From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain(Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History)

Series: Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History

This book reveals the workings of a culture that cherished death, and invested its resources in the pursuit of heaven. This is the first full-length study of Spanish attitudes toward death and the afterlife in the peak years of the Counter-Reformation. It contains an analysis of the death rituals requested in hundreds of sixteenth-century Madrid testaments, as well as a detailed account of the way