Illnesses, Death and Funeral Ceremonies in Living Strategies of the Schwarzenbergs (1732-1914)

The Thesis Illnesses, Death and Funeral Ceremonies in Living Strategies of the Schwarzenbergs (1732?1914) deals with the topics of last illnesses, death, funeral ceremonies and shape of burial places in living strategies of the high aristocracy in a long period of time between the Baroque age and the beginning of the 20th century. The Schwarzenberg family had been chosen as a case study. The initial part of the dissertation focuses on the period intellectual discussion about death and dying with particular stress on the history of medicine. Since the 1740s the human dying had been still more medicalised. The implementation of some funeral reforms from the late 18th century into practice was one of some concrete results of medicalising death. The reforms had a significant impact on changing the attitudes towards dying and dead body and influenced the shape of funeral ceremonies and burial places. Consequently the author of this Ph.D. Thesis compared the period funeral norms with the Schwarzenbergs? experience with death. Having studied written estates of the both family branches, the Thesis tries to reconstruct the shape of dying, death and funerals by the high aristocracy and using the Schwarzenberg transitional ritual of death as an example observes changes or stagnation of collective mentality and life style within the noble society. The last moments by the deathbed in the civil age belonged still more to close relatives, while the display of the body, the requiem mass and mainly the mourning conduct became the opportunity to demonstrate values of the kin and narrate the family history