Séminaire Le Cadavre en Représentation

Cadavres des temps antépétroviens. Religion et médecine

• Enrique Santos Marinas (Professeur à l’Université Complutense de Madrid) 

The corporeity of the dead in the Slavic pre-Christian religion of the East Slavs

Already Wienecke (1939) coined the expression lebenden Leichnam « living bodies » in order to refer to the concept of the dead among the East Slavs. Actually, for them the soul of the deceased had a material or physical entity, even corporeal, keeping all their physiological needs and their relationship with the living. This had a correspondence with the funerary rites as attested both in the earliest medieval sources and in the oral tradition of the folklore. Therefore, the soul survival did not take place in the Afterlife, but in this very world. And as a consequence all the dead were in fact des revenants. However, their return had to follow certain rules in order that it was positive for the living, being arranged according to specific rites and performed in particular places and dates. Otherwise, the deceased could be harmful for the living, as well as for the cattle and the crops. In this paper we will analyse the specific characteristics both physical and corporeal that were shown by the dead in the earliest historiographic and homiletic medieval sources regarding the East Slavs, as well as in the oral tradition of the Slavic folklore.

• Angelina Kalashnikova (Chercheuse junior à l’Institut d’histoire de l’Académie des Sciences de Russie, Saint-Pétersbourg)

Description of corpses in double-murder case in Yakutia in the 1630s

The presentation focuses on the examination of corpses of Yakut interpretor Oska Stefanov and his five-year-old son that were discovered near Lensky fort, founded at the beginning of the exploration of Yakutia by Russian servicemen in the 1630s. Description of the corpses is
examined in context of criminal investigation procedure that took place at the moment when the administration had very limited power. Indeed, at that time subordination and management strategies in the region were so unstable and complicated that Lensky fort administration frequently faced with difficulties concerning its main responsibilities (tax collecting and conflict settlement).

• Kirill Khudin (Chercheur junior à l’Institut d’histoire universelle de l’Académie des Sciences de Russie, Moscou)

Medical examinations of corpses in Russia in the 17th and early 18th centuries

The transformations under Peter the Great at the beginning of the 18th century and the interest in anatomy that followed made the practice of dissecting human bodies quite widespread. However, procedures of medical inspection and examination of corpses existed earlier, in the 17th century, although they were not as widespread. The need for such procedures arose primarily in times of epidemic and was related to the need to establish the causes of death and to make sure that the person did not pose a danger to others who came into contact with him. Our presentation will review the cases of cadaveric medical examinations and analyze the context of each of them.

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Programme CadavRe 21-22