22. Who Am I When I Am Dead?

15 October 2019, 3:00pm - 4:00pm

We spend the afternoon in late-medieval France, where cultural representations of the dead proliferated, functioning not only as memento mori to encourage moral living but also as imaginative experiments posing questions about what constitutes human identity and who defines a person when they die. Helen Swift, author of the acclaimed book Representing the Dead, considers the relationship between body, voice, and text in the composition of posthumous reputation, tracing in particular two mythical figures born in fifteenth-century literature, the Belle Dame sans Merci and François Villon.