Death, Renaissance Conception of

Abstract

With the advent of the Reformation, Protestantism did not so much as abolish the Catholic death arts as revise and add to them. The Renaissance’s every day awareness of and meditation upon mortality, epitomized by the phrase memento mori, would face slow yet steady erosion from humanism’s revival of classical thought. Humanist thinkers and natural philosophers began to question prevailing religious verities and practices by engaging with Platonist, Aristotelian, Stoical, and Epicurean topoi on death, chief among which was the status of the soul’s immortality. As humanism gave way to scientific inquiry, the growing materialism and empiricism of the seventeenth century performed the spadework for the next century’s endorsement of the individual’s total annihilation, notoriously promulgated by the French philosophes. Occupying a liminal position between medieval religion and the Enlightenment, the Renaissance’s heterogeneously complex attitude toward the death arts has sparked ongoing debate on its legacy. Did the Renaissance lead to the enrichment or impoverishment of our contemporary conception of death?