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IMC 2022: Sessions

Session 131: This is the End, or Is It?: Borders and Boundaries of Dying in the Middle Ages

Monday 4 July 2022, 11.15-12.45

Organiser:Patrick Nehr-Baseler, Geschichte des frühen und hohen Mittelalters sowie für Historische Grundwissenschaften, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel
Moderator/Chair:Rike Szill, Historisches Seminar - Mittelalterliche Geschichte, Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel
Paper 131-aResurrected by a Saint: Forms of Shaping and Functionalising the Other's Death in Hagiographical Literature
(Language: English)
Sarah-Christin Schröder, Geschichte des frühen und hohen Mittelalters sowie für Historische Grundwissenschaften, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel
Index terms: Ecclesiastical History, Hagiography, Religious Life, Theology
Paper 131-bHello from the Other Side: Relations of Body and Soul while Dying in High Medieval Otherworld Stories
(Language: English)
Karolin Künzel, Geschichte des frühen und hohen Mittelalters sowie für Historische Grundwissenschaften, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel
Index terms: Ecclesiastical History, Mentalities, Religious Life, Theology
Paper 131-cBetween the Self and the Other: Crossing Boundaries in Late Medieval Deathbed Manuals
(Language: English)
Patrick Nehr-Baseler, Geschichte des frühen und hohen Mittelalters sowie für Historische Grundwissenschaften, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel
Index terms: Lay Piety, Printing History, Religious Life, Sermons and Preaching
Abstract

People are constantly crossing borders until being united in crossing the inevitable, final one between life and death, this world and the afterlife. While the exploration of transcendent spaces has come a long way in hagiographical, visionary, and devotional literature, the crossing of borders in dying and these border's fluidity itself have received less attention. Thus, by referring to borders and boundaries between body and soul, of one's own dying, and the dying of others (e.g. peers of a saint), we are asking in a diachronic perspective how these borders between life and death are negotiated dynamically in various text types.