Laura Vivanco. Death in Fifteenth-Century Castile: Ideologies of the Elites. Series A: Monografías 205. London: Tamesis, 2004. 220 pp. ISBN: 1855661004. Reviewed by Frank A. Domíguez, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill This book tackles the subject of death and its documentation in fifteenth-century Castile. The topic is of great interest to researchers in the Spanish Middle Ages, particularly after the work of Royer (1992), Guiance (1998), and Martínez Gil (1996); but, because of the large number of works on the subject, an overview of fifteenth-century attitudes towards death is difficult. Death in Fifteenth-Century Castile intends to remedy that lack by providing “an analysis of the fifteenth-century Castilian ideologies of death as expressed by and for the elites through a range of written sources” complemented by critical studies on the visual arts (10). The book begins with Huizinga’s perception that death permeated everything during the Middle Ages, and that life was spent either in contemplation of its approach or morbidly clinging to the enjoyment of the body in the face of life’s brevity. Vivanco, in consonance with other recent critics, takes a more nuanced approach than Huizinga’s by looking at how thoughts of death and its aftermath affected individuals differently, depending on their station in life. To do so, she adopts the famous medieval division of society into three classes (oradores, defensores, labradores) and examines how two of them, the oradores and defensores, responded to death. However, as she states in the introduction, she believes that death and dying were not “as important in the lives of fifteenth-century individuals as Huizinga’s study would lead us to believe” (7). The rest of the work seeks to prove her thesis. Death in Fifteenth-Century Castile begins with a very useful introduction to the critical literature on death and dying in medieval Europe and continues by reviewing the work that has been done on Castile (Chapter I: “Introduction,” 1-26). Vivanco then devotes separate chapters to describing how individuals died, or were expected to die, and how their deaths were assessed by others (Chapter II: “The Types of Death,” 27-98); how belief in the aftermath of death conditioned those assessments (Chapter III: “The Afterlife,” 99-135); and, how people dealt with the consequences of their bereavement (Chapter IV: “The Bereaved,” 136-177). The book ends with a “Conclusion” (178-184), an Appendix (“Breakdown of the Causes of Death o Near-Death of the Characters in Berceo’s Milagros de Nuestra Señora,”185-187), a “Works Cited” bibliography (189-204), and an “Index” (205-211). Each of the chapters mentioned begins with its own brief introduction and ends with an equally brief conclusion. The introduction to Chapter II (“The Types of Death”) looks at the “good” and “bad” death in the defensor class. Vivanco draws most of her examples from accounts of the death of kings and contemporary arts of dying. The first section (“The Oradores: Christianity and the Good Death,” 28-54”), further clarifies the book’s thesis and its bias toward the defensores as Vivanco looks at the defensores of more modest station in the three subsequent sections of Chapter II. “The Defensores: Good Death in Battle” (54-63) reveals the class to be composed of individuals who actively seek and court death, and are more afraid of dishonor than anything else. Their attitude toward death in battle is one of acceptance and exemplifies very different values from those of the Church. Defensores base their definition of a good death on the belief that individuals can have life in death through the fame and honor they accrue in the memory of those they leave behind (57-58), while oradores believe in a life committed not to individual achievement but to abnegation. To some extent, Vivanco finds that the defensor ethos is sanctioned by the Church’s concept of crusade, but it is based on an older system of values that is in tension with the Christian religion. This good death that lives on in memory is balanced by the three “Bad Deaths” (64-75) that are the result of 1) accidents or other people (“Sudden deaths as a result of an outside agency,” 68-75), 2) executions (“Deaths imposed by the judicial system,” 75-85), and 3) suicide (“Self-inflicted deaths,” 85-97). Of course, the definition of a good or bad death often depends on the point of view of the writer, who is not above enhancing (or not) his subject’s life and death for the sake of advantage. Chapter III, “The Afterlife,” begins with a section called “The Oradores and the Afterlife” (99-108) in which the inscrutable nature of God’s decisions pertaining to the salvation of a soul are expounded. It continues with a discussion of the characteristics of “God and the Devil” (108-114), “Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory” (114-127), and “The Defensores and the Vida de la Fama” (127-134). It concludes that the warriors’ concept of fame was “a cohesive alternative ideology to that of the oradores”, without clearly demonstrating what constitutes a good death among the latter. Vivanco’s perception that the concept of death of the oradores was more abstract is important and should also be further explored. Chapter IV, “The Bereaved,” looks at the rituals surrounding death and the different attitudes exemplified by secular and religious authorities. It establishes first the function of the ceremonies (“The Oradores: Ritual and Remembrance,” 137-144) and their commingling of the secular and sacred (“Defensores and the Mingling of Secular and Sacred in Funeral Customs,” 145-155). An assessment of the excesses of consolation (“Consolation and the Oradores’ Opposition to Excessive Grief,” 155-160); its role as one of the burdens of the defensores (“Fortaleza, Grief, and the Defensores,” 160-165); the different expressions according to gender (“Grief and gender,” 165-167); and social standing (“Grief and social status,” 167-174) follow. Vivanco arrives at the conclusion that, although the oradores struggled to eliminate from society burial practices that they considered excessive, these practices prevailed despite a certain male reticence to give free rein to an outward expression of excessive grief. There is, however, no consideration of the increasing influence of Stoic philosophy at the time. Vivanco comes to the overall conclusion that “two coherent and distinct ideologies . . . coexisted and came into conflict in fifteenth-century Castile.” The conflict is summarized in the next two sections called “Oradores” (180-81) and “Defensores,” (181-182). Oradores saw everything from the vantage point of the moment of death, when the dying sought absolution in the hope of gaining eternal life, whereas for the defensores the total life of the individual was assessed from the vantage point of whether they had led a full and honorable life that ended with a death that assured their survival in the memory of men and benefited their lineage (“Conflict and Coexistence,” 182-184). Of necessity, a book of such wide scope does not treat elements that other researchers would consider important. Death in Fifteenth-Century Castile does not tackle what is the most exemplary death in the orador class, celebrated in the most copious biographical genre of medieval literature: the vita of the saint. Instead, the values of the oradores are used to ferret out the differences separating them from the defensores rather than fully describing the orador ethos, which at first seems one of the two main underpinnings of the book. It would have been useful to contrast the saint’s vita as a description of a religious hero with the individual secular biographies that begin to appear with greater insistence in the fifteenth-century, and to examine how the description of death in one is imitated by the other; in other words, to look at what is similar between the narratives that describe oradores and defensores rather than discuss how they differ (32) from the point of view of members of each class. Most of the oradores cited in the book, after all, don’t belong to a different “class” (as we understand the term) from the defensores, but fulfill a different function. The book does not mention the judicial execution of Martín López de Córdoba, the most important medieval death sentence of a member of the elite after that of Alvaro de Luna, and the one that gives rise to one of the exceptional texts of the early fifteenth century: the Memorias of Leonor López de Córdoba. Martín López’s death would perhaps have led Vivanco to explore the well-developed bibliography on the concept (and the sentence) of infamia. Not enough is made, either, of the Coplas of Jorge Manrique, which explicitly borrow from the life of a saint to construct the panegyric of a warrior father and extensively counterpoints the “good” and “sudden” death topics. Finally, while the lack of documentation about the labradores is a result of the design of the study, in limiting Death in Fifteenth-Century Castile to the elites, the book fails to provide a total picture of the influence of death at the time. Missing also, I might add, is consideration of the theme among members of the other confessional groups still inhabiting the peninsula: the Jews and Muslims. Nevertheless, Death in Fifteenth-Century Castile is an excellent book on the topic, within its self-imposed limitations. I hope that Vivanco will build on her research and some day give us a truly global study on the impact of death in the fifteenth century.