THE ORADORES AND THE AFTERLIFE

Although the manner of an individual’s death was generally considered extremely important, a theologian such as Fray Juan de Alarcón (d. c. 1451) could challenge the existing views of different types of deaths, as outlined in the previous chapter, by asserting that whether a death was good or bad depended on the life lived and, more importantly, the destination of the soul:

The difficulty facing a theologian who sought to challenge the usual categorizations of what constituted a good or a bad death was that these already took into account a moral element. A good life was expected to lead to a good death, ‘de la buena vida sienpre se sigue buena muerte’ (Arte ‘N’ 1990: 153). Conversely, people associated certain forms of death with ignominy and sin, and therefore believed that dying in such a way was an indicator both that the life lived had been sinful and that the soul would be damned after death. These bad deaths were classed as such precisely because in general they were thought to indicate that the soul of the deceased would be ‘afligida e atormentada’. It is this prevailing attitude that is challenged in an exemplum in which the servant of a ‘buen rreligioso’ who is killed and eaten by a wild beast throws himself to the ground and declares, ‘¡Oh Señor! Non me levantaré fasta que me muestres commo [. . . ] este santo padesció esta pena’ (Sánchez de Vercial 1961: 98), presumably because he cannot understand how a good man can die a bad death.