Mestre Vicent ho diu per spantar. El més enllà medieval

Abstract

This work is something like a topographical guide, a vision over the Middle Age imaginary about the afterlife, the deads land and supernatural bound. His existence isnt imaginary, and any attempt of global explanation about Middle Age societies must include subjectivities, or then the historical agents behaviour becomes incomprehensible. The method has been to get together, organize and compare materials from different times (between XIIth and XVIth centuries), places (Occidental Europe and above all, Catalonia), and communication channels. Precisely, the sens of my investigation lays in his interdisciplinarity, treating iconograph, texts and historical interpretations from an antropological or cultural perspective. And the main difficulty has been these different languages and visions articulation, the stablishment of a methodological crossing. In first place we emphasize antropomorfization and anacronism, consubstantials in Middle Ages thinking; the afterlife societies are ahistorically conceived according the earth models. We meet here, then, different simetries, in a mirrors game: heaven, sublimed version of feudal society; hell and purgatory, reflections of punishment systems on earth; hell like a negative of heaven, and still a double simetry, in the four lower spaces, qualitative (two different penalties) and quantitative (different terms: transitory or eternal). With a clear concept like physical, real spaces, in a jerarquized geography; they are transparent, with visual and acoustic communication; and they tend to functionnel specialization: social pleasure and contemplation of God, waiting, purifying torments, perpetual vacant and eternal punishment. Open places; Crist run over all of them one by one; angels and devils have some limits for their moving. The souls, immaterial, are very travellers: when die, they go up from earth to heavens doors, where they are judged. If they cannot enter, they fall temporary or for ever in one of the four hells floors. But Middle Ages border between alives and deads worlds, or between real and supernatural is elastic, and both are in communication by real or virtual appearances, or by the travel to the deads land, real or only spiritual. Middle Ages arribes to the literary banalisation of wonder travel; the unavoidable models are the Aeneis, the Saint Patricks purgatory and the Divina Commedia.