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The Mystical Politics of Death in Medieval Iberia

2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 56; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00138282-4337607

2573-3575

Edward L. Holt,

Medieval Literature and History

The Cantigas de Santa María, a thirteenth-century collection of poems gathered to praise the Virgin Mary and composed in the scriptorium of Alfonso X of Castile-León (r. 1252–84), contains a miracle concerning the infanta Berenguela (d. 1279). Wishing to honor the Virgin Mary, her parents, Fernando III (r. 1217–52) and Beatriz of Swabia (d. 1235), promised their daughter to the Abbey of Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas. However, before the ceremony of velatio could take place, the young girl succumbed to illness. Stricken with grief, Beatriz placed her daughter at the feet of an image of the Virgin, begged for the mercy of the Virgin, and kept vigil outside the chapel. Her prayers were soon answered with the cries of her child, whom she raced to embrace, praising the Virgin and immediately honoring her promise of giving her daughter to the Cistercian order at Las Huelgas.1Encapsulated in this story is the core element of medieval mysticism: the unmediated relationship with the divine. I employ such a definition following the work of Christina Van Dyke and Sarah Beckwith, who have demonstrated that in the Middle Ages there was no uniform means to achieve this connection.2 As Van Dyke argues, mysticism “took different forms in different parts of Europe, and those forms changed substantially from the eleventh to the fifteenth century.”3 My response to the question “Do mystical traditions have a politics?” will focus on one particular expression of mysticism—the rituals surrounding death. I will argue that these moments form a contact zone between the living and the dead, the earthly and the supernatural, and the political and the mystical. In contrast to some of my fellow responders, who have focused on individual aspects of mysticism, I wish to devote space to corporate interactions. As Beckwith has shown, such a treatment has generally been eschewed in the past, promoting instead understandings of medieval mysticism as a modern distillation of the Weberian “protestant ethic” with the only possible performance being a solitary individual having a transcendent experience.4 However, once modern accretions of ideological beliefs about how mysticism should function have been scraped away, a diversity of mystical traditions practiced in the Middle Ages with the common aim of the union of the human soul and the divine can be recovered.The cantiga concerning the infanta Berenguela highlights the unique mystical and political association that the Castilian monarchy had with the Virgin Mary. Here the affective piety exhibited by Queen Beatriz echoes the suffering of the Virgin at the foot of the cross and the subsequent hope for resurrection. In performing these rituals, Beatriz encounters the divine through her Marian mimesis and Mary’s actual intercession. The story is not just a mystical encounter between the human and divine; it also carries a political message of the special friendship with the Virgin Mary enjoyed by the Castilian monarchy. For the Cantigas de Santa Maria encodes a broader devotional practice whereby the Virgin Mary serves as a spiritual coruler of the Castilian realm, and through devotion to her the community was bound into a corporate unit, helmed by what Amy Remensnyder has described as a “Marian monarchy.”5 This sublimated relationship provides a political theology for conquest and rule and a mystical element through direct encounters and visions of her grace and power.While the infanta ultimately lived, the initiation of mourning before her death provides insight into how rituals surrounding death represent a second point of intersection between mystical traditions and politics. In the premodern world, death was not relegated as a biologically determined fact and ignored until that inevitable moment loomed; rather, it was embedded in the fabric of everyday life.6 In this liminal zone society negotiated a space for the dead among the living in which mystical traditions and politics participated in a shared discourse. The choice to enclose the infanta Berenguela in Las Huelgas was by no means random. Placement in Las Huelgas highlights not only the devotional connection between the Castilian monarchy and Mary, to whom the abbey is dedicated, but also dynastic politics, as Las Huelgas serves as the site of burial for thirty-two royal figures.7 While there is no one necropolis for Castilian kings, the number of royal individuals located here transformed the place into a center of royal and religious importance.8 The presence at Las Huelgas of the infanta, who would one day become its abbess, intensified this connection as she ensured the continued prayers for her ancestors as well as the current rulers.9Beyond these specific prayers at Las Huelgas, mystical traditions contain a politics more broadly at the moments in which a community or individuals meditate on and pray for the memory of the deceased. First, this occurred at the moment of death. R. C. Finucane argues that the “death ritual was not so much a question of dealing with a corpse as of reaffirming the secular and spiritual order by means of a corpse.”10 For the monarch, this negotiation can be seen in the phrase “The king is dead. Long live the king.” Resonant with rich nuances of political theology, it often signifies moments of transition, marking the point of burial of the old monarch and the accession of the new one. But the phrase also denotes an eternal quality of the deceased, who embodied the corporate, mystical, and enduring essence of the monarchy.11 While a Castilian king may not have been ascribed sacral trappings, he was no ordinary man. Emilio Mitre Fernández argues that late medieval chronicles reflect a political and religious message that separates the monarch from the ordinary individual.12 Likewise Carlos Eire states that the death of the monarch, preserved in chronicles, served as an early form of an ars moriendi.13 Meditation on the affective piety of these individuals, especially at their moments of death, served as a model of holiness with which to experience God.Even after the individual’s death, the liturgies remembering the anniversary of the death offer a temporal connection between the sacral and earthly realms. As Ulrike Wiethaus states, “Apart from the sacraments, liturgical sound provided a sensual medium that connected the sacred and created world with intense immediacy.”14 Variously classified as martyrologies, obituaries, and necrologies, these texts situate the reader in communion with the divine at the same time that they present the memorialization of the person and office of the king.15 Inscribed in the entries are themes of conquest, lineage, and religiosity. The performance of the text, usually (although not exclusively) during the gathering of the community at prime, supports Paul Szarmach’s claims that “medieval mysticism does not preclude a role for institutions.”16 And it is in the institutions’ selective memory that the political nature of these mystical traditions are exhibited. The inclusion of an individual was by no means mandatory, and unlike chronicles, these sources do not serve as a genealogical roll call for the royal lineage. Instead, a monarch’s placement in a specific liturgical tradition represents a conscious choice to include the individual, either to signify burial at the site, as a means of supplication as thanks for a donation, or to bolster the identity of a place through a greater spiritual connection to the monarch. For example, an obituary for the Cathedral of Toledo provides an entry which notes that on October 6 “the noblest king Alfonso of Las Navas died.”17 Including an interesting reference to his role in the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212), this entry furnishes a memory for Alfonso VIII of Castile (r. 1158–1214) that is tied to the martial role of the monarchy and its archbishop and is performed in the context of divine prayer and contemplation. In contrast, there is the case of Sancho II of Portugal (d. 1248). Relieved of his duties as king by Innocent IV in 1245, Sancho II was forced by the subsequent invasion of Alfonso III of Portugal (r. 1248–79) to reside in Toledo. Yet after his death (and despite his burial in the Cathedral of Toledo), his name is omitted from the larger obituary tradition.18 Sancho’s absence demonstrates the flexibility in the memory of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Liturgical rituals could laud a patron or military victor through an obituary entry, yet they were not beholden to chronicle every death in the parish, not even royal figures. Consequently, institutions, which negotiated their place and status against other ecclesiastical and royal institutions, used mystical traditions as a means to exhibit political power and influence.Finally, the memorialization of monarchs, whether in the story of a good death or in the liturgy of death itself, encompasses the mystical goal of the union of the human soul with the divine through providing a place in which models of holiness can be presented. As Marcia Colish notes, the practice of virtue was essential for “preparation for mystic vision, which, in turn, energizes the soul and enables us to serve God and neighbor even better.”19 These models of holiness were intensely political, as they often focused on the elite of society, privileging certain monarchs over others. And these messages were projected to all levels of society, influencing behavior and shaping how all monarchs would be viewed. These models would even be viewed across confessional and political boundaries. For example, al-Ḥimyarī provided a eulogy for Fernando III in a fifteenth-century Arabic-Islamic geographic dictionary. Al-Ḥimyarī notes that Fernando “was a gentle man who had political sense. It is said that when he died, he was interred in the great mosque of Seville, in the part of the Qibla.”20 Thus the selection of an individual to serve as a model of holiness had political implications for mystical practice, as the choice highlights specific agendas of whom or what should be memorialized.The initial question “Do mystical traditions have a politics?” incorrectly suggests an opposing duality of purpose. The diversity of mystical and political traditions in the Middle Ages provided room for the two strands to intersect. In the kingdom of Castile the special friendship between the monarch and the Virgin Mary created the devotional space in which to have the mystical relationship with the divine. This same devotion was harnessed to political ends, as Mary became a patron of conquest and political hegemony. In the liturgical remembrance of the dead, and in particular deceased monarchs, mystical traditions contained a political message as institutions preserved certain individuals in necrologies to highlight certain temporal and political conditions. Yet the prayers themselves contributed to a symbolic mystical community whereby meditation on these models of holiness served as moral preparation for contemplation. Consequently, in the medieval kingdom of Castile and, by virtue of the pan-European use of liturgies concerning death, the rest of the continent, the mystical and the political shared a discursive space.