Una fuente archivística inusitada por la historia de la muerte en la Edad Moderna: los recibos de las limosnas

Abstract

For studying the History of death in the XVIIIth century, usually are used the testaments to look for the final wishes for the burial, funeral and other expenses. This is the main historical source to describe funerals and consequently, to measure the religiosity. Looking at that source, it seems that after the Baroque Era the funeral pomp descent. In this paper we find another source, quite rare but frequent: the vouchers of the funeral. Actually they showed what in fact was wasted for the funeral. They reveal that, if the social norm was trying to call for the austerity, many people continued having big pumps at the funeral, and wasting lots of money in material and spiritual services of the church, much more than were recorded by testaments.