 978-2-503-60658-3; E-ISBN: 978-2-503-60659-0

Assembling the contributions of twenty-two authors, this volume aims at revisiting the question of the choice of burial sites throughout the Middle Ages, in their political, emotional, and devotional dimensions, across a wide chronology and in a vast palette of different social statuses. The choice of a burial site inevitably reflects very important statements, made by the living persons, not only regarding what they wished the memory of their passage on Earth to be, but equally enlightening us on what their concern for the future of their souls was and how it should be cared for, in the afterlife.

The first part of this volume is devoted to royal pantheons, considering their development and relevance in the construction of royal legitimacy. Kings and Queens were not the only ones considering their lineage and personal memory: noblemen, ecclesiastics, rich tradesmen, and their wives and daughters, were also involved in a world of changing tendencies, which are dealt with in the second part of the book. The third and last part looks at the strategies and interconnection between building a burial site and constructing collective memories, whether in stone or in writing, through the performing influence of rituals, images, or symbols.

This book proposes, therefore a whole new set of approaches on the subject, addressed either in interdisciplinary and all-around syntheses or via analysis of specific case-studies, looking at pantheons and other burial sites as the important witnesses of the lives, emotions, and devotions of the medieval society they served.

Contributors to this volume are Xavier Barral i Altet, Catarina Fernandes Barreira, Thiago José Borges, Maria Helena da Cruz Coelho, Federica Cosenza, Antonio Pio de Cosmo, Lorenzo Curatella, Mário Farelo, José Ramón González de la Cal, Lindy Grant, Laurent Hablot, Orlindo Jorge, Emma Liaño Martínez, Christian de Mérindol,
Sonia Morales Cano, Jorge Morín Pablos, Pedro Redol, Martina Saltamacchia, Isabel Sánchez Ramos, Lydwine Scordia, Rosa Smurra and Christian Steer.