Royal Funerals

He deseado realizar en este artículo una revisión actualizada de los acontecimientos y de las fuentes que describen las exequias celebradas
en la catedral sevillana con ocasión del deceso del rey Felipe II. El ceremonial, los testimonios documentales, los actores y protagonistas,
los sonidos, las palabras, los conflictos, la cronología de los solemnes actos llevados a cabo con tal fin se revisitan y reinterpretan en este
trabajo, añadiéndose tres nuevas fuentes documentales hasta ahora inéditas, que permiten profundizar en un suceso que trascendió, por su
relevancia, las propias fechas de su celebración.

Kings of Disaster is a comparative, ethnographic study of the political systems of the the Bari, Lulubo, Lokoya, Pari and Lotuho, peoples who inhabit the East Bank of the Nile in Equatoria, South Sudan. The political systems are structured by the principle of consensual antagonism, the king operating as the unifying antagonist of the combined segments that constitute his people. Regicide as it is practiced by these peoples is a direct consequence of the king’s role as its political antagonist.
Kingship ritual is an unmistakeable makeover of the scapegoat mechanism, the model of consensual antagonism as René Girard first formulated it: he king’s installation is framed as the capture of an unwilling victim while his natural death is dramatized as a double transfiguration, as demon and as god. 
The book has four parts.  Part One presents the theoretical framework and the historical context of the kingdoms.  The dozen or so kingdoms where information was collected vary in size – between a thousand and a hundred thousand subjects per king. They practice a dual system of governance; on one side are the king/rainmaker and his clan, clients and other followers, on the other side the monyomiji, the age-grade of middle-aged men who rule as a corporate group for a fixed period varying from 10 and 24 years.The book is about the dynamic relationship between the kings and their peoples, the latter being normally represented by their monyomiji. The two core responsibilities of the monyomiji are warfare and the management of the relationship with the king. They ensure that the king provides the community with a timely and well-dosed supply of rain. They keep him happy by meeting his demands since royal anger is bad for the rain.  When the rains fail, the monyomiji carry out investigations and take measures against any group or person suspected of intentionally or accidentally stopping the rain. If drought persists, the blame will be put on the king. The monyomiji will confront him, if necessary use force in obtaining a confession regarding the cause of the disaster. During a king's career, periods during which he is worshipped like a god alternate with episodes of vicious confrontation when he is demonized, tortured, or even killed when a stand-off with the monyomiji escalates beyond repair.
Part Two, ‘Dualism’, analyzes the nature of relations between territorial and age- and generation based groups using Evans-Pritchard’s model of complementary, segmentary opposition. When disputes between these groups cannot be resolved by negotiations, the conflict parties have a stick fight. The winner is put in the right. A more or less fragile balance of power defines intergroup relations.   
Part Three, ‘Centralism’, deals with the relationship between king and people. Both king and monyomiji are jealous of their power and keenly intent on making the power balance tilt in their favour. As a rule, the balance will swing back and forth, one year the king is calling the shots, the next it is the monyomiji. 
In situations of war, when the confrontation between different kingdoms overrides internal divisions, king and monyomiji make common cause. When kings have the full support of the warrior class they obtain a de facto control over the legitimate use of force - the Weberian criterion that distinguishes states from pre-state social formations. A state-like configuration emerges that has characteristics in common with historic states: regimes of king and monyomiji who try to stay in power by preventing the junior generation from taking over. This has resulted in outright repression of the juniors when they resist the new regime, or in an exodus of juniors  as happened in Imatari in the middle of the nineteenth century and in Lafon in the beginning of the twentieth century.
From an evolutionary perspective these regimes can be considered cases of attempted endogenous state formation. They refute the widely held consensus that the first states could only have been the result of conquest.  The evidence also refutes the time-honoured anthropological consensus that there is a deep divide between the power dynamic animating stateless, segmentary, societies and the one that makes centralized, hierarchical, systems tick. The closing of ranks between the king and monyomiji, evoked in the previous paragraph, is a perfect example of complementary opposition: the more inclusive social segments that compose the political body of the kingdom merge when confronted with a political entity of the same order of inclusion.
When a war is over, there are two possible scenarios of the aftermath. In case of a victory of  the kingdom. (the merger of king and monyomiji), either another enemy will be picked to strenthen the emerging state configuration, or, depending on the phase  in the cycle of generational succession and the restlessness of the junior generation, king and monyomiji  may prioritize internal stability by consolidating their grip on the upcoming generation.
If a war ended in defeat, the coalition of king and monyomiji was likely to fall apart, offering chances to the new generation, leaving the king weakened and vulnerable. Local oral traditions tell about monyomiji abnegating their king altogether to the point of abolishing the institution of kingship (Chapter 15). These traditions are evidence of a back and forth between horizontal segmentary antagonism and vertical king-people antagonism.  By their proneness to rivalry in the royal family, coupled with the antagonism between territorial segments and successive generations,  these early kingships striving for statehood, remained  very fragile. This fragility may be the reason that examples of similar configurations are rare in the ethnographic literature. 
Part Four zooms in on the king as scapegoat. In his role as his people’s unifying adversary, the king is the ultimate target of blame when the community is stricken by disaster. The case-studies show that the killing of the king is not an impulsive, collective act. The tension builds up slowly and is political. Alternative wrongdoers are identified and all sorts of remedies are tried  before the collective anger converges on the king. In line with the logic of segmentary antagonism the killing community justifies the murder as an act of revenge. Kings of Disaster presents and analyzes more than twenty cases, some of them contemporary to the field work, in which kings or queens lost their lives in confrontations with their united subjects. These cases are undisputable evidence that the practice of regicide on which Frazer had built his majestic The Golden Bough really existed. The practice was disputed by later anthropologists who pointed at the ambiguity of the ethnographic evidence and argued that early observers had been misled by their colonial perceptions. 
The king is not only a scapegoat in what is fundamentally a political game. His career as king is ritualized as a deferred victimhood. From the day of his installation (staged as a capture, a deliberate contamination with his people’s diseases, or a condemnation), he is his people’s hostage. If he has not been a victim of a confrontation over drought before, his blessings are expected to be released at the time of his natural death. The king’s death is ritualized as a process in which the divine and the demonic powers inhabiting him are separated so that only the beneficial ones are retained for the community. The ‘effective divinity of the king’ is made to coincide  with a process of dying in successive stages and extending over at least one cultivation cycle counting from the king’s last breath, through the bloating and decomposition of his corpse, to the final exhumation  and placement of the skull or bones in a shrine.
For the Bari, Lulubo, Lokoya and Lotuho digestion is the model for the purification of the blessings; so they plug the orifices of the king’s body so that disorderly forces do not escape. For the Pari – and their well-documented Shilluk relatives to the north - the focus of control is on the king’s breathing which must be stopped before it stops by itself. This strongly suggests that the much-debated Shilluk practice of having the king suffocated when he is on the brink of death belongs in the same category of practices as the plugging of the orifices of his more southerly colleagues. The suffocation ensures the orderly release of the king’s blessings; it is not a vestige of regicide, nor a piece of colonial imagination.
Kings of Disaster demonstrates that Girard’s theory of social cohesion not only offers an explanatory context to the institution of kingship, but also to the political systems of the Nilotic Sudan as a whole. The dynamic of complementary segmentary opposition which is so prominent in these societies, is just another instance of consensual antagonism or, in the terminology used in the book, of the ‘enemy scenario of the scapegoat mechanism’.

Throughout her life, both as princess and queen of England, Elizabeth of York (1466-1503) abided by the prescriptive texts of the English royal house.  Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII and Elizabeth’s mother-in-law, wrote several specific, highly detailed essays concerning the ordinance, conduct, and apparel of women, but hers were merely the latest in a series of documents going back to the thirteenth century.  These texts dictated protocol during various ceremonies and other elite activities for both men and women.  The royal prescriptive texts universally expressed the need for differentiation among the king, the royal house, and the ranks of nobility.  Conspicuous consumption was required, most of all from the king and queen.  Using the texts, narrative accounts, and financial information, this paper will examine key events in the life of Elizabeth of York and the ceremonial opulence that she would have been required to display as an elite and as a female.  These activities expressed both her status and the power she wielded by virtue of that status.  Notably, Henry VII chose to venerate Elizabeth’s death in childbirth at her exequies.  By dying in a manner that could not be experienced by any king or prince, Elizabeth of York’s gender became a celebrated element in her procession and funeral.

In considering the funeral practices in the reign of Victoria, a number of questions are raised: why did Victorians choose to ritualize death, what were the rituals in which they engaged, what were the outward trappings of mourning, and how and where did they dispose of the deceased.  It can be argued that during Queen Victoria’s long reign, the celebration of death reached its peak, which raises the further question of the degree to which the death, funeral, and grieving for Prince Albert affected the pattern of British mourning.This paper seeks to consider the various elements of mourning and funerals during the Victorian Era.

State funerals were among Milan’s most distinctive contributions to the world of the early modern spectacle.  The ephemeral scenographies constructed for these occasions transformed both the interiors and the exteriors of the churches in which they were held into great “theatres of death.”  In this paper I offer an examination of three such occasions from the late sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries.  Using the engraved and printed records of these events as a means of reconstructing the experience, I consider how visual rhetoric, including image, word and gesture, functions together with light and ritual movement to appeal to both the emotions and the intellect in order to persuade, engaging the participant in the cathartic performance of mourning.  As highly choreographed rituals of devotion and reflection, Milanese funerals are eloquent illustrations of early modern understandings and beliefs regarding death, mortality and commemoration.

La finalidad de este trabajo es estudiar las circunstancias de la muerte del príncipe don Juan, los ritos post mortem y las ceremonias fúnebres que tuvieron lugar en Córdoba y Sevilla. Además, nos hemos detenido a analizar cómo pudieron transcurrir los primeros años de su vida y su adolescencia, ya que los testimonios consultados revelan una salud frágil, que, probablemente, pudo precipitar su temprano fallecimiento. Las numerosas fuentes a las que hemos tenido acceso nos han permitido obtener datos inéditos sobre el ceremonial funerario, las manifestaciones de duelo y el volumen de gastos al que tuvieron que hacer frente los concejos de Córdoba y Sevilla para despedir, como la ocasión merecía, al príncipe heredero.

Alexander of Medicis, first duke of Florence, was killed in 1537. His widow was Margaret of Austria, daughter of the emperor Charles V, who ordered to celebrate a funeral for the dead duke in the spanish city of Valladolid, where his imperial court was. This act was used as a symbol of the Habsburg power in the Tuscany area.

This paper was presented at Kings & Queens 4, in Lisbon, Portugal, 26 June 2015.

The second half of the fifteenth century in England was marked by several dynastic shifts. First, the House of Lancaster gave way to the House of York, when Edward IV permanently won his crown in 1471; as early as 1461, Edward IV referred to Henry VI and his forebears as ―kings by fact, not by law.The Lancastrian king was treated as such at his funeral in 1471. Second, the House of York suffered a split when Richard III declared his brother Edward IV‘s marriage invalid and his children illegitimate in 1483. Richard III made an effort to reconcile himself with the legacy of Henry VI by reburying him at Windsor. During Richard‘s reign, Edward V, like many royal bastards, disappeared. With the third shift, from the House of York to the House of Tudor, Henry VII, victor at Bosworth Field, declared Richard III and his reign invalid in 1485. The circumstances of Richard III‘s burial have now become famous in recent years. Because of these shifts in power, Henry VI and Richard III underwent changes in status which affected their funerals and later reburials. This paper will discuss the differences in the lives and deaths of these kings death compared to other royal exequies, particularly those of Edward II and Richard II. The problem of Edward V is unique among English kings: after being declared a bastard, the boy king was restored to legitimacy alongside his sister Elizabeth, Henry VII‘s betrothed. But this created a problem for both Henry VII and historians: how can a king be laid to rest without a body?

This paper was presented 9 July 2015 at the Leeds IMC as part of the Fourteenth Century England panels.  Reburial was not a new concept in the fifteenth century, when Henry V reburied Richard II and Richard III buried Henry VI.  Rather, it was part of a constant pattern of movement of bodies and body parts.  Edward I moved people for both personal and political reasons.  Yet, Henry IV and the writers in his employ made it a point to emphasise Richard II's activity in this realm, suggesting that the movement of bodies was deviant in some way.  By manipulation of the written record, Richard II seems vastly different from Edward I, even though their burial programmes were quite similar.

The forms of the representation of the dead person which were employed in Poland in the Middle Ages and the beginning of thr 16th Century were not much different from the ceremonies which were held in other countries in Europe. The only ritual which was truly exceptional against the background of the Christian Europe was the kiryśnik's falling the horse was accompanied by his casting the dead man's sword, shield, helmet and a broken banner on the altar. This ritaul fall, which was provided for in the ordo pompae funebris drawn on the occasion of the funeral of King Sigismund the Old (1548) seeems to orginate from the fact that the royal person was segregated from the State in accordance with the doctrine of the Crown of Polish Kingdom an that  event itself was singular because it ended the diarchy.

Comunicazione presentata alla giornata di studi "Una sacra passione", Milano, 30 maggio 2014. Ricognizione delle incisioni e delle relazioni a stampa che documentano celebrazioni e apparati funebri dei reali di Spagna realizzati, per iniziativa della Confraternita dell'Entierro, nella chiesa di S. Fedele a Milano tra il 1642 e il 1701. I documenti visivi presi in esame, anche con riferimento alle fonti iconografiche romane e spagnole, riguardano le esequie del Cardinale Infante Ferdinando (1642), di Filippo IV (Il Sepolcro Glorioso, 1666), e infine di Carlo I (Il Gran Pianto, 1701).

This paper was presented at the Death in Scotland conference, 31 January 2016.  The ill-fated James IV of Scotland was not the only body to be carried back down to London; Edward I and John of Eltham also made the long journey. This was made possible by the talents of embalmers.

The chronicle of Orderic Vitalis (covering events until 1141) began to circulate for the first time in nearly 500 years thanks to the 1619 publication by Duchesne. However, Books VII and VIII had circulated independently in manuscript form through the monks of Caen beginning in the fourteenth century. Camden printed a section of Book VII in 1603 pertaining to the death and explosive burial of William the Conqueror.

Beginning in the last years of the sixteenth century, royal bodies that exploded, burst, or were mistreated became a popular motif. James IV of Scotland and Henry VIII and Elizabeth I of England were among the “casualties,” but the motif would later be applied to others. This paper will discuss the rumored bad embalmings of elites during the late fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, juxtaposing them with what we know through documentation, excavation, and eyewitness accounts. However, more often than not, medieval and early modern body preservation was highly effective and later enabled antiquarians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to examine well-preserved royal bodies and their grave goods. Determining why someone was reported to have blown up is as important as determining historical events.

Zgon króla Zygmunta I i znaczenie fiducji w jego pobożności. List Jana Benedyktowicza Solfy do Jana Dantyszka i królowej Bony do córki Izabeli I. Starość Zygmunta I; II. Przygotowanie do śmierci i zgon; III. Przedśmiertne wypowiedzi króla jako wyraz eschatologicznej fiducji; jej geneza, wyraz w fundacjach artystycznych i domniemany aspekt neoplatoński; IV Jan Benedyktowicz Solfa; V Miejsce śmierci Zygmunta I-lokalizacja sypialni w obrębie apartamentu królewskiego na Wawelu; VI. Aneks: edycja listów. I. Król Zygmunt I zmarł w swej wawelskiej rezydencji 1 IV 1548 r., mając osiemdziesiąt jeden lat. Śmierć ta, mimo iż od pewnego już czasu spodziewana z racji samego sędziwego wieku władcy, wywarła ogromne wrażenie na całym ówczesnym społeczeństwie, z tego chociażby względu, że kończyła czterdziestoletnią, w sumie pomyślną epokę rządów 1. U osób czynnych politycznie wrażenie musiało być tym silniejsze, im bardziej były one świadome realnych zagrożeń, które zgon króla mógł wywołać. Wynikały one z niepewności utrzymania pokoju z Turcją, formalnie wraz ze śmiercią królewską wygasającego, a także z roszczeń Zakonu Krzyżackiego do Prus Książęcych, zwłaszcza że Zakon przy poparciu cesarza i stanów Rzeszy zmierzał wyraźnie do rozstrzygnięć zbrojnych 2. Poczucie zewnętrznego zagrożenia, ostatecznie szczęśliwie zażegnanego 3 , zastąpić miało z kolei w ciągu najbliższych miesięcy wrażenie pewnego wewnętrznego zamętu, destabilizacji 4 , gdy inaugurację rządów Zygmunta Augusta skomplikowała kwestia zawartego przezeń potajemnie małżeństwa z Barbarą Radziwiłłówną, nieakceptowanego przez rodziców ze względów dynastyczno-państwowych, a atakowanego przez znaczną część dostojników Królestwa i szlachtę wykazującą rokoszowe nastawienie 5 .

Durante la primera mitad del siglo XVI, Valladolid jugó un papel singular como sede de la Corte, en ocasiones durante largos períodos de tiempo. Como escenario cortesano, la ciudad se transformaba para acoger a los monarcas, celebrar el nacimiento de sus herederos o llorar sus muertes. En todas estas ocasiones las celebraciones eran complementadas con un despliegue de arquitecturas efímeras, decoradas con símbolos y alegorías, y los participantes aparecían ataviados con sus mejores galas, en una manifestación externa del lujo y el poder, que convertía la fiesta cortesana en un escaparate de las élites y sus relaciones. El presente estudio recoge de forma cronológica los acontecimientos en los que Valladolid acogió a la Corte (entre 1502 y 1559) y los festejos que entonces tuvieron lugar.

Sigismund I (1 I1467-1 IV 1548), grand duke of Lithuania from 1506, king of Poland from 1507, was from the end of the 1520s frequently afflicted by diseases; which made it difficult for him to fulfil his royal duties. This is said to be the reason why more and more decisions were taken by Queen Bona. But until the end of his life the king kept control over the fundamental matters of the state. The political role of his son, Sigismund Augustus (1520-1572), kept increasing from the 1540s; crowned as early as 1530, the young prince took over the governance of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1544. Sigismund I died in his residence on Wawel hill in Cracow on Easter Day at the age of 81. One of the most comprehensive accounts of the king's death is the speech made at the funeral (July 26, 1548) by Samuel Maciejowski, the truthfulness of which is confirmed by epistolary accounts, two of which (the letters of Queen Bona and Jan B. Solfa) are annexed to the study. Sigismund I's piety was shaped in his young years under the influence of the royal family's religious traditions and practices. Religion was a profound personal experience for the king, as is proved not only by his good knowledge of the Bible, which he read frequently, but also by the text and illuminations of his prayer book, written specially for him. What characterised Sigismund I's religiousness was his worship of Christ's mankind-redeeming sacrifice, whose consequence was eschatological fiducia, a strong belief, almost a certainty, that immediately after his death he would be resurrected and would unite spiritually with Christ. Before his death the king kept repeating the words of St. Paul (Phil. 1:23). He was convinced not only that he would at once unite with Christ but also that he would be able better to understand what was going on in this world. Sigismund I's religiousness was marked by traits of late medieval spirituality (devotio moderna) and some elements of magical thinking. It assumed its final shape about the middle of the 1530s under the influence of Erasmus. The nature of the king's faith is reflected in his sepulchral monument and inscriptions in the Sigismund chapel. This has induced scholars to express the view that the king had an influence on the interior decorations of the chapel and that he must have had contact with the concepts of Marsilio Ficino's Florentine neo-Platonism. But the influence of neo-Platonism on the king's intellect and religious views has been overvalued. The sepulchral monument presents the king's body in movement, probably at the moment when he awakes and rises from the dream of death to a new life; the inscriptions on the inner friezes say that kings are sure to be redeemed and that those who die in Christ will enjoy happiness after death. Sigismund I died in full consciousness, ideally fulfilling all the recommendations of ars bene moriendi, including the gift of tears (gratia lachrimarum), particularly valued by theoreticians as proof of deep faith, and of repentance, recommended to a dying man; he felt authentic sorrow (compassio) for the martyrised Christ; he also could bid farewell to his attendants and forgive and biless those who had sinned against him. An analysis of the accounts of the king's death allows us to get an insight into the complex spirituality of humanism during the Reformation and shows the specific characteristics of a religiousness which, while keeping within the doctrine and ritual of the Roman Church, included elements close to the doctrines of the Reformation, as regards redemption and salvation; however, this does not mean that the king was a Nicodemite or a crypto-Lutheran. Sigismund I's bedroom in the Wawel Royal Castle was most likely on the first floor in the room now called Alchemia; it was there that he lay in state, first in the bed of state and then in the coffin, until the funeral. The letter of the king's physician, Jan Benedictus Solfa, to the Bishop of Warmia Jan Dantyszek, Sigismund I's diplomat and poet (first item in the Anex), deserves attention for two reasons. It quotes the king's last words which reflect the ruler's fiducia-permeated eschatological views. It is also a valuable testimony to the intellectual and theological dilemmas of the humanistic élites, which sought inspiration direct in the source of the revelation: the Bible and the epistles of the Fathers of the Church. It also shows the quality and scale of the intellectual ferment sown by Erasmus, who maintained close contacts with the intellectuals of Cracow. Queen Bona's letter to her daughter Izabella, queen of Hungary, written in Cracow on April 2, 1548 (second item in the Annex) contains a valuable description of the king's attire in the coffin, identical with his coronation robes, and of the laudatory text on a plaque placed in the coffin.

This is a book chapter from Fourteenth Century England X, ed. Gwilym Dodd.  This work places Richard II's activities around the dead in context with the activities of his predecessors, Edward I and Edward III.  Richard's behavior was skewed by the presentation of Thomas Walsingham, affecting the king's post-mortem reputation.  Richard acted in the same continuity as his forebears and as his successors, Henry IV and Henry V.

On 12 May 1774, Louis XV died, ending a reign which had started in 1715.  Standard accounts of his death focus on faction-fighting around a weak self-indulgent king. In this article. I wish to examine these accounts critically and, by bringing new sources to the fore, to construct a richly contextualised account of the deathbed.  Sin, smallpox and ceremony are drawn together to create a new understanding of this crucial event.

When Ernst Kantorowicz published The King’s Two Bodies in 1957, far greater importance was placed upon the body politic, the office of King, than on the body natural, the king as a man. In part, this thesis sets out to overturn this notion: the royal corpse was the central and most vital element of the royal funerary and burial ceremonies, and concern for the royal body and its soul lasted for centuries. Although the King always lived, the mortal king did not become inert or null upon death. The English royal funeral has been understudied. The practical mechanics of English kings’ funerals (including the preservation of the body, the role of the Church, and the events of the ceremonies) have not been laid out clearly. This thesis seeks to update the analysis of both individual kingly funerals and the overarching development of royal exequies over three centuries, from John in 1216 to Henry VII in 1509. It is my argument that the language used in the royal prescriptive funerary and b...

From the last decades of the sixteenth century and continuing to the end of the seventeenth, the city of Milan was characterised by a particular confluence of political and religious ideologies: reformed Catholicism, represented in the figure of archbishop Carlo Borromeo and his successors, and expressed in an intensely devout and performative religious culture; and the rule of the Catholic Spanish Habsburgs, represented in the person and the court of the Spanish governor and expressed in major events celebrating Spain’s monarchs.  Spectacle in Spanish Milan played a defining role in urban life throughout this period, involving the citizenry of the city and its territories as performers in elaborate civic and religious rituals and ceremonies.

State funerals were among Milan’s most distinctive contributions to the world of the early modern spectacle.  The ephemeral scenographies constructed for these occasions—collaborations of the city’s artists, architects, scholars and religious orders––transformed both the interiors and the exteriors of the churches in which they were held into great ‘theatres of death.’  The elaborate decorative programmes of royal funerals in Milan’s vast Duomo, recorded in lavish commemorative publications,  invariably celebrated the global reach of Spain’s power with figures, emblems and imprese representing Spanish territories. In this paper I offer an examination of the Milanese state funeral as it developed from the 1580s to the 1660s, demonstrating those aspects which make it distinctive among early modern exequies in Europe: the ritual itself and the performative role of the public as royal subjects; the language and symbolism used in narratives and panegyric sermons; the decorations and ephemeral structures—particularly the elaborate catafalques––and the systems of visual rhetoric they employed; and the roles of light, ritual movement and memory in the design and the experience of the event.  As highly choreographed rituals of devotion and reflection, Milanese funerals are eloquent illustrations of early modern understandings and beliefs regarding death, mortality and commemoration.

he forms of the repesentation of the dead person which were employed in Poland in the Middle Age an the beginning of the 16th Century were not much different from the ceremonies which were held in the other countries in Europe.
The only ritual which was truly exceptional against the background of the Christian Europe was tke kiryśnik's fallin of the horse which was accompanied by his casting the dead man's sword, shield, helmet and a broken banner on the altar. This ritual fall, which was provided for in the ordo pompae funebris drawn of the occasion of the funeral of King Sigismund the Old (1548) seeems to orginate from the fact that the royal person was segregated from the State in accordance with the doctrine of the Crown od the Polish Kingdom and that the event itself was singular because it ended the diarchy.

Heart burial is a funerary practice that has been performed since the early medieval period. However, relatively little scholarship has been published on it in English. Heart burial began as a pragmatic way to preserve a body, but it became a meaningful tradition in Western Europe during the medieval and early modern periods. In an anthropological context, the ritual served the needs of elites and the societies they governed. Elites used heart burial not only to preserve their bodies, but to express devotion, stabilize the social order and advocate legitimacy, and even gain heaven. Heart burial assisted the elite Christian, his or her family, and society pass through the liminal period of death. Over the centuries, heart burial evolved to remain relevant. The practice is extant to the present day, though the motivations behind it are very different from those of the medieval and early modern periods.

Die Handlung des Buches beginnt im Jahre 2010, als der gerade in Krakau die polnische Sprache erlernende Autor aus dem Fenster seiner Sprachschule dem Begräbnis von Maria und Lech Kaczyński beiwohnte. Die kontrovers geführten Diskussionen um diese Bestattung und ihr gigantisches Ausmaß lassen Petro Andreas N u n g o v i t c h die Frage nach den Traditionen von Beerdigungszeremonien auf dem Krakauer Schlosshügel "Wawel" stellen. Da die Begräbnisse im Fokus des Buches stehen, wird die "lebensbejahende" Dimension des Wawel-Hügels, z. B. des königliches Schlosses, nur gestreift. Die Geschichte der lokalen Begräbniskunst ist allerdings sehr lebendig geschrieben, sie soll nicht nur dem Fachpublikum, sondern auch einem geschichtsinteressierten Laien zugänglich ge

This paper was originally delivered at Leeds IMC 2018

Upon the death of his consort Eleanor of Castile on 28 November 1290, Edward I descended into prolonged, sustained grief.  Two years after Eleanor died, Edward I set up an elaborate and expensive anniversary for her, with hundreds of pounds of lit candles, many masses, and a yearly gift to Westminster Abbey.  This was maintained throughout the remainder of Edward I’s reign and through that of his and Eleanor’s only surviving son, Edward II. Edward II actively worked to fulfill his mother’s anniversary and possibly chose the design of his father’s tomb to this end.  After Edward II’s deposition in 1327, it seems the celebration of Eleanor’s anniversary at the royal court was discontinued, though the Abbey’s activity may have continued unfettered.  However, by 1337, Edward III had set about “renewing the wax” around the tomb of Edward I at Westminster Abbey, with no mention of Eleanor.  This paper proposes that Eleanor’s anniversary, whether purposely or accidentally, was recycled and utilized for invoking the memory of the warrior king, Edward I, by his grandson Edward III.  This paper will also address the long-term impact of Eleanor’s anniversary on royal ceremonial life and its inspiration for other monarchs' commemorative activity, both for themselves and for their queens consort.

Regele Mihai (25 octombrie 1921 -5 decembrie 2017) a fost o personalitate marcantă din istoria românilor 1 . Viaţa lui s-a identificat cu destinul ţării noastre, cu toate suferinţele şi transformările traumatizante prin care a trecut aceasta. Fiu al lui Carol al II-lea şi al principesei Elena a Greciei şi Danemarcei, a fost prima dată rege în anii 1927-1930. Ulterior, după încoronarea tatălui său, a devenit Mare Voievod de Alba-

The early modern spectacle in Italy is known for its use of complex rhetorical systems of word, image and performance, employed together to communicate religious and political messages, and ultimately to achieve persuasion.  Due to their ephemeral nature, the scenographies, costumes and other elements featured in these events are somewhat elusive as objects of art historical inquiry.  What is left to us, in many cases, are engravings and written accounts, from which we must re-construct the event, its images, colours, sounds, smells, and the words and actions of the ritual.  In this paper I present commemorative pamphlets and engravings from several genres of spectacle in Milan and Rome in the seventeenth century.  Focusing on the  relationship of images with textual content, such as descriptive narrative, inscriptions, panegyric addresses and sermons,  my inquiry considers two functions of these printed commemorative materials: how they called upon the 'arts of memory' of those in attendance, and the imaginations of those who were not, in order to reproduce the experience of the event; and how they function as rhetorical devices in themselves and serve to disseminate the event and its significance across boundaries of time and distance.

The forms of the repesentation of the dead person which were employed in Poland in the Middle Age an the beginning of the 16th Century were not much different from the ceremonies which were held in the other countries in Europe.
The only ritual which was truly exceptional against the background of the Christian Europe was tke kiryśnik's fallin of the horse which was accompanied by his casting the dead man's sword, shield, helmet and a broken banner on the altar. This ritual fall, which was provided for in the ordo pompae funebris drawn of the occasion of the funeral of King Sigismund the Old (1548) seeems to orginate from the fact that the royal person was segregated from the State in accordance with the doctrine of the Crown od the Polish Kingdom and that the event itself was singular because it ended the diarchy.

When Ernst Kantorowicz published The King’s Two Bodies in 1957, far greater importance was placed upon the body politic, the office of King, than on the body natural, the king as a man. In part, this thesis sets out to overturn this notion: the royal corpse was the central and most vital element of the royal funerary and burial ceremonies, and concern for the royal body and its soul lasted for centuries. Although the King always lived, the mortal king did not become inert or null upon death. The English royal funeral has been understudied. The practical mechanics of English kings’ funerals (including the preservation of the body, the role of the Church, and the events of the ceremonies) have not been laid out clearly. This thesis seeks to update the analysis of both individual kingly funerals and the overarching development of royal exequies over three centuries, from John in 1216 to Henry VII in 1509. It is my argument that the language used in the royal prescriptive funerary and burial texts permitted individual variation based on personal preferences, the unique circumstances of the death, and the requirements of the Church for a Christian burial. The royal prescriptive texts were elastic, enabling a wide variety of kings during the medieval period to be laid to rest fittingly and honorably, according to their station. These prescriptive texts did not cover commemoration, an omission that allowed flexibility in celebrating the legacy of a deceased king. In special cases, the living elected to rebury the dead, be it for practical reasons or to enhance the legacies of both parties. The ceremonies and the ensuing commemoration, combined with a pronounced preference for burial in England for members of the royal house, formed an English royal way of death.