Abstract
If one set of boundaries is concerned with the inside and outside of the body, another significant boundary marks the difference between the body living and the body dead. But the boundary between life and death is less settled than it might appear. Historians have explored the ways in which death does not constitute so absolute a boundary in early modern Europe as we might imagine: the living relate to the dead or to the not yet living in ways that acknowledge in them a continuing force.1 The concept of purgatory surrounded Catholic Europeans with a community of the dead whose desires and distresses continued to be potent, and the continuing presence of ghosts and revenants among Protestants as well as Catholics signalled a similar sense that the dead might have unfinished business that would keep them around. To ignore the wishes of the dead might bring disaster on the living. What Naomi Tadmor describes as the ‘lineage-family’, stretching back towards ancestral lines of descent and forwards towards those who would carry the name in future, connected the dead and the as yet unborn in the minds of the living, not only among the aristocracy.2 The constant reshaping of the family unit caused by high rates of infant and maternal death gave rise to forms of expression that can now seem curiously alien, undermining notions of temporal progression or human individuality: dead mothers address their children in the popular ‘mother’s legacy’ genre, frequently written by a mother to her unborn child in case of her death in childbirth; paintings and monuments represent multiple spouses and children in a simultaneous present; babies are given the name of an older sibling now dead.3
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Notes
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© 2007 Katharine Hodgkin
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Hodgkin, K. (2007). Beyond the Human Body: Life, Death and the Devil. In: Madness in Seventeenth-Century Autobiography. Early Modern History: Society and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230626423_8
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