INTRODUCTION

So far in my examination of the process of dying and its consequences for the deceased, the living have received relatively little attention. They have not been entirely excluded, for deaths occurred in a wider social context and it was living people, not dead ones, who wrote accounts of deaths and made recommendations on how to die. I have also shown how the form of an individual’s death could affect the social status of their family, particularly if they had died a bad death. The physical consequences for the corpses of many of those who had died bad deaths have also been discussed, and when these deaths led to outcomes such as the destruction of the corpse, the requirement to bury it in a designated criminals’ cemetery, or the refusal of burial in hallowed ground, the choice the deceased, their family, and friends could exercise with regard to funeral arrangements was severely limited. In this chapter I turn to the responses of the bereaved to good deaths, or at least ones about which no negative judgement had been made by the bereaved or the author who relates them: Moriens is now a corpse and though his wishes, as expressed in a will, might be respected by its executors, it is the living who are the actors at this point in the events surrounding death. My aim is not to present an exhaustive study of the practices and rituals that surrounded the burial and commemoration of the dead in fifteenth-century Castile, or even an evaluation of how they changed in the course of the century. Rather I shall examine certain aspects of them, as reflected in literature and as revealed in historical and legal documents, in order to discover whether they too reflect the conflict between, and the co-existence of, the values of oradores and defensores. What follows, therefore, illustrates the