The coordination of the COMMEMORtis project was recently informed that Professor Clive Burgess passed away suddenly last week at his home in St Andrews. This totally unexpected news has filled us with sadness and dismay, and it is with this feeling that we write this brief note of regret.
Professor Clive Burgess dedicated a large part of his career to the religious history of England before the Reformation and wrote remarkable works on the experience of death, the founding of chantries and the construction of the pastoral for the dead in cities such as London and Bristol, in the last centuries of the Middle Ages. We consider his work to be a must for anyone wishing to study death, popular piety, secular religiosity and the investment of wealth in perpetuating memory.
As we have already mentioned on this blog (when we published the review), his latest book The right ordering of souls: the parish of All Saints' Bristol on the eve of the Reformation [Woodbridge UK and Rochester, NY (USA): Boydell Press, 2018] was a very important inspiration for the construction of the COMMEMORtis exploratory project, for which Professor Burgess agreed to be one of the scientific advisors from the outset.
Between 10 and 12 July, Clive Burgess was with us in Coimbra, where he took part in our International Conference and showed us great generosity and kindness. He left us very positive and altruistic comments about the project, which filled us with hope for the future. That's the memory we'll keep of him, just as we'll never forget the enormous privilege of the months of work we were able to share with him.
This August, quite unexpectedly, the COMMEMORtis team suffered a tough loss, undoubtedly poorer and really thinking about "What survives after death?".
(c) GCI/FLUC