Among the most basic challenges of human existence is how to care for the departed. Forms of solicitude for the dead can be usefully divided between deathbed and funerary rituals performed shortly before and after physical death, including burial, and memorial practices meant to ensure the survival and nourishment of the deceased in the afterlife, encompassing concreted efforts to ameliorate the fate of the soul. Though focused respectively on the moment of death and the period afterward, both areas might also include actions taken while the deceased was still alive. In the former case these included practices associated with the ars moriendi, which in Christian traditions included confession and the anointing of the sick, or in the latter case masses celebrated for the living. Funerary practices might include the preparation of the body for burial, ritualized feasting or fasting and the burial itself. The circumstances of inhumation – close to or distant from human settlement, with or without a variety of grave goods, etc. – varied enormously between cultures.
With these (inter-)cultural considerations in mind, the planned workshop will focus on care for the dead in the pre-modern Eastern Christian context, including both the Eastern Roman Empire and then Byzantium as well as the Islamicate and Slavic worlds. We want to explore different forms of caring and commemorative practice that go beyond the care for the dead body. The aim is to identify cultural, religious and mentalité similarities, but also differences.
“40,000 Years of Human Challenges: Perception, Conceptualization and Coping in Premodern Societies”
The Research Area offers a holistic research framework that brings together multiple disciplines to explore human challenges and functions as a platform for the development of larger inter- and transdisciplinary research that is fundamental for a better understanding of current and future challenges and the development of their potential solutions. It will thereby substantially contribute to contemporary discourses on the general topic in the humanities, the social and life sciences, politics and the broader public with the integration of new, long-term and hitherto neglected data from the last 40,000 years. The longterm aim of the Research Area is the sustainable institutionalization of this platform that will enhance the scientific profile of the JGU, Mainz and the RMU area as a research hub for transdisciplinary research in that field.
