From Madrid to Purgatory

This book reveals the workings of a culture that cherished death and invested its resources in the pursuit of heaven. This is the first full-length study of Spanish attitudes toward death and the afterlife in the peak years of the Counter-Reformation. It contains an analysis of the death rituals requested in hundreds of sixteenth-century Madrid testaments as well as a detailed account of the ways in which the good deaths of King Philip II and Saint Teresa of Avila were interpreted by contemporaries.