‘Hora Mortis’. Considerations on the Medieval Death and its Relationship to the Body

Abstract

Death and the human body. Two things that mankind has been trying to understand and reconcile since the earliest civilizations until the present day. This yearning for the understanding of the processes of death and of the human nature, both physical and spiritual, was strongly expressed in the Middle Ages in the most different ways. The problems of the body –of the living or the dead, and the body of the Resurrection— within Christianity penetrated deeply in the secular and in the religious life during that period. The influence of these problems and inquiries on the body was felt on the centrality of the funeral rituals that evolved from primitive Christianity, in the reverence for the relics of the saints, in the Eucharist, and in the inquiries about personal identity, bodily integrity and the nature of the resurrection’s body.