Post-mortem Preservation Techniques Applied to the Members of Medieval Hispanic Royalty (SP)

Abstract

In this paper we try to show the kind of post-mortem preservation techniques that may have been applied to the members of the medieval Spanish royalty from the end of the thirteenth to the middle of the sixteenth century. For this, we have availed ourselves in particular of the information given by the historiographical witnesses and by some medical texts. From the information that has reached us, we can infer that the practice of embalming corpses was not generalized in the Iberian Peninsula during the high and late Middle Ages and did not, therefore, properly belong to the funeral ritual of the royalty.