ABSTRACT
The historiography of death, memory, and testamentary practices is already abundant in Western Europe and a fairly large number of extra-European regions. For East-Central Europe there are many short studies in various regional languages, mainly on anthropological/ethnographic aspects of the funeral rituals.
This is an edited collection of studies by international scholars on the interlocking themes of attitudes and discourses on death, commemorative practices, and inheritance/testamentary strategies in the Balkans and East-Central Europe. These and other related themes are addressed comparatively and cover areas including Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, and areas of the former Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Austria from the perspective of imperial – Ottoman and Habsburg – legacies.
Pro refrigerio animae: Death and Memory in East-Central Europe contributes to this subject by: linking anthropological/religious/cultural approaches to death to the legal/economic aspects of inheritance/commemoration; adding a still absent East-Central European and Habsburg, Balkan, and Ottoman dimension to the study of death, memorialization, and testaments; and presenting an abundant primary and secondary material in English translation and thus placing research on death and testaments by East-Central and Greek scholars within the international scholarly circuit.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part 1|55 pages
Death and Funerary Practices
chapter 1|17 pages
Death and Dying in Ottoman Bosnia
chapter 2|20 pages
The Cult of the Dead in Moldavia (Seventeenth–Early Nineteenth Centuries)
chapter 3|16 pages
“The Last Passage”
part 2|157 pages
Testaments, Property, and Family
chapter 4|26 pages
From Fear of Death to the Salvation of the Soul and Eternal Life
chapter 5|17 pages
Demise Far from Home
chapter 6|29 pages
“For a Christian Ending to Our Life”
chapter 7|24 pages
Families without Children
chapter 9|40 pages
Between Material and Spiritual Memoria
part 3|106 pages
Funerary Art, Monuments, and Memorialization