Staging death: Silences and ventriloquisms of the dead body in medieval Spain.

This dissertation examines the post-mortem life of three celebrated dead bodies from late medieval Castile: Prince Juan, Alvaro de Luna, and Philip the Handsome. This study reads the literary representations of the aristocratic dead body as a material object which promotes a secular debate capable of reformulating the apparently paradoxical relationship between secular power, religious doctrines, and mortality. From this perspective, this dissertation contributes to the investigation of the Medieval Spain's 'cult of death' by focusing on the dead body as an authoritative instrument which, despite its inherently ephemeral nature, was used as a channel to disseminate messages designed to enact social and political agency. In contrast to the conventional and meager rites that surrounded the good death of Prince Juan, this dissertation argues that the practices conducted and the narratives constructed around the cadavers of Alvaro de Luna and Philip the Handsome by family members and social institutions offer us valuable insight into the formation of proto-national identity, royal authority, and social status. The analysis of the literary representations of these two cadavers sheds light on the ways in which their visibility and the theatricality of practices around them uniquely articulated a kind of political ventriloquism, thus creating a privileged site in the struggle for the political and social agency of their promoters. Working from evidence in contemporary poems, ballads, letters and chronicles, this dissertation shows how, despite the austerity of supposedly hegemonic religious discourse, the coexistence of secular practices of death, mourning and memoralization offered means for Castilian elites to challenge patterns of power and consolidate their own authority.Ph.D.Language, Literature and LinguisticsMedieval literatureRomance literatureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/124553/2/3150083.pd