Nissi studies the attitudes towards the communality of death through the acts that are recorded as being performed around a dying person in two different source materials: ars moriendi guidebooks and resurrection miracle narratives of the canonization processes and miracle collections.
In addition to two different source materials, the construction of communality around a dying person is studied in two distinct geographical areas: Italy and Sweden, which have been selected to facilitate detection of the possible differences in the geographical extremes of Western Christendom. The 15th century is the selected timeframe of the study, because the most popular ars moriendi guidebooks were written then.
The analysis of the three most popular ars moriendi guides showed that the theologians who wrote these texts did not consider the presence of several people beneficial for the dying person. This is a major finding, because previous studies have not acknowledged the guidebooks’ negative attitudes towards the communality of death.
People were welcomed to visit the dying during the early phases of the process of death. However, dying persons were instructed to be left alone with one trusted friend after the delivery of the last sacrament. This instruction was based on the belief that the presence of the loved ones would cause the dying to fall into the sin of avarice. According to this belief, the Devil tempted the dying to hold on to every mundane thing, including their next of kin. Thus, according to the guidebooks, the presence of relatives and friends caused the dying not to accept their death but to cling to the earthly matters, which would eventually lead to a bad death. Accordingly, the temptation of avarice was avoided, and the good death was achieved if people were not surrounding the deathbed.
One does not find such a negative attitude toward the people surrounding a dying person in resurrection miracle testimonies. Quite the opposite is true: Witnesses testified how the community actively took part in the process of death. A narrative of a communal death moment was constructed by recording, especially certain five acts of death. It has been often recorded that a community agreed on the apparent signs of death, prayed together for help from a saint, agreed that the last sacrament should be delivered, decided to start preparing the burial and asked for help outside the sickroom.
These recordings were a way to validate a miracle, because it was an assertion for a canonization commission that the people present were assured of the arrival of death. At the same time, they give evidence of how small-scale communities cooperated in the face of death: people negotiated, made decisions, and helped each other. Even strangers were welcomed to the deathbed scene.
The communal character is most clearly emphasised in those five acts of death when the determination of the signs of death has been recorded. The recording of this act was used as evidence that a proper miracle had occurred. A way to confirm that a person was truly dead was to testify that everybody present considered the person to be dead. The arrival of death was most often communally determined. However, doctors, apothecaries, barbers or even midwives were also used as expert witnesses to validate resurrection miracles in the Italian material.
The appearance of medical experts, the use of relics around the dying, and the more frequent appearance of priests around the dying in Italy are the only major differences between the resurrection narratives recorded in Italy and Sweden.
The study has consequently verified that the communal acts of death were rather similarly comprehended in Nordic and South European 15th century hagiographic material. However, the institutionalised religion, which the ars moriendi represented, differed from the communality recorded in resurrection miracle narratives. Communality was an integral part of a deathbed scene in resurrection miracle narratives.
Nissi proposes that the communal deathbed scene as recorded in hagiographic material reflects the lived religion of medieval people. Even if the theologians guided people in the opposite direction to the ars moriendi guides’ instructions, people gathered around a dying person in the late Middle Ages. People were not mere passive bystanders around the deathbed; they constructed communality in manifold ways.
The doctoral dissertation of M.A. Jyrki Nissi in the field of history titled The Communality of Death and Dying in 15th Century Europe: Evidence of Miracle Narratives and ars moriendi Guidebooks will be publicly examined at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Tampere University at 12 o'clock on Saturday 4 September, 2021. The venue is Pinni B building auditorium 1096, address: Kanslerinrinne 1. Professor Laura Ackerman Smoller from University of Rochester, USA, will be the opponent while Professor Christian Krötzl will act as the custos.
Because of the coronavirus pandemic, only a limited amount of persons can participate in the event. The public defence can, however, be followed via remote connection.
The dissertation is available online at
http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-03-2025-6
Photo: Sanna Niskanen