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Hello everyone. Welcome back to New Books and Early Modern History. A podcast on the new books network. I'm Yana Byers, your host and I'm here today with Enrique Fernandez of the University of Manitoba to talk about his new collection Death and Gender in the early modern period.
Out 2024 with Brill. Hello Enrique and welcome to the podcast. Hello nice to talk to you. Yeah, so how are you today?
Fine, fine. I'm the Master's over and I'm enjoying the spring summer in the prairies in Canada. Fantastic. Before we go any further, I want to know that you have a co-editor, Darlene Ambro-Fareto, who couldn't be with us today.
But so hello to Darlene. Yeah, hey Darlene can not be with us today because she's teaching at the, we have two universities here in town, which is University of Ottawa and University of Winnipeg, which is the city where we are. That's where she works. So she is a historian and I'm a literature person.
That's what the team is and she is from Portobquis, the same and I'm from Spanish, the same. In my case, first generation immigration. So and the two have been coming to the Iberian connection, but she sees things from the historian perspective. I see things more from a history of culture, so perspective, which I think is one of the strengths of the book that we can move in both ways and it shows a lot in the article where they come from.
And during the editing process, each side sees the, okay, you're missing data as the historian saying, no, that's my side, the cultural interpretation. They say, well, yeah, but that's the state that you have to interpret them. So do these two different disciplines, basically. And I think why the books are good in the sense that you have two completely different audiences, but we tend to be isolated from each other.
And we have so much in common and we don't realize it. And the two perspectives will put together a different and very powerful. No, it's a strength of the volume. And it is funny how much these disciplinary boundaries matter in our work and the way we approach questions and how we relate.
So I love that I love that you can see the literary and historical perspectives here. And how do you know, Darlene, and how did you two come to create this volume? Well, we made different conferences we have here, especially conferences, local conferences, the early modern world. And of course, because of our information connection, as I said, we met in those conferences and we started to talk and we were talking about the same things, but from two completely different approaches.
So that's how we decided that we could do something together and bring together the two approaches. And also because of the geographical isolation in which we live, that we are in North America, the distance is brutal and special in Canada. So it's not like in Europe where you just take a train and go to another city where there's another professor in the same area. We are very, very isolated.
We really try to find people to talk to that is close to you. Although, you know, the internet this day is there, you can have this interview. It's not the same to have lunch and discussing formally. So that's how we came to meet these other local barriers that periodically we all the people working on every modernity together.
So when you decided to create this volume, what were the holes in the scholarship that you wanted to fill? Well, the idea was that gender is the theme, this is everywhere. It's the most important theme, like to say, or one of the most important things. The construction of gender is informed much of modern criticism, both in the language and history.
And that is also a thing of research, especially in history, but not as much as gender. So my idea was to put together two themes that were gender is absolutely constructed as such perceived theme. Death is the absolute and constructible reality. Death is that you cannot present it as something that is not just a convention.
Death is so physical, so real. And then the the contrast between the two, I realized that how they encounter those two how reality of death, is the much more nuanced reality of gender. And it's like in a coalition from the we see how they call the instances in which they too collided in the early modern period, what were the results of these two realities? And especially how different they were from today, like today gender is everywhere and death is ignored.
I don't think it's the exact opposite, but death was much more present and much more constructed where gender was considered a hard category. So that was part of the original thinking that moved me forward with that. And in the case of the link, I have been working with autopsies with the culture of bisection in the 16th century. That's why it was for me with the side of death and the link was working with wheels, especially women in Portugal, fighting wheels, fish mongers, and then we'll be side the practice in the word dispositions here in the wheels.
So we started to talk around that. All right. So you know in the introduction that early moderns didn't see death as an end, but rather kind of a stop in the journey. Can you comment some more on that?
Yeah. As I said today, death is the non-touchable subject we try to hide. We said just as the cessation of life on the end point, there is no idea of post-death life. And if there's one, there's only culture, there's a horror culture, religion is being fade away.
So for us, there is nothing to say after death. It's something that is difficult to construct, you can construct the story. Money is the consequences, but death is nothing. It's the beginning of nothing.
For the early modern period, death was contrary a moment of the beginning of the real life. So the ecosystem transition, and you got into a complex life pattern of waiting for resurrection. You had reincarnation, but they don't call it reincarnation, but you need your body to be reborn again. So there was a very strong culture of taking care of the dead until they came back to life.
So you had to consider that as a transition into a new life, which is basically the religious belief. But it had a very material side to it, and you could not just abandon the corpses. You had to take care of it, prepare for death. Not only the practicalities of Wales, and prepare.
You wanted to have masses for you, you wanted to be buried here, dressed like that. So this was a very rich, constructed culture that is lost today. I really want to hit on this. The question in tradition doesn't believe in reincarnation, and I'm making air quotes listeners.
The way you might talk about it in some Eastern religions, but there is the idea that you start a different life. There is a rebirth, there is an afterlife, and you're in it in a different way. So it's not reincarnation, it's not reincarnation either. In the West, today?
No, I'm talking about it in the early modern period. It was a basic religious pattern with discussions, but it was a very typical Christian belief, that you went ahead and held, but you went with your whole voice. It's not that you just went as naked soul, the soul. It was reincarnated, even the reincarnation, not in the modern meaning we take it, but you become somebody different that's Eastern.
It's a reincarnation of your original boy. In many cases, they specify if it was a body of your 30 or 33 year old person, which was considered because of Jesus at the perfect age. So your body will reconstitute from that, from the skeleton, everything. It's somehow facilitated to have everything together in the same place, ideally kept in a whole replay, like a cemetery or a church.
Then it was considered that the human remains were waiting. They were waiting the day of reincarnation or re-freshing to go to heaven. So it was a moment of temporary suspension. So they even considered that the body had some remained life where it was fresh attached to it.
And until the 19th century, when all the cemeteries were taking outside the cities, all over Europe you have cemeteries within the city, and within buildings in the churches, then for hygienic reasons, they can await only very recently the idea of cremation, as you can be acceptable for the worse, because they remain in the fear that doesn't make it harder to reincarnate. And this rebirth of a flesh was very physical in that meaning. And one of the things that is very controversial is not a foreign doctrine, is if when you were re-inconnected, during sex with a man or woman, and they ask whether there is a lot of different doctrine within the church that the reincarnated body, the divine body, doesn't have sexual organs. Otherwise, it does, but they don't do you any good.
They don't use because when you're in heaven, there is no death, you don't need the full reproduction. So the identity after death was a gender identity or un-gender identity was a big debate. It was going to an intro, and I was difficult to conceive. The idea of what leading after death was, it wasn't killing which state, but it was a clearly embodied state.
Okay. Yeah. So let's talk about this. The idea that gender identity or non-gender identity, your gender, your sex body, extends past death.
So let's talk about how that plays out in the first article, post-mortem cross-dressing and other gender aspects of lay death and burial in religious habits, 30, 50, to 60, 50. What does Kristin Skud do here? She is, she, it's something very interesting and I never know, I went in practice, is that people, when they are buried, you can choose, they close, you can choose as well. But very common was to be buried in religious habits, even if you were a lay person.
So many people decided, okay, I want to be buried in the habit of Franciscan or Carmelite, that's where the most common practice is. And the strength thing, that's where she, that's what the call of her article is about, is that women chose to be buried, dressed in the habit of their male confessors. So they were kind of some gender changing practice there. Why would a woman not be dressed like a, would be dressed like a male and not like a man?
Not this always Franciscan confessor. And they actually wanted them to be used, the one that they have been used by their male confessors. Not necessarily a professor, but men that in the British or they had a sense or a reputation of sanctity. So the idea behind it is that by being dressed like holy clothes or clothes in contact with a holy person, that how you facilitated the transfer to the heaven.
And that produced that there was also a commercial side, like clothes were very expensive in the period. So what happened was that women, women bought a new habit for that mankadin, they got the old one. So that practice was well documented. It was always in the direction of male.
There is no case is recorded of men being buried in female nuns clothes. And the most logical explanation is that by dawning those habits, women donning a male habit, they were moving to a neutral androgynous body of eternity because that would fit the theory that on the one side, the resurrected body had no gender one on the view. Or the other one that the male body was the most perfect body versus the female body. There are cases in nuns who wore male clothes, so just to be less carnal, flesh oriented.
So that's a very, this is an article that emphasizes something that is to, we know that practice is common and gives it as being on the side of how do you envision what is the purpose of practice, the point that would be for you that you take care of it. Sometimes it could take the only difference, sometimes it was a woman, they veil when the coughing was open, they veil their face during the ceremony so that the contrast between the, the, the, the, the rich male habits and the person like the sexual identity wasn't so strong. So that's, that's the, the gist of the article. That is fascinating, right?
That is so interesting. This idea too. From the pitch to the stands, the communities around the world, the beautiful game is coming to our beautiful country, uniting fans around a shared passion. Now you have the opportunity to hold this chapter of Canadian soccer history in the palm of your hands.
Score the People World Cup 2026 $1 coin today. Look forward in your change. You know, and that, this idea that, you know, your clothing is going to affect you, like what you do in the, even in death in the physical world influences the next world is really an interesting early modern condition. Yeah, I also really enjoyed Marlene, disc hours, disc showers, article thinking outside the box, death and gender and women's autobiographical columns.
Morely because I learned about auto, like auto death poetry, which is not a genre I had ever heard before. But what are we seeing that these women are expecting from death? She presents the cases of three women from early modern England, not so well known poets, I don't know, sports, that they know they are going to die. One of them has been sentenced, so she's waiting for the execution on political religious ground.
The other two are just all un sick. So they fantasize on their death and is like writing your own eulogy. And of course they consider they are believer of religious, believe this is pretty much impossible to find an unbeliever in their non-material. What they do is they take advantage of this point to write about how they envision their current life, their legacy and what they make up to them.
And Marlene, the driver, what she does is she claims that because it's completely unknown this area, what happens to you as a dead person, I mean there's the religious frame, but the detail is missing. They take advantage of that unknown space to avoid the patriarchal discourse and they present themselves as independent subjects that they are functioning life, they've reinterpreted according to the self-conception of why they were meaningful and why they are not subject to the patriarchal order. So it's basically a feminist reading from death, that being the great equalizer, as they call it in this case, even before death, of giving you that opportunity to self-fashion yourself for eternity. Okay, so this first section is a, it addresses ways people deal with their own deaths.
And so overall what are we learning from this section? Well, the other thing from this section is that death is constructed in the meaning that you prepare for it because it's a very important aspect of your, of next step going into the next level. And what regarding from the point of view of gender, there is a contradictory position on the one side. Many people consider that you're going to a better world in which gender does not exist.
Or on the other hand, if you want to be memorialized, it's very difficult to be memorialized without the virtues that correspond to you and those virtues are sort of a strong gender. So there is a tension between first, I'm going to become an entity, sublimated in which gender does not have a function. The difference is that you can, how can you have an identity because the new life is not beginning from zero, you're from your private life, your previous private life. So you have to have some leftover from gender.
At the same time, it's an opportunity to leave behind aspects of your gender life that you don't like, as those women who seem to be dressed like monks and people who want to be remembered on a specific part that are not necessarily to their functions of mothers or fathers or other gender roles. So death does not eliminate gender completely, basically because identity without gender cannot be considered no matter how much paradise is ambiguous regarding what you do there with your body and with your body is like. And then the second section uses sources that discuss other people's deaths, right? Yeah, the second section is basically how do we deal with dead bodies, the body's got the real human remains.
And here is quite clearly how we construct them into something, how do and what exactly will role of those remains play in other people's life as relics or sometimes as memories. Or how we honor them, how we respect their, what they left as instructions, how they want to be buried. And once again, do they, they are born, do they have gender in their treatment or do they become undistinguishable dead matter and then the risk of becoming objects. Okay.
Let's talk about the first article in this section. Good, that's that that's that bad narrative gender and politics in the quadrojianc of Lawrence. Yeah, this is a historic, very historian point of view, but analyzing text that the death of Lawrence, oh, in many of you go, he died. He died from disease, he was sick, dying bed, but then all within the political struggle of the time, his death was used by the pro-medicie people as an example of virtuous death.
And there is in the period, there is a lot of literature on the good and the bad there. And next to the basic, this generic salvation doctrine of accepting God, accepting Jesus, repenting. There is also probably an older layer of heroic idea for males. And that's very, very gender men have to die like stoic heroes.
So the pro-medicie people, what they did is they constructed a narrative that we don't have to which point the true most likely exaggerated in which he dies like a perfect score or humanist, a politician and a family, head of family, surrounded only by men, that's when women are next door crying. So it's an example of how the moment of death, independently of how it was, is the path to our legacy in these cases that becomes a political weapon. And especially in his case, the Lawrence L'Omerges, his doctor who was accused of having poisoned him, is not clear he was killed by the meditians, or he committed suicide. But in this literature, he's presented as the opposite, it's committing suicide, anti-heroic death.
So they presented this doctor throwing himself into a well and committing suicide out of desperation. So there is this group of heroic narratives of making of death the moment of truth or the moment of confirming our whole life and the importance of this powerful process of a sanctification, not in his case, he was in the religious paradigm, but making of a hero, the death of the hero, which has goes back to Socrates and the death of the wise man. So that's what this article is, and I put in context the descriptions of the death of Lawrence or the manifical at the moment within the many rivalries and internal wars. Now I'd like to talk about your article, the gender relics and one mental glory.
My interest in relics goes back to a book I wrote on dissection in the 16th century, and what was done with the tissues and the body part and there was an important culture of dissection called this book. At that point I corrected it with anxiety and privacy of being looked into, but here what interests me is that once you die or the holy person dies, you become an object for religious usage, because they believe that body parts of family people, of course, are not to heaven when the person is to be treated or refresh. So being close to one of those and like Charlie helps you, you a salvation, you know, you'll be taken somehow with it. And was also a way of being in contact with the heavens, it's like windows into heaven.
So there was a strong culture of keeping body parts in the Catholic world, not in the Protestant world, but in the Catholic world, rulers famously makes fan of Catholics have it of keeping with the cult disgusting pieces or sometimes false relics because they don't belong to human but to animals, the bones. So the relics culture of the Middle Ages is what interests me is the, in this case with a center on what's on the gender aspect of the relics as in the fight against the Protestant. And how they could be used, especially in an important case of production of relics that was around the mid 1500s, the Roman catacombs that had been missing, they've been forgotten basically when we discover accidentally so the Pope found themselves in the property of thousands and thousands of corpses According to the period, they thought, ironically, we know today that they were all of the martyrs, Christian martyrs who because the masses were dying in secret in the catacombs, which nowadays is not believed in a theory. So for all matter on purpose, anybody who was a mechanic on date thought that it was a very just a proto Christian person and when they found capsule with blood or perfume, they thought that that meant that they were martyse because that was mentioned practice, but that was not the most case, it was just perfect.
So whatever they were, they had the Pope's out of their disposal of this body, and they're using expressions, especially for the ruling houses of Europe, and for instance, with Spain, they were sending them relics, it could send even complete bodies. And because those bodies identity was clear, who they were, the signs of the inscriptions were gone, so what they did is they're called back to his relics, so the Pope's decided, okay, this is the name says Mary, this is the same Mary Magdalene, and they send it. So what they did is, for instance, to Spain, they're their foot order, which is an important company, but they're standing with the nuns, where all the female relatives of the family, so they came from a polar court, very powerful women, and the Pope, the good books, sending relics, which he considered was appropriate for them, and so he sent relics of proto female martyrs in their fight against the Roman emperor, because they compared these women in their fight against the Lutheran monarch as they equivalent. So the kind of relics they send were saying this Roman martyr, but they made it, they coined it as they needed it, they just went there and brought a female skeleton, not even clear those days they couldn't distinguish, it's making male and female.
And the other case I analyze, which is also curious, is the case of how religious orders in Germany that in Bavira, that they had lost most of their relics because of the protest and invasion had destroyed him, so they requested relics from Rome and the Pope was sending all these skeletons, and very often because they didn't know the identity, they gave the, of the very person they assumed they were martyched, they gave them the names they baptized him with a virtue's name, Saint Felicida, Saint Beitian, Saint Guev, and then those allegories, because they were allegory, and they had a female saints very often, and shown in Bavira in them, and many of them ended up in the hands of religious orders with nuns, and there is the famous Beitule relics, which are the whole skeleton that those nuns completely dressed up like dolls, but with two, they're very, very shocking to see, because they look like Andres from one of you, and even if the name was Santa, named Santa Fortuna, Santa Fides, they were dressed like Roman warriors because they were in a very militant mentality, in other cases probably the skeletons were made from separate bodies, from separate parts, so they were completely constructed and gender was used as needy, and even they produced these, or Andres, it's, I would call them, it's interesting if you go to Germany, of course the churches don't have filambaras by them, but they haven't, and some of them are very turned into statues, and the Saint of them, for instance, they are famous, Saint Ignatus, Ignatus is Latin for unknown, and it's a count of Saint Ignatus and how he's not addressed in Bavira, it depends on their name, the name, it's not only a Saint Ignatus, so it's the absolute interference of modern interests, of current interests at the moment, with the gender identity, of the alleged gender identity of the remains. Alright, I've taken up enough of your time, I think quite a bit of your time, so let's just have one more question, one of the big ones, what's our takeaway here, what will we know after we read this? I think that the, for the first one is that human, human dead bodies remains are, become objects, and it's special objects, they are not, you know, they are a lot of legislation in today, but they can be accommodated to many agendas, something that once you wrote, the same, the person wrote before they die, okay I want this to be that, that way, so they have meaning, because they are human remains, and another aspect is that they are partially gender, because they belong to a gender person, so, but as objects they are not gender, so there is a problem with, are they going to be gender, or are they going to become neutral objects, which would match that supposed body, heavily body, that we are going to have, becomes a very cultural practice, what to do with that. Also, the idea that there's an impossibility of seeing reincarnation or survival of the soul as engender, there's a contradiction between the soul which is supposed to be not gender, by definition, this heavenly body is sometimes called the glorious body, but the word body is always there, is it going to be a male or female, in theory none of it doesn't matter, none of it does not matter, but when I try to envision my future identity, because I'm so invested in gender, I have problems of seeing myself as a non-gender entity, and people have problems celebrating the death, disease person as an engender entity, so the collision between death and gender brings up those, so, plenty of those blind spots in the conception of post-mortem life, and if the category of gender goes beyond death, if it is possible, and also that the idea of death has the culture of death has become so impoverished nowadays, that these subjects are nowadays we don't even want to touch, as being medicalized and clean to the point to become a starials, how different the concept was, while the concept of gender that was relatively straightforward at the early modern period was considered a hard category, gendery, and sex, now has become a very complex, fragmented, or even dissolving category, those could be the some of the main ideas we can take from there, and the other one is how we can take different approaches, some textual, some purely historical, and in which the bodily remains behave like texts in many aspects, surrounding sometimes by literal texts that describe or tell you how to deal with anything in the future, so that would be some of the conclusions.
Yeah, okay, that's wonderful, and I think it's a good place to close out our conversation, and Rika, thank you so much for joining me today, it's an absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.