| dc.description.abstract | Without the need to consider the already familiar details of the dying and death of Charles V, the state of his consciousness has been analysed in a broad context of religious and ideological attitudes and practices, taking also into account of the complex relations of Hispanic Catholicism and its variations, Erasmianism and Protestantism. Charles V envisaged and conceptualized his dying, death, and afterlife in an individualizing process of change and reconsideration, influenced both by Erasmianism and Protestantism, as well as by the logic of contemporary tendencies, and in connection with struggles to do with the personalization of increasingly centralized absolutist political power and state authority. His attitude toward life and death emerged from various elements: traditional Christianity, Erasmian humanism, a Hispanic pride and sense of honour, civic responsibility, and tidiness — and even an almost Protestant modesty. Although he came to power by chance, after a series of deaths delivered sovereignty and a basis for future rule to him, Charles V remained obsessed by death just like any contemporary. Though a defender of Roman Catholicism, he understood life and death more in accordance with the Erasmian attitudes of his immediate intellectual environment, which was otherwise predominantly Protestant in character. Such were the preparations for his final departure, that the last act of his final moments allegedly took place in a carefully thought-out devotional ritual. | sr |
