From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain by Carlos M. N. Eire (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 563 theologians were not bashful about claiming effective control of Catholic doctrine . The third, most harsh phase of the debate began with the outbreak of the Reformation. Catholic humanists were in an especially awkward position. Conservatives laid the blame for the new heresies squarely on them. A valuable chapter analyzes the humanists' critique of scholastic dialectic, beginning with the work ofValla and Agrícola and continuing into the new century withVives, Melanchthon, Ramus, and Nizolius. Rummel shows that several of these critics aimed beyond scholasticism at the authority of Aristotle himself, early hints of the following epoch's repudiation ofAristotelian rationalism. Charles G. Nauert,Jr. University ofMissouri-Columbia Early Modern European From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft ofDying in Sixteenth-Century Spain. By Carlos M. N. Eire. [Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History] (NewYork: Cambridge University Press. 1995. Pp. xiv, 571. $4995.) In all our lives there comes a time when thoughts of death and human mortality become particularly intense. Carlos Eire's book, From Madrid to Purgatory , records the multifaceted history of Spain's epochal fascination with death. It is Eire's concern, in this long and detailed study, to demonstrate not only the ways in which mortuary rituals were conceived and crafted in sixteenth-century Spain, but to suggest that the enormous amount of time, effort, and money devoted to these rituals revealed a compulsive emotional drive among Spaniards for spiritual security in an age of economic distress and political instability. Eire's reasons for labeling sixteenth-century Spanish death practices "obsessive " come hard and fast: the first third of the book presents evidence from several hundred wills in sixteenth-century Madrid which express a conscious and deliberate use of deathbed distributions of alms to enhance the spiritual status of testators' souls. Eire has calculated, moreover, from these wills, that the average number of post-mortem Masses requested by testators for their souls' benefit rose from ninety in the 1520's to 777 by the end of the century, an inflationary spiral that deserves to be called, as Eire has called it, a "numeric delirium in pious bequests." And if the sheer number and subtle gradations in types of mortuary devotions are not sufficient to demonstrate Spain's "obsession " with death, the final two sections of the book describing popular responses to the deaths of King Philip II in 1598 and of Teresa of Avila in 1582 decisively confirm the judgment. We learn in exhaustive detail about the gruesome way in which Spain's most powerful monarch met his death—about the gout and ulcers and boils and abscesses that drenched Philip II's sheets—and more importantly, about the enormous popularity of tracts and sermons that narrated these personal events. We learn as well about the wondrous stories 564 BOOK REVIEWS that the Spanish people wove around the "sacred" death of Teresa of Avila—of nuns who saw resplendent lights across the sky, who heard the great saint's moans, and who smelt delicious odors from her flesh miles and miles away from her deathbed. The eagerness with which Spaniards dismembered Teresa's dead body for its healing powers and the readiness with which they accepted reports of her supernatural reappearance on earth is testimony to their refusal to accept the idea of mortal extinction and temporal flux. By insisting upon the continuous presence of cherished heroes and heroines after death, Eire argues, the Spanish people found a means of imposing imaginary order and stability on an otherwise chaotic and disintegrating universe. Professor Eire is to be commended for attempting to assess the psychological value of Spain's death-denying rituals even though his conclusions are apt to elicit debate and even heated opposition. After considering the possibility that Spain's devotion to the fate of the dead amounted to a morbid misdirection of corporate interests and a superfluous investment of wealth in unproductive ventures which contributed to Spain's decline as a nation, Eire opts for a more benign assessment of the period's death practices. He concludes that Spain's emotional and financial investment in the fate of dead men's souls was not a cause and symptom of cultural decline...