Image and the Office of the Dead in Late Medieval Europe: Regular, Repellant, and Redemptive Death 9463722114, 9789463722117

Table of contents :
Cover
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. The Office of the Dead in Christian Liturgy
The Office of the Dead in Devotional Books
2. Regular Death: Reading the Funeral and Imaginative Practice
Seeing into the Office: Imagining
Reader as Body
Hearing Community: Image and Liturgy
3. Repellent Death: Time, Rot, and the Death of the Body
Death-Tide: Time and Decay of the Body
‘Nothing more base and abominable’: The Corpse
Disruption: The Lively Corpse
Dry Bones: Death in Life
4. The Redemptive Death: Job, Lazarus, and Death Undone
Living Death: Job as the Social Body
The Undead: Lazarus and the Promise of Resurrection
Conclusions
Bibliography
Index of Manuscripts
General Index
List of Illustrations
Fig. 1-1. Royal MS 2 A XVIII ‘The Beauchamp Hours’, Hours, England (London), c. 1430, fol. 34. London: British Library. © The British Library Board.
Fig. 2-1. Detail, Egerton MS 1151, Hours, England (Oxford), 1260–70, fol. 118. London: British Library. © The British Library Board.
Fig. 2-2. Detail, Egerton MS 3277 ‘Bohun Psalter-Hours’, Psalter/Hours, England, c. 1361–73, fol. 142. London: British Library. © The British Library Board.
Fig. 2-3. Detail, Additional MS 50001 ‘The Hours of Elizabeth the Queen’, Hours, England (London), c. 1425, fol. 55v. London: British Library. © The British Library Board.
Fig. 2-4. MS 39, Hours, England, c. 1420–40, fol. 70. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Library, Heritage Collections. © The University of Edinburgh. CC-BY licence.
Fig. 2-5. MS Richardson 34, Hours, England, c. 1470, fol. 88v. Cambridge, MA: Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Fig. 3-1. MS BP.96, Hours, France (Paris), 1475–1500, fol. 133. New York: Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries.
Fig. 3-2. MS M.453, Hours, French, c. 1425–30, fol. 133v. New York: The Morgan Library and Museum. Purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) in 1911. Photographic credit: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.
Fig. 3-3. Sloane MS 2468, Hours, France (Paris), c. 1420, fol. 163. London: British Library. © The British Library Board.
Fig. 3-4. Harley MS 2934, Hours, France (Troyes), c. 1410, fol. 106. London: British Library. © The British Library Board.
Fig. 3-5. MS 507, Hours, France (Paris), c. 1500, fol. 113. Paris: Bibliothèque Mazarine.
Fig. 3-6. Yates Thompson MS 7, ‘The Hours of Dionora of Urbino’, Hours, Italy (Florence or Mantua), c. 1480, historiated initials added c. 1510–15, fol. 174. London: British Library. © The British Library Board.
Fig. 3-7. Additional MS 25695, Hours, France, late 15th century, fol. 165. London: British Library. © The British Library Board.
Fig. 3-8. MS Lewis E 92, Hours, France (Paris?), 1440–60, fol. 90v. Philadelphia: Rare Book Department, Free Library of Philadelphia. Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia, Rare Book Department.
Fig. 3-9. MS Lewis E 212, Hours, France, c. 1475–1500, fol. 151r. Philadelphia: Rare Book Department, Free Library of Philadelphia. Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia, Rare Book Department
Fig. 3-10. Yates Thompson MS 13 ‘The Taymouth Hours’, Hours, England, c. 1325–40, fols. 179v–180. London: British Library. © The British Library Board.
Fig. 3-11. MS Lewis E 108, Hours, Flanders (Bruges), 1485–1500, fols. 109v–110, Belgium, Bruges, 1485–1500. Philadelphia: Rare Book Department, Free Library of Philadelphia. Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia, Rare Book Department.
Fig. 3-12. MS Typ 180, Hours (frag.), Italy (Venice), early 15th century, fol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Fig. 3-13. MS Q Med. 88, Hours, Flanders, late 15th century, fol. 110. Boston: Boston Public Library.
Fig. 4-1, 2. MS Auct D. 4.4. ‘The Bohun Psalter and Hours’, Psalter/Hours, England, c. 1370–80, fols. 244, 248v. Oxford: Bodleian Library. CC-BY-NC 4.0 licence.
Fig. 4-3a–c. Detail, Egerton MS 2019, Hours, France (Paris), c. 1440–50, fols. 167v, 175, 176. London: British Library. © The British Library Board.
Fig. 4-4. MS Buchanan E. 3, Hours, France (Rouen), late 15th century, fol. 55. Oxford: Bodleian Library. CC-BY-NC 4.0 licence.
Fig. 4-5. Detail, MS KB 71 A 23, Bible, France (Paris), c. 1320–40, fol. 203v. The Hague: Nationale bibliotheek van Nederland.
Fig. 4-6. MS Auct D. 4.4. ‘The Bohun Psalter and Hours’, Psalter/Hours, England, c. 1370–80, fol. 243v. Oxford: Bodleian Library. CC-BY-NC 4.0 licence.
Fig. 4-7. Additional MS 35314, Hours, Netherlands, late 15th/early 16th century, fol. 53v. London: British Library. © The British Library Board.
Fig. 4-8. Detail, MS M. 179, Hours, France, 1480–1500, fol. 132v. New York: The Morgan Library and Museum. Purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913). Photographic credit: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.
Fig. 4-9. MS M. 1003, Hours, France, c. 1465, fol. 153v. New York: The Morgan Library and Museum. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Landon K. Thorne, Jr., 1979. Photographic credit: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.
Fig. 4-10. MS 21, ‘The Castle Hours’, Hours, France, late 15th century, fol. 69v. Bryn Mawr: Bryn Mawr Special Collections Library.
Fig. 4-11. MS M.1001, Hours, France, c. 1475, fol. 114. New York, The Morgan Library and Museum. Purchased on the Fellows Fund, 1979. Photographic credit: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

Citation preview

V I S U A L A N D M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E , 13 0 0 -17 0 0

Sarah Schell

Image and the Office of the Dead in Late Medieval Europe Regular, Repellant, and Redemptive Death

Image and the Office of the Dead in Late Medieval Europe

Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700 A forum for innovative research on the role of images and objects in the late medieval and early modern periods, Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700 publishes monographs and essay collections that combine rigorous investigation with critical inquiry to present new narratives on a wide range of topics, from traditional arts to seemingly ordinary things. Recognizing the fluidity of images, objects, and ideas, this series fosters cross-cultural as well as multi-disciplinary exploration. We consider proposals from across the spectrum of analytic approaches and methodologies. Series Editor Allison Levy is Digital Scholarship Editor at Brown University. She has authored or edited five books on early modern Italian visual and material culture.

Image and the Office of the Dead in Late Medieval Europe Regular, Repellent, and Redemptive Death

Sarah Schell

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: MS 39, Hours, England, c. 1420-1440, f. 70. Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh Library, Heritage Collections. © University of Edinburgh, CC-BY license. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 211 7 e-isbn 978 90 4854 423 3 doi 10.5117/9789463722117 nur 685 © S. Schell / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2023 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

For J. ‘con la forza di mille soli’



Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

9

Introduction 13 1. The Office of the Dead in Christian Liturgy The Office of the Dead in Devotional Books

31 44

2. Regular Death: Reading the Funeral and Imaginative Practice Seeing into the Office: Imagining Reader as Body Hearing Community: Image and Liturgy

57 59 78 83

3. Repellent Death: Time, Rot, and the Death of the Body Death-Tide: Time and Decay of the Body ‘Nothing more base and abominable’: The Corpse Disruption: The Lively Corpse Dry Bones: Death in Life

97 100 107 130 141

4. The Redemptive Death: Job, Lazarus, and Death Undone Living Death: Job as the Social Body The Undead: Lazarus and the Promise of Resurrection

157 158 178

Conclusions 205 Bibliography 211 Index of Manuscripts

231

General Index

233

Fig. 1-1 Fig. 2-1 Fig. 2-2 Fig. 2-3 Fig. 2-4 Fig. 2-5 Fig. 3-1 Fig. 3-2

Fig. 3-3 Fig. 3-4 Fig. 3-5 Fig. 3-6

Fig. 3-7

List of Illustrations Royal MS 2 A XVIII ‘The Beauchamp Hours’, Hours, England (London), c. 1430, fol. 34. London: British Library. © The British Library Board. Egerton MS 1151, Hours, England (Oxford), 1260–70, fol. 118. London: British Library. © The British Library Board. Egerton MS 3277 ‘Bohun Psalter-Hours’, Psalter/Hours, England, c. 1361–73, fol. 142. London: British Library. © The British Library Board. Additional MS 50001 ‘The Hours of Elizabeth the Queen’, Hours, England (London), c. 1425, fol. 55v. London: British Library. © The British Library Board. MS 39, Hours, England, c. 1420–40, fol. 70. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Library, Heritage Collections. © The University of Edinburgh. CC-BY licence. MS Richardson 34, Hours, England, c. 1470, fol. 88v. Cambridge, MA: Houghton Library, Harvard University. MS BP.96, Hours, France (Paris), 1475–1500, fol. 133. New York: Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries. MS M.453, Hours, French, c. 1425–30, fol. 133v. New York: The Morgan Library and Museum. Purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) in 1911. Photographic credit: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York. Sloane MS 2468 ‘The Hours of the Umfray Family’, Hours, France (Paris), c. 1420, fol. 163. London: British Library. © The British Library Board. Harley MS 2934, Hours, France (Troyes), c. 1410, fol. 106. London: British Library. © The British Library Board. MS 507, Hours, France (Paris), c. 1500, fol. 113. Paris: Bibliothèque Mazarine. Yates Thompson MS 7, ‘The Hours of Dionora of Urbino’, Hours, Italy (Florence or Mantua), c. 1480, historiated initials added c. 1510–15, fol. 174. London: British Library. © The British Library Board. Additional MS 25695, Hours, France, late 15th century, fol. 165. London: British Library. © The British Library Board.

49 65 74 75 79 87 102

105 111 114 120

123 125

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Image and the Office of the Dead in L ate Medieval Europe

Fig. 3-8

MS Lewis E 92, Hours, France (Paris?), 1440–60, fol. 90v. Philadelphia: Rare Book Department, Free Library of Philadelphia. Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia, Rare Book Department. Fig. 3-9 MS Lewis E 212, Hours, France, c. 1475–1500, fol. 151r. Philadelphia: Rare Book Department, Free Library of Philadelphia. Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia, Rare Book Department. Fig. 3-10 Yates Thompson MS 13 ‘The Taymouth Hours’, Hours, England, c. 1325–40, fols. 179v–180. London: British Library. © The British Library Board. Fig. 3-11 MS Lewis E 108, Hours, Flanders (Bruges), 1485–1500, fols. 109v–110, Belgium, Bruges, 1485–1500. Philadelphia: Rare Book Department, Free Library of Philadelphia. Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia, Rare Book Department. Fig. 3-12 MS Typ 180, Hours (frag.), Italy (Venice), early 15th century, fol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Houghton Library, Harvard University. Fig. 3-13 MS Q Med. 88, Hours, Flanders, late 15th century, fol. 110. Boston: Boston Public Library. Fig. 4-1, 2 MS Auct D. 4.4. ‘The Bohun Psalter and Hours’, Psalter/ Hours, England, c. 1370–80, fols. 244, 248v. Oxford: Bodleian Library. CC-BY-NC 4.0 licence. Fig. 4-3a–c Egerton MS 2019, Hours, France (Paris), c. 1440–50, fols. 167v, 175, 176. London: British Library. © The British Library Board. Fig. 4-4 MS Buchanan E. 3, Hours, France (Rouen), late 15th century, fol. 55. Oxford: Bodleian Library. CC-BY-NC 4.0 licence. Fig. 4-5 MS KB 71 A 23, Bible, France (Paris), c. 1320–40, fol. 203v. The Hague: Nationale bibliotheek van Nederland. Fig. 4-6 MS Auct D. 4.4. ‘The Bohun Psalter and Hours’, Psalter/ Hours, England, c. 1370–80, fol. 243v. Oxford: Bodleian Library. CC-BY-NC 4.0 licence. Fig. 4-7 Additional MS 35314, Hours, Netherlands, late 15th/early 16th century , fol. 53v. London: British Library. © The British Library Board. Fig. 4-8 MS M. 179, Hours, France, 1480–1500, fol. 132v. New York: The Morgan Library and Museum. Purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913). Photographic credit: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York. Fig. 4-9 MS M. 1003, Hours, France, c. 1465, fol. 153v. New York: The Morgan Library and Museum. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Landon

127

132 134

142 145 147 164 168 172 176 179 184

186

11

List of Illustr ations 

Fig. 4-10 Fig. 4-11

K. Thorne, Jr., 1979. Photographic credit: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York. MS 21, ‘The Castle Hours’, Hours, France, late 15th century, fol. 69v. Bryn Mawr: Bryn Mawr Special Collections Library. MS M.1001, Hours, France, c. 1475, fol. 114. New York: The Morgan Library and Museum. Purchased on the Fellows Fund, 1979. Photographic credit: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

191 194

197

Introduction Abstract: This book examines images at the Office of the Dead in Books of Hours. It approaches the topic through three conceptualizations of death which dominate the imagery of the Office: social death, bodily death, and non-death. The social engaged the reader in contemplation of death’s connotations for and in the community. Bodily death considers images responding to the physical consequences of death, such as dissolution and identity loss, as well as engaging with the rhetorical power of the visible corpse. Images of non-death provided visual evidence of the Christian promise of redemption through death and the reunification of body and soul. These images are contributors to, as well as reflections of, the socially and culturally constructed idea of medieval death. Keywords: medieval, ritual, church, experience of death, imagination

When thy face pales and thy strength decays and thy nose become cold and thy breath falters and thy breath fails, and thy life goes away; then shall they stretch thee on the floor and place thee on a bier and sew thee up in a clout, and put thee in a pit along with the wormes.1

So go the ‘signs’ of death in a thirteenth-century miscellany describing the faltering body – going, going, gone. It is at once practical and mysterious. What does it mean 1 A Middle English ‘Song of Death’. MS 29, Miscellany, English, 13th century, fol. 189r. Oxford: Jesus College. Richard Morris, ed. An Old English Miscellany Containing a Bestiary, Kentish Sermons, Proverbs of Alfred, Religious Poems of the Thirteenth Century, from Manuscripts in the British Museum, Bodleian Library, Jesus College Library etc., Early English Text Society Original Series 49 (London: Trübner & Co., 1872), 101.

Schell, S., Image and the Office of the Dead in Late Medieval Europe: Regular, Repellent, and Redemptive Death. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463722117_intro

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Image and the Office of the Dead in L ate Medieval Europe

when ‘thy life goes away’? Even now, with all the scientific and medical developments of the last six hundred years, we do not really know. There are ongoing medical and philosophical debates about ‘heart death’ versus ‘brain death’; we struggle to deal with situations in which a person is physically missing but not verifiably dead, or with those who are mentally gone but physically alive. We say of those who are socially shunned that they are ‘dead’ to us and speak of our beloved dead as present or ‘alive’ through us. Death and deadness (and life and aliveness) connote many things. Not only are these inseparable ideas (you cannot be dead if you are not first alive), we also use them remarkably flexibly considering the purported absolute nature of the distinction between death and life. In the twenty-first century, death is habitually understood as a moment of personal annihilation. In the Catholic world of the medieval period, death marked a change, but not an end, to an individual existence. It is, of course, more than either of these: it is a condition of life, a terminal event, a perceived threat, and a beginning, among other things. ‘Death’ can thus be inflected with different meaning depending on the circumstance of its use. The thirteenth-century poem above describes a body in the moments before and after the death of the body, and this is its most common association. But it is only one part of what death can mean. What did it mean to medieval people? The famously plentiful and diverse imagery of death produced in this period indicates not only that it was a question people deliberated through images but also that they did so in a range of ways, considering (and imaging) different aspects of death at different times and places. This book arose out of a curiosity about the dense weave of overlapping ideas that make up this familiar and essentially human concept during the late medieval period and represents an effort to untangle some of these threads by examining one space for the visual manifestation of medieval death culture, the Office of the Dead in Books of Hours. It approaches the topic through three different conceptualizations of death which dominate the imagery of the Office: social death, bodily death, and non-death. The articulation of these themes is not exclusive of other death concepts, nor are they exclusive of one another (images could and often do engage with more than one of these ideas). Rather, this articulation highlights the multifaceted conceptualization of death in the visual culture of the period, which is responding to the lived experience of proximity to death, to the anxieties surrounding the knowledge of one’s own death, and to the theological structures that framed the medieval experience of death in various ways. Death embraces within itself socially and religiously constructed ideas about what it should be, as well as the idiosyncrasies and peculiarities of each encounter with it. The Office of the Dead in a Book of Hours is a vibrant space in which to examine the intersection of these cultural definitions and personal experiences of death because of its own flexibility of form and use. It could be used with others

Introduc tion 

and alone, out loud and silently. It was present at the performance of the Office in church, and it accompanied its reader into the private spaces of the home. The text and images of the Office in the Book of Hours both physically and metaphorically travelled between cultural definition and individual experience. Between the two, the reader crafted an engagement with death that responded to both, and which could be flexibly amended as life (and death) unfolded around them. The medieval period has long been associated with death, themes of memento mori and the macabre, and has traditionally been situated in contrast to the supposedly ‘lively’ Renaissance. Johan Huizinga’s evocation of a morbid society stalked by the spectre of death has itself stalked the scholarship on medieval death for nearly a hundred years since the publication of The Waning of the Middles Ages.2 Recent scholarship has seen a surge of interest in areas ranging from the religious and liturgical framework that surrounded death and the social implications caused by mass or violent death to the day-to-day business of death and burial in medieval communities.3 The work of these scholars has attempted to divest medieval death of its association with the geist of a decaying age. Rather than approaching attitudes to death in broad epoch-defining sweeps as Huizinga and Philippe Ariès4 have done, this work grounds the discussion within localized cultural and religious spaces, examining individual agency and motivation vis-à-vis death within communities. It situates medieval death culture as a productive aspect of medieval civic and religious life, incorporated into and impacting areas such as corporate and individual identity, gender, and community support systems (such as charitable or civic foundations), among others. Amy Appleford’s reassessment of the ars moriendi tradition in the context of public life and governance in London, for example, recharacterizes this so-called ‘morbid’ genre as a generative force with positive implications for the regulation of public as well as private life in the late medieval city.5 This book 2 Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth Centuries (London: E. Arnold, 1927). 3 This literature is extensive. On the religious and liturgical framework, see Frederick S. Paxton, Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe (London: Cornell University Press, 1990); Knud Ottosen, The Responsories and Versicles of the Latin Office of the Dead (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1993). On ordinary death, see Steven Bassett, ed., Death in Towns: Urban Responses to the Dying and the Dead (London: Leicester University Press, 1992); Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall, The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Roberta Gilchrist and Barney Sloane, Requiem: The Medieval Monastic Cemetery in Britain (London: Museum of London Archaeology Service, 2005). 4 Philippe Ariès, Images of Man and Death, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981). 5 Amy Appleford, Learning to Die in London, 1380–1540 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

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likewise argues that reader engagement with death culture as expressed in Books of Hours was consistent with and encouraged positive social and religious outcomes for the individual and the community. At the same time, there has been much recent work on devotional lives in the late medieval period, and particularly on reading practices and lay engagement with devotional texts, many of which highlight the importance of imagination and of immersive reading.6 These works highlight methods used by devotional readers seeking to move themselves closer to divine truths, often via embodied experiences of imagined states. Such a method is particularly applicable to any effort to understand death. Not only did death in the medieval period have its part in those divine truths, but it is also, for the living, necessarily and thus essentially an imagined state. It is only in the imagination that the living can experience or prepare to experience death. Images, whether external or internal to the reader, played an important role in this process, as they prompt the viewer to see through them to the worlds they evoke. The power of sight to instigate somatically experienced spiritual states was a characteristic aspect of late medieval devotional reading, and one that was supported by texts and images that invoked and promoted it. Nicholas Love called readers to ‘see in the eye’ the events he described in text as though they were ‘bodily’ witness to the events of Christ’s passion. Aquinas was convinced that the path to understanding required the use of the senses, including ‘phantasms’ (imagination), in order to reflect on knowledge. Image and imagination were important tools providing the devout with methods they could use in pursuit of greater understanding of divine mysteries.7 As Michelle Karnes succinctly puts it, ‘the most important cognitive task assigned to medieval imagination was the discovery of truth.’8 This book applies the palpable and invitatory quality of 6 See Laurel Amtower, Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2000); Jennifer Bryan, Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and Reading the Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Laura Sterponi, ‘Reading and Meditation in the Middle Ages: Lectio Divina and Books of Hours’, Text & Talk: Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse Communication Studies 28, no. 5 (2008): 667–89; Sabrina Corbellini, ‘Creating Domestic Sacred Space: Religious Reading in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy’, in Domestic Devotions in Early Modern Italy, ed. Maya Corry, Marco Faini, and Alessia Meneghin (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 295–309; Heather Blatt, Participatory Reading in Late-Medieval England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018); Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 7 Michael Camille, ‘Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late Medieval Practices of Seeing’, in Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance, ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 212–13. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, trans. Kenelm Foster and Sylvester Humphries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951), Book 3, Chapter 8, Lectio 13, accessed April 1, 2023. https://isidore.co/aquinas/english/DeAnima.htm#313L. 8 Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages, 4.

Introduc tion 

imaginative medieval reading and seeing that was often evoked in devotional writing of the medieval period to the images of death examined here. Through embodied imagination, these images offered readers and viewers ways to engage with death that lay beyond the bounds of their earthly lives, as death ultimately lies beyond the bounds of all our lives. Complicating any effort to understand death is the fact that we die only once. We therefore confront our own impending death vicariously: our lived experience of death is mediated through the deaths of others and through images of death. This aspect of the visual culture of medieval death has been explored by Paul Binski, Ashby Kinch, and Michael Camille, among others, who all explicitly engage with the mediating role of death imagery in various contexts.9 This book builds on the work of these scholars, focusing on how this mediating function works in concert with the liturgical context of the Office of the Dead and within a prayerbook that bridges the physical and mental spaces between private and public devotion. Much of the scholarship on the visual culture of death has focused on the image of the dead body. Paul Binski’s Medieval Death considers death primarily through attitudes toward the corpse,10 and Kenneth Rooney does the same for the literary material in his examination of ‘physical dereliction and human transience’ via the language of the macabre – that is, of the decaying body.11 For Kinch, too, the ‘image of death’ is the image of the dead body.12 There is an abundance of literature on various manifestations of the macabre such as cadaver tombs, chantry chapels, tomb brasses, the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead, the Danse Macabre, the Ars moriendi, and others.13 The death of the body dominates because of the 9 Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (London: British Museum Press, 1996); Michael Camille, Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Remiet, Illuminator (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Ashby Kinch, Imago Mortis: Mediating Images of Death in Late Medieval Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 10 Binski also discusses the representation of the afterlife in the f inal chapter of the book. Binski, Medieval Death, 164–214. 11 Rooney broadly defines the macabre as literature that ‘didactically dissolves the body’ and includes material that pre- and post-dates the first appearance of the term in the fourteenth century. Kenneth Rooney, Mortality and Imagination: The Life of the Dead in Medieval English Literature, Disputatio (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 7. 12 Kinch, Imago Mortis, 4 13 This literature is extensive. See for example: Sally Badham and Malcolm Norris, Early Incised Slabs and Brasses from the London Marblers, Reports of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries of London (London: Society of Antiquaries of London, 1999); Kathleen Cohen, Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol: The Transi Tomb in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance (London: University of California Press, 1973); Howard Colvin, Architecture and the After-Life (London: Yale University Press, 1991); Mary Catherine O’Connor, The Art of Dying Well: The Development of the Ars Moriendi (New York: AMS Press, 1966); Elina Gertsman, ‘The Gap of Death: Passive Violence in the Encounter Between the Three Dead and the Three Living’, in Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Erin Felicia Labbie and Allie Terry-Fritsch (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 85–104; Elina Gertsman, ‘Visualising Death: Medieval Plagues

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wealth of material that represents, and makes physically present, that event within the visual environment, and because of the striking qualities of these images and the compelling body of literature describing and interrogating the corpse.14 The body is also present in images at the Office of the Dead, and indeed many of the best known and most often reproduced images from the Office are images of the corpse.15 The concentration on the body, undoubtedly an important aspect of death imagery, has privileged this way of thinking about death over others. The approach taken here addresses the powerful imagery of bodily decay as one aspect of death’s meaning, situating it in relationship to other ways of thinking about death, the social and the redemptive. The images of the Office of the Dead in Books of Hours will be familiar to those interested in medieval history. They often appear on book covers or are selected for the rare colour illustration in scholarly texts. They have been treated in passing in many historical studies of medieval death,16 and their rich contemporary detail has seen them used as illustrations or confirmations of historical practice in scholarly and non-scholarly works on social history. Thomas Boase, for example, uses them as illustrations, while Gilchrist and Sloane use the images to support the archeological findings of Requiem, but there is little discussion of the extent to which such images themselves can be considered ‘archeological’.17 In the epilogue and the Macabre’, in Piety and Plague : From Byzantium to the Baroque, ed. Franco Mormando and Thomas Worcester (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2007), 64–89; Dominique DeLuca, ‘Bonum est mortis meditari: Meaning and Functions of the Medieval Double Macabre Portrait’, in Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: The Material and Spiritual Conditions of the Culture of Death, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 239–61; Jill Bradley, ‘The Changing Face of Death: The Iconography of the Personification of Death in the Early Middle Ages’, in On Old Age: Approaching Death in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. Christian Krötzl and Katariina Mustakallio (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 57–87; Sophie Oosterwijk and Stefanie A. Knöll, Mixed Metaphors : The Danse Macabre in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011). 14 See for example Wendy A. Matlock, ‘The Feminine Flesh in the Disputacione Betwyx the Body and Wormes’, in The Ends of the Body: Identity and Community in Medieval Culture, ed. Suzanna Conklin Akbari and Jill Ross (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 260–82; Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), chs. 3, 9, Appendix H. 15 See, for example, the full-page painting that precedes the Office of the Dead in The Rohan Hours. Reproduced in Millard Meiss and Marcel Thomas, The Rohan Book of Hours: Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (MS. Latin 9471) (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), fol. 159. Discussed in Leslie A. Blacksberg, ‘Death and the Contract of Salvation: The Rohan Master’s Illumination for the Office of the Dead’, in Flanders in a European Perspective: Manuscript Illumination Around 1400 in Flanders and Abroad. Proceedings of the International Colloquium, Leuven 7–10, Sept. 1993, ed. Maurits Smeyers and Bert Cardon (Leuven: Uigeverij Peeters, 1995), 487–98. 16 Neither Huizinga nor Ariès spend any time on them. 17 Thomas S. Ross Boase, Death in the Middle Ages: Mortality, Judgement and Remembrance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972); Gilchrist and Sloane, Requiem: The Medieval Monastic Cemetery in Britain. Others, such as Duffy, have acknowledged them as a rich source but have not examined the visual material

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of her book on parochial identity Imagining the Parish, Ellen Rentz specifically identifies Office of the Dead images as she queries to what extent images of ritual might support community practices within the medieval parish.18 There are several articles that examine Off ice of the Dead images, notably those by Millard Meiss and by Gabriele Bartz and Eberhard König,19 as well as articles focusing on individual examples of Office of the Dead imagery.20 Much of this existing work has focused on late f ifteenth-century French examples. Although often referenced and frequently identified as the most iconographically diverse set of images in the Book of Hours,21 the Off ice of the Dead images as a corpus have not received a book-length study. This book addresses that gap. Building on the existing literature on individual manuscripts and introducing less well-known examples, it assesses the images as a body of work that reveal diverse conceptualizations of medieval death. It is a topic that necessarily crosses disciplinary boundaries, and recent scholarship has demonstrated the rich results that arise from this approach.22 While this book is structured around the visual as significant in its own right. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400–c.1580 (London: Yale University Press, 2005); Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers, 1240–1570 (London: Yale University Press, 2006). 18 Ellen K. Rentz, Imagining the Parish in Late Medieval England (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2015), 152. 19 Gloria Fiero, ‘Death Ritual in Fifteenth-Century Manuscript Illumination’, Journal of Medieval History 10 (1984): 271–94; Gabriele Bartz and Eberhard König, ‘Die illustration des Totenoff iziums in Stundenbüchern’, in Im Angesicht des Todes. Ein interdisciplinäres Kompendium, ed. H. Berkeret (St. Ottilien: Pietas Liturgica III, 1987), 487–528; Millard Meiss, ‘La Mort et l’office des Morts à l’époque du Maitre de Boucicaut et des Limbourg’, Revue de l’Art 1, no. 2 (n.d.): 17–25; Elizabeth Morrison, ‘The Light at the End of the Tunnel: Manuscript Illumination and the Concept of Death’, in The Ivory Mirror: The Art of Mortality in Renaissance Europe, ed. Stephen Perkinson (New Haven; London: Bowdoin College Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2017), 83–106. 20 Christine Kralik, ‘Death Is Not the End: The Encounter of the Three Living and the Three Dead in the Berlin Hours of Mary of Burgundy and Maximilian I’, in The Ends of the Body: Identity and Community in Medieval Culture, ed. Suzanna Conklin Akbari and Jill Ross (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 61–85; Caroline Zohl, ‘A Phenomenon of Parallel Reading in the Office of the Dead’, in Mixed Metaphors: The Danse Macabre in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Sophie Oosterwijk and Stephanie Knoll (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011), 325–60. 21 Roger S. Wieck et al., Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life (New York: George Braziller, in association with the Walters Art Gallery, 1988), 124; Roger S. Wieck, Painted Prayers: The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art (New York: George Braziller in association with the Pierpont Morgan Library, 1997), 119; Fiero, ‘Death Ritual in Fifteenth-Century Manuscript Illumination’, 276, 291; Nigel M. Morgan and Bronwyn Stocks, The Medieval Imagination: Illuminated Manuscripts from Cambridge, Australia and New Zealand (South Yarra: Macmillan, 2008), 130. 22 Elina Gertsman, Sophie Oosterwijk, and Ashby Kinch, among many others, have drawn on a wide array of material in their studies of medieval death culture, from visual art and literature to performance and politics. Elina Gertsman, The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance, Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages 3 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010). Sophie Oosterwijk, ‘Of Dead Kings,

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material found in the Office of the Dead, the images are examined in conjunction with their bookish setting. This study addresses how the images interact with the liturgical text they accompany, the participatory reading practices of the period, and the broader world of late medieval death culture as expressed in literature and art outside the Book of Hours. Medieval Death: The Practical and Conceptual On a practical level, death was very physically present in the medieval world. In much of Europe, there was war abroad, dynastic unrest at home, and raging plague, in addition to the more quotidian concerns of hearth and home. But it was not only a biological and social fact; it was also a soteriological one. Death was an essential part of the Christian salvation narrative: death was at the beginning as a punishment for sin, and it was a death that opened the way to redeem the sinner. It was necessary for the body to die so that the soul could live anew with Christ. It was the only path to eternal salvation but also, frighteningly, a possible path to damnation. There was a highly developed anxiety about the spiritual fate of the dead: an awareness that not all would readily ‘pass through the eye of the needle’23 but instead face untold years, perhaps centuries, in the purifying fires of purgatory. The close proximity to death that was a part of daily experience, and the spiritual worry over the fate of the dead gave rise to devotional practices that encouraged the devout to meditate on death and consider what it would mean for the dead as well as for the living. The shared ritual structures of the church shaped medieval encounters with death through the Requiem Mass and Office of the Dead. Originally a monastic service, by the late medieval period the Office was recited at family funerals, gild commemorations, yearly minds, and chantry chapel services in memory of the dead. It was present in the background of all deaths in the period and was one of the most familiar liturgical rituals to people from all walks of life.24 The Placebo and Dirige, or ‘Dirge’, were texts that people knew through constant exposure. It Dukes and Constables: The Historical Context of the Danse Macabre in Late Medieval Paris’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 161, no. 1 (2008): 131–62; Sophie Oosterwijk, ‘Death, Memory and Commemoration: John Lydgate and “Macabrees Daunce” at Old St Paul’s Cathedral, London’, in Memory and Commemoration in Medieval England: Proceedings of the 2008 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Caroline M. Barron and Clive Burgess (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2010), 185–201. Kinch, Imago Mortis. 23 ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.’ Mark 10:25. 24 Eamon Duffy states that the prayers and texts of the Office of the Dead were the most commonly used of all prayers in the late medieval period. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400–c.1580, 220–22.

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was also accessible in the most popular and widely produced devotional book of the late medieval period, the Book of Hours.25 The Book of Hours is based around the Hours of the Blessed Virgin Mary and regularly included the text of the Off ice of the Dead. 26 In addition, other texts were added and subtracted to express the devotional tastes and desires (and purse) of the owner. These might include other off ices or formalized sets of prayers such as the Commendation of Souls, Litany, or Hours of the Holy Spirit, as well as a variety of other more informal prayers and tracts.27 Images could also be used to personalize the book via the inclusion of particularized illuminations containing portraits, heraldic motifs, or saints of special personal significance.28 They were adapted through time with new images sewn or pasted in to reflect the pilgrimages, new devotions, or increased wealth of new owners. The book was thus malleable in content and illustration, shaped by and for the devotional and familial requirements of the reader. For readers today, it is often this personal quality of the Book of Hours that makes them both revealing and engaging. It is also a quality that makes them a good gauge of the devotional concerns of their users. 25 By the end of the fifteenth century, many households were able to afford one, and it was often the only book a household might possess. John Higgitt, The Murthly Hours: Devotion, Literacy and Luxury in Paris, England and the Gaelic West (London: British Library, 2001), 165; Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400–c.1580, 211; Amtower, Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages, 35. 26 There are, of course, other types of books that contain the Office of the Dead, such as psalters, hymnals, breviaries, and antiphoners. There are also occasional mentions of books containing only the Office of the Dead, and perhaps some additional related prayers. These ‘Dirige Books’ were short, functional texts designed to assist the clergy in carrying out their commemorative duties. They do not appear to be very common. In the 313 wills written by clergymen between 1370 and 1532 examined by Norman Tanner, only four such books are mentioned, three in the years between 1440 and 1489 and one from 1490 to 1517. Norman P. Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich 1370–1532, Studies and Texts (Toronto: Pontifical Institute Mediaeval Studies, 1984), 194. Another such book is mentioned in the 1514 will of Sir Thomas Abbot, a priest in London, who leaves a ‘lytell with Placebo and diryge’ to his church of St George. Ida Darlington, ed., London Consistory Court Wills, 1492–1547, London Record Society 3 (London: London Record Society, 1967), 2. 27 On the personalization of Books of Hours see Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers, 1240–1570; Katherine M. Rudy, Piety in Pieces: How Medieval Readers Customized Their Manuscript (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2016); Virginia Reinburg, French Books of Hours: Making an Archive of Prayer, c. 1400–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2012), 53–83. 28 Alexa Sand cites an example, the Psalter-Hours of Yolande of Soissons, in which even the details of the architecture in the images reflected the environment of the intended owner. Alexa Sand, Vision, Devotion, Self-Representation in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 160. See also Amelia Grounds, ‘Evolution of a Manuscript: The Pavement Hours’, in Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England, ed. Margaret Connolly and Linne R. Mooney (York: York Medieval Press, 2008), 118–38.

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Death is a socially and culturally constructed idea. What was known about death and deadness in the medieval period was formed and shaped by the Christian community over centuries into a complex series of beliefs regarding the action, state, and landscape of death. By the late medieval period, the focus of this book, the ‘facts’ of death, had been rigorously fleshed out, and there was a boom in visual material that conveyed and contributed to these particulars. Many parts of the complex of concepts that made up death in the fifteenth century were an assumed truth for the medieval parishioner. And although the geography of the afterlife had been mapped and there were instructions on how to get to your final destination, death remained a compelling, powerful, and often mysterious subject. The locational schema of the afterlife, after all, were maps of terra incognita, and the how-to guides were hypotheses with no possibility of verification. The abundance of material, textual, and intangible culture that concerns death reflects its important place in eschatology as well as the unknown and unknowable nature of death – so vital for the continued life of the soul and yet so impossible to fully comprehend. The incomprehensibility of death opened the way for continual engagement with and reassessment of death within the structures of established Christian notions regarding it. The nature of death prohibits anyone from possessing anything more than a theoretical expertise in the matter. The artists, poets, and scholars involved in the production of a visual and literary culture of death, as well as their works, were therefore participants in and shapers of the ongoing (one might say ‘live’) conversation on the nature and meaning of medieval death. Images of death were particularly significant contributors to this negotiation because they were accessible to a wide array of the population in a way that text was not, but also because images are interpretively flexible. People owned and used images outside of the confines of ritual or accepted church teaching. They shared and thought about them, sometimes developing practices or iconographies that reflected beliefs and anxieties about death that extended or contradicted ideas sanctioned by official theology. The lively corpses of the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead, for example, are a theological impossibility since the corpse was without soul, literally inanimate – yet there they are, capering across the walls and pages of medieval Europe. Each manifestation of death contributed a new form to an imagined mental representation of death in the world and the viewers’ place in relation to it. Each engagement with a representation of death is a distinct effort to construct a meaningful explication of death within a particular moment rather than a summation of all the emotional and social complexities embraced by the word ‘death’. This pluralistic characterization reflects an awareness that death was not one thing and certainly not easy to capture or define in images or otherwise. Rather, within the frame of the liturgical text, the images themselves offer insights and methods for considering the nature of death, operating as a creative gloss

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accessed through the act of imaginative looking.29 The contribution of images to this ongoing discourse on the nature and meaning of death for readers and viewers is a central theme of this book. Three conceptualizations of death dominate the images of the Office of the Dead: the social death, the bodily death, and non-death. Despite the wide array of subject matter found in the Office images, the majority of them substantially engage with one or more of these ways of considering death. These death concepts are expressed through images that represent death as ‘regular’ (visualizing the social and religious structures that regulate a medieval death), ‘repellent’ (foregrounding that which is deemed unsightly, the rot of the body), or ‘redemptive’ (providing visual corroboration for the impermanence of a Christian death). Death makes itself felt through the gaps in the social fabric that occur as a result. Social death is about the loss of the individual from the larger community – it is about absence. The roles the deceased played in family, work, and public life are vacated. It is a form of death that impacts survivors keenly and for extended periods of time. It is what we grieve over. In the highly communal world of medieval society, these absences could be especially stressful, as they might also mark periods of significant political, economic, or social transition for the survivors as well as of emotional transition. As such, religious and social mechanisms for guiding people through the period of adjustment were well developed, and it is these regularizing structures that are pictured in ‘regular’ death images. The quintessential image of the ‘regular’ death is the vigil or funeral service. It is death as it was shaped daily: matter-of-fact, ordinary, prosaic, familiar. It is also the most common subject used to illustrate the Office of the Dead. It is tempting to see these images as snapshots – tiny, hand-made ‘photographs’ showing us ‘the way things were’ in the medieval past. It is clear that the images do reflect the statutes and guidelines of the church, as well as (to an extent) the wills, church records, and accounts of funerals in the period. However, they are not (generally) representations of any specific commemorative event or individual but instead present the collective community response to death. The second chapter examines the ‘regular’ death image that is defined by the emphasis on community rather than the individual corpse. In these images, the body itself (often what we think of as the essential signifier of death) is inferred by the actions around it but rarely seen. These images emphasize death and absence as a social phenomenon and eschew direct visual references to either bodily decay or resurrection. As this chapter will demonstrate, ‘regular’ death images present death through the eyes of the survivors as an experience shared by the living in community with one another. In these images, the reader-viewer could 29 Sarah Stanbury, The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 177.

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vicariously explore their aspirations for, social expectations of, and community involvement in death as a method of preparing themselves for their own and others’ deaths. Via their imaginative investment in the ‘regular’ death images and Office texts, readers participated in the maintenance and continuation of a harmonious commemorative community of the living and the dead which included themselves. Lying uneasily alongside the daily experience of ‘regular’ death was an anxiety about the physical nature of death, its suddenness and final corruption. This is bodily death, concerned with the unavoidably corporeal consequences of death. The third chapter, ‘Repellent Death’, examines images of bodily death and their rhetorical power in the devotional context. In some ways, this seems to be the most straightforward of the three deaths: we have bodies, and it is bodies that die. However, bodily death is bound up with our sense of ourselves in the world. The ‘repellent’ death images thus also engage with readers’ fears concerning identity and the dissolution of an autonomous self. Genesis warned Christians that ‘to dust thou shalt return’, but this process was a sight usually hidden by ritual, by shroud, by earth, and by tomb. To put the corpse on view was often a sign that things had gone badly wrong. It was a punishment reserved for criminals and transgressors, whose openly rotting bodies functioned as a sign of exile from their community in this life and the next. However, the image of ‘repellent’ death was not merely ghoulish – the corpse also served to remind viewers of the finitude of life. Animated corpses regularly exhorted the reader to virtue and salvation, and the corpse provided a visceral echo of the spiritual rot of the sinful soul and a preview of things to come. The contemplation of the image of the corpse, one of the few ways a reader could access this didactically powerful sight, was both a method of working toward salvation and an avenue for confronting the reality of one’s own corporeal death. There is an immense and abundantly diverse corpus of images depicting bodily death, and it would be impossible to address them all. I have not attempted to do so. Rather, this chapter will address several recurring themes in ‘repellent’ death images: time, identity, agency, and disruption. It is difficult to contemplate one’s own physical non-existence. This was particularly so in light of the Christian belief in the resurrection of the body and the continued life of the soul. The concept of non-death encapsulates the contradictory sense in the medieval period that death was, and was not, an end. For the reader of the Office of the Dead, preparing for death included coming to terms with loss of community and loss of (physical) self, but it also meant preparing for the life of the soul which would continue beyond the bounds of death. The death-event was a pivotal moment, not between life and death but between life and more (different) life. The ‘redemptive’ death images evade both the existential horror of physical dissolution and the comfort of ritual and community; they focus instead on the Christian promise of death undone, a non-death. The images engage with the promise

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of life after death through exemplars such as Job and Lazarus, whose miraculous lives demonstrated the possibility of resurrection and provided a template for Christian responses in the face of death. The ‘redemptive’ death images draw together all three of the deaths addressed in this book, as part of the promise pictured in this imagery includes the restoration of the deceased to both social and bodily life. This book considers the various ways we think about death through and with images. When Elina Gertman wrote that the violence of death in a medieval image ‘is meant to take place in the mind of the beholder, and to be constituted, therefore, through her own gaze’,30 what ideas was that hypothetical viewer drawing on to constitute that death? The ‘regular’, ‘repellent’, and ‘redemptive’ deaths encompass much of the visual discourse about death in the medieval period and both reflect and contribute to the construction of a polysemous death concept. The first two are concerned with a particular aspect of death (social, bodily) and its consequence (absence, decay), while the third concerns the Christian truth that denies death’s power to end us. Social death, bodily death, and non-death constitute one articulation of the fundamentally multifaceted nature of death in the medieval period, and they are not fixed (or the only) categories one might use. These conceptualizations reveal different responses to the cultural and theological facts of death within the devotional worldview of late medieval Europe. Momentarily separating these different ways of understanding death allows us to better explore aspects of medieval death in relation to the real and conceptual experiences of the period. *** Death is many things beyond the cessation of breath; the concept of death in the imagined mortality of the reader is the concern of this book. It is about what it means to be a person-who-dies in a world in which death is viscerally real and simultaneously denied. It is not about dying, the moment of death, or the state of being dead. It is about trying to imagine these things in the absence of subjective experience and where imagination is the most effective (and only) method of preparation for one’s own inevitable death and for the life of the soul beyond. Bibliography Amtower, Laurel. Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Appleford, Amy. Learning to Die in London, 1380–1540. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 30 Gertsman, ‘The Gap of Death’, 93.

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Aquinas, Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima. Translated by Kenelm Foster and Sylvester Humphries. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951. Accessed April 1, 2023. https://isidore.co/aquinas/english/DeAnima.htm#313L. Ariès, Philippe. Images of Man and Death. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. Translated by Helen Weaver. London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981. Badham, Sally, and Malcolm Norris. Early Incised Slabs and Brasses from the London Marblers. Reports of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries of London. London: Society of Antiquaries of London, 1999. Bartz, Gabriele, and Eberhard König. ‘Die illustration des Totenoffiziums in Stundenbüchern’. In Im Angesicht des Todes. Ein interdisciplinäres Kompendium, edited by H. Berkeret, 487–528. St. Ottilien: Pietas Liturgica III, 1987. Bassett, Steven, ed. Death in Towns: Urban Responses to the Dying and the Dead. London: Leicester University Press, 1992. Binski, Paul. Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation. London: British Museum Press, 1996. Blacksberg, Leslie A. ‘Death and the Contract of Salvation: The Rohan Master’s Illumination for the Office of the Dead’. In Flanders in a European Perspective: Manuscript Illumination Around 1400 in Flanders and Abroad. Proceedings of the International Colloquium, Leuven 7–10, Sept. 1993, edited by Maurits Smeyers and Bert Cardon, 487–98. Leuven: Uigeverij Peeters, 1995. Blatt, Heather. Participatory Reading in Late-Medieval England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Boase, Thomas S. Ross. Death in the Middle Ages: Mortality, Judgement and Remembrance. London: Thames and Hudson, 1972. Bradley, Jill. ‘The Changing Face of Death: The Iconography of the Personification of Death in the Early Middle Ages’. In On Old Age: Approaching Death in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, edited by Christian Krötzl and Katariina Mustakallio, 57–87. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. Bryan, Jennifer. Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Camille, Michael. ‘Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late Medieval Practices of Seeing’. In Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance, edited by Robert S. Nelson, 197–223. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Camille, Michael. Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Remiet, Illuminator. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Cohen, Kathleen. Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol: The Transi Tomb in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance. London: University of California Press, 1973. Coleman, Joyce. Public Reading and Reading the Public in Late Medieval England and France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Colvin, Howard. Architecture and the After-Life. London: Yale University Press, 1991.

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Corbellini, Sabrina. ‘Creating Domestic Sacred Space: Religious Reading in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy’. In Domestic Devotions in Early Modern Italy, edited by Maya Corry, Marco Faini, and Alessia Meneghin, 295–309. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Darlington, Ida, ed. London Consistory Court Wills, 1492–1547. London Record Society 3. London: London Record Society, 1967. DeLuca, Dominique. ‘Bonum est mortis meditari: Meaning and Functions of the Medieval Double Macabre Portrait’. In Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: The Material and Spiritual Conditions of the Culture of Death, edited by Albrecht Classen, 239–61. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016. Duffy, Eamon. Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers, 1240–1570. London: Yale University Press, 2006. Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400–c.1580. London: Yale University Press, 2005. Fiero, Gloria. ‘Death Ritual in Fifteenth-Century Manuscript Illumination’. Journal of Medieval History 10 (1984): 271–94. Gertsman, Elina. The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance. Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010. Gertsman, Elina. ‘The Gap of Death: Passive Violence in the Encounter between the Three Dead and the Three Living’. In Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Erin Felicia Labbie and Allie Terry-Fritsch, 85–104. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Gertsman, Elina. ‘Visualising Death: Medieval Plagues and the Macabre’. In Piety and Plague : From Byzantium to the Baroque, edited by Franco Mormando and Thomas Worcester, 64–89. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2007. Gilchrist, Roberta, and Barney Sloane. Requiem: The Medieval Monastic Cemetery in Britain. London: Museum of London Archaeology Service, 2005. Gordon, Bruce, and Peter Marshall. The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Grounds, Amelia. ‘Evolution of a Manuscript: The Pavement Hours’. In Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England, edited by Margaret Connolly and Linne R. Mooney, 118–38. York: York Medieval Press, 2008. Higgitt, John. The Murthly Hours: Devotion, Literacy and Luxury in Paris, England and the Gaelic West. London: British Library, 2001. Huizinga, Johan. The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth Centuries. London: E. Arnold, 1927. Karnes, Michelle. Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Kinch, Ashby. Imago Mortis: Mediating Images of Death in Late Medieval Culture. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Kralik, Christine. ‘Death Is Not the End: The Encounter of the Three Living and the Three Dead in the Berlin Hours of Mary of Burgundy and Maximilian I’. In The Ends of the

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Body: Identity and Community in Medieval Culture, edited by Suzanna Conklin Akbari and Jill Ross, 61–85. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Matlock, Wendy A. ‘The Feminine Flesh in the Disputacione Betwyx the Body and Wormes’. In The Ends of the Body: Identity and Community in Medieval Culture, edited by Suzanna Conklin Akbari and Jill Ross, 260–82. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Meiss, Millard. ‘La mort et l’off ice des morts à l’époque du Maitre de Boucicaut et des Limbourg’. Revue de l’Art 1, no. 2 (n.d.): 17–25. Meiss, Millard, and Marcel Thomas. The Rohan Book of Hours: Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (MS. Latin 9471). London: Thames and Hudson, 1973. Morgan, Nigel M., and Bronwyn Stocks. The Medieval Imagination: Illuminated Manuscripts from Cambridge, Australia and New Zealand. South Yarra: Macmillan, 2008. Morris, Richard, ed. An Old English Miscellany Containing a Bestiary, Kentish Sermons, Proverbs of Alfred, Religious Poems of the Thirteenth Century, from Manuscripts in the British Museum, Bodleian Library, Jesus College Library etc. Early English Text Society Original Series 49. London: Trübner & Co., 1872. Morrison, Elizabeth. ‘The Light at the End of the Tunnel: Manuscript Illumination and the Concept of Death’. In The Ivory Mirror: The Art of Mortality in Renaissance Europe, edited by Stephen Perkinson, 83–106. New Haven/London: Bowdoin College Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2017. O’Connor, Mary Catherine. The Art of Dying Well: The Development of the Ars Moriendi. New York: AMS Press, 1966. Oosterwijk, Sophie. ‘Death, Memory and Commemoration: John Lydgate and “Macabrees Daunce” at Old St Paul’s Cathedral, London’. In Memory and Commemoration in Medieval England: Proceedings of the 2008 Harlaxton Symposium, edited by Caroline M. Barron and Clive Burgess, 185–201. Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2010. Oosterwijk, Sophie. ‘Of Dead Kings, Dukes and Constables: The Historical Context of the Danse Macabre in Late Medieval Paris’. Journal of the British Archaeological Association 161, no. 1 (2008): 131–62. Oosterwijk, Sophie, and Stefanie A. Knöll. Mixed Metaphors : The Danse Macabre in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011. Ottosen, Knud. The Responsories and Versicles of the Latin Office of the Dead. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1993. Paxton, Frederick S. Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe. London: Cornell University Press, 1990. Reinburg, Virginia. French Books of Hours: Making an Archive of Prayer, c. 1400–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Rentz, Ellen K. Imagining the Parish in Late Medieval England. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Rooney, Kenneth. Mortality and Imagination: The Life of the Dead in Medieval English Literature. Disputatio. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011.

Introduc tion 

Rudy, Katherine M. Piety in Pieces: How Medieval Readers Customized Their Manuscript. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0094. Sand, Alexa. Vision, Devotion, Self-Representation in Medieval Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Stanbury, Sarah. The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Sterponi, Laura. ‘Reading and Meditation in the Middle Ages: Lectio Divina and Books of Hours’. Text & Talk: Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse Communication Studies 28, no. 5 (2008): 667–89. Tanner, Norman P. The Church in Late Medieval Norwich 1370–1532, Studies and Texts. Toronto: Pontifical Institute Mediaeval Studies, 1984. Wieck, Roger S. Painted Prayers: The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art. New York: George Braziller in association with the Pierpont Morgan Library, 1997. Wieck, Roger S., Lawrence R. Poos, Virginia Reinburg, and John Plummer. Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life. New York: George Braziller, in association with the Walters Art Gallery, 1988. Woolf, Rosemary. The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. Zohl, Caroline. ‘A Phenomenon of Parallel Reading in the Office of the Dead’. In Mixed Metaphors: The Danse Macabre in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Sophie Oosterwijk and Stephanie Knoll, 325–60. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011.

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1.

The Office of the Dead in Christian Liturgy Abstract: This chapter provides an overview of developments that gave rise to the two foundational subjects of this book, the Office of the Dead and the Book of Hours. The development of the Office of the Dead is traced through the establishment of an early Christian funeral rite, its formalization in the monastic context, and its later use in the secular community including its regular presence in the Book of Hours. The shape, use, and forms of engagement with the Book of Hours is also discussed. Keywords: funeral liturgy, literacy, Book of Hours, ordo defunctorum

A delicately drawn miniature in a fifteenth-century French Bible manuscript depicts the moment after the fall with Adam and Eve standing by the Tree of Knowledge. Adam is choking and leans forward, holding his hands to his throat in distress. Eve, still holding the offending fruit in her hand, gazes thoughtfully down at an emaciated corpse, an image of death that reclines, grinning, at the foot of the tree.1 The view of the church was that death entered the world in direct consequence of the fall as one of the penalties paid by humanity for Adam’s transgression, as was articulated in biblical texts such as Paul’s letter to the Romans, which states starkly: ‘The wages of sin is death.’2 Adam and Eve were cast out into a physically, 1 MS 28 ‘Histoire extraite de la Bible et Apocalypse’, France (Paris or Bourges), c. 1415, fol. 3v. Chantilly: Bibliothèque du Château (Musée Condé). The manuscript was illuminated by the Maître des Médaillons. Françoise Autrand et al., Les très riches heures du duc de Berry et l’enluminure en France au début du XVe siècle: Exposition au musée Condé du 31 mars au 2 août 2004 (Chantilly: Musée Condé, 2004), 56, 79. 2 Rom. 6:23. In Augustine: ‘For the first men would not have suffered death had they not sinned.’ And later: ‘Wherefore we must say that the first men were indeed so created, that if they had not sinned, they would not have experienced any kind of death; but that, having become sinners, they were so punished with death, that whatsoever sprang from their stock should also be punished with the same death.’ Augustine, ‘The City of God’, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. Marcus Dods (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co.; New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia Online, 1887), Bk 13:3, accessed March 18, 2023. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1201.htm. See also Gen. 2:15–17 and Athanasius, On the Incarnation, trans. Sister Penelope Lawson (New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 1:3; Christopher Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England, 1066–1550 (London: Routledge, 1997), 69.

Schell, S., Image and the Office of the Dead in Late Medieval Europe: Regular, Repellent, and Redemptive Death. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463722117_ch01

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morally, and spiritually corrupting world, in which death embodied our removal from the perfection of God’s creation as it was intended to be. There were two types of death, the spiritual and the physical. To the medieval mind, spiritual death – that is, the separation of the soul from God – was infinitely worse than a mere physical death. Physical death was in some ways viewed as a release from the earthbound life and from the prison of the sinful body to be united with God in heaven. Bernard of Clairvaux described the death of the saints as ‘precious’, for it was ‘the end of labours, the consummation of victory, the gate of life, and the entrance to perfect safety’.3 But of course, the average person was not a saint, and his or her ‘entrance to perfect safety’ was not assured. For these, the fear of judgement was a present reality, and it was to this uncertainty over the final destination of the soul after death, and to the anxiety surrounding it, that the Office of the Dead was addressed. The Christian funeral rite developed over many centuries, eventually, during the eighth and ninth centuries, settling into a form that would be recognizable as that used throughout the medieval period. It had its beginnings in the pagan funeral rites of the Roman Empire and in the continuation of the Judaic traditions with which the first Christians would have been familiar. Christianity emerged amid a large and multicultural empire. The social norms of pagans, Jews, and Christians were often the same, and this was a cause for concern in the early church, as the letters of Paul to various new Christian communities testify. Early Christian believers, having neither an established church nor liturgy to regulate the religious movement, nor the mores of a Christian society to guide them, attempted to understand their faith in the context of the social norms of both the Romans and the Jews – social norms that were their own. In funeral rites, as in other areas of life, established and familiar traditions were used and adapted by the Christian community. The Jewish traditions of death emphasized and upheld the religious underpinnings of Jewish culture. Stress was placed on ritual cleanliness, respect for the dead, and the physical placement of the body. The tomb was a symbol of the permanence of the departed both in the physical landscape of their history and in the memory of the community.4 The Roman traditions also supported corporate unity, but here emphasis was on the state, not the individual. There was concern with the smooth continuation of the civic entity and with proclaiming the immortality of the empire, 3 Bernard of Clairvaux, St Bernard of Clairvaux’s Life of St Malachy of Armagh, ed. H. J. Lawlor, Translations of Christian Literature, Lives of the Celtic Saints, V (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1920), Sermon I ‘On the Death of Malachy’, 147; Louis Edward Jordan, ‘The Iconography of Death in Western Medieval Art to 1350’ (Masters thesis, University of Notre Dame, 1980), 67. 4 On the form and tradition of Jewish burial practice, see Geoffrey Rowell, The Liturgy of Christian Burial: An Introductory Survey of the Historical Development of Christian Burial Rites, Alcuin Club Collections (London: SPCK for the Alcuin Club, 1977), ch. 1; Paxton, Christianizing Death, 19–32; Jon Davies, Death, Burial and Rebirth in the Religions of Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1999), 69–110.

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while also acknowledging the fact of human death. While in Jewish traditions the dead comprised an important part of the identity of present and future generations, in Roman customs the dead were identified with the glories of the past, and the onus was on the living to produce the glories of the future. The Roman behaviours thus expressed the importance of the departed through their status among the living.5 It was from these disparate traditions that early Christians drew various components and to these traditions that they were responding when developing their own Christian burial practices and beliefs.6 As the Christian movement gained momentum, the rites, too, began to evolve a particularly Christian cast. Emergence of a Christian Rite In the New Testament, in the immediate aftermath of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, there was little interest in discerning what an appropriate Christian burial involved, since it was expected that Jesus would return before the end of the current generation. As expectation faded and the second coming receded into an unknown future, the question of what to do with the Christian dead became more pressing, particularly in view of the promised resurrection of all believers at the end of time. It was at this time that the Christian community began to separate itself from existing traditions. The unique view the Christians held on death, life, and the role of the dead in life made change necessary in order to represent these central aspects of Christian faith. The most radical departure from the older death rites was in the Christian understanding of the nature of death itself and, by association, of how death and the dead should be treated. Both the Jews and the Romans viewed the dead as a pollutant, redolent with spiritual uncleanliness and bodily disease; whether spiritually or physically, the corpse was a threat to society. In both of these cultures, the place of the dead was outside the city or settlement, and initially Christians continued this trend. As Christianity became more mainstream, the Christian ethos regarding the dead became more apparent. One of the ways the increasing 5 On the form and tradition of Roman burial practice, see J. M. C. Toynbee, Death and Burial in the Roman World, Aspects of Greek and Roman Life (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971); Davies, Death, Burial and Rebirth in the Religions of Antiquity, 125–67. On the negotiation between Roman, Jewish, and Christian burial rites in the early Christian period, see Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, Lectures on the History of Religions, N.S. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), ch. 1; Davies, Death, Burial and Rebirth in the Religions of Antiquity, 187–217. On the landscape and visual art of Roman and Early Christian burial, see Ariès, Images of Man and Death, ch. 1. 6 Indeed, both the Jewish and Roman attitudes toward tombs and monuments articulated here are found in the medieval period as well, which adapted and combined such notions to fit a Christian ethos. See Erwin Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture: Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini (London: Thames and Hudson, 1964), 92–115.

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Christian presence in Rome was manifest was in the infiltration of the Christian dead within the city walls, an indication of the ways in which Christianity began to change the face of the dominant culture. The dead, as emblems of a realized higher spiritual state, were welcome within the precinct of the living. In addition, the Christian dead played an active role in the lives of the living. For, having achieved a heavenly life, they were now in a position much closer to the divine than the earthbound could hope to achieve. They became intercessors to God through the prayers of the living. The traditional marked separation between the living and the dead was broken down and replaced by a continuum where the living and the dead interacted. As a result, at the end of the fourth century, Christian burial began to occur in mortuary chapels and in association with churches. More and more Christians sought burial within the confines of the church and surrounding area as a way for them to be close in death to the blessed dead, the martyrs, in addition to the most holy (and hopeful) death: Christ as present at the altar.7 Early Liturgy and the Roman Ordo Defunctorum Death liturgy was considered in light of its role in the Christian community from the beginning. Despite assertions that what happened to the body after death should not matter, the early church acknowledged the natural desire of family to commemorate loved ones and with Augustine indicated that ‘it does not follow that the bodies of the departed are to be despised and flung aside’, citing both Old and New Testament for examples of funeral remembrances from the death of Sarah to Jesus himself.8 The emphasis on the care of the dead led to the formation of a regular process for dealing with periods of sickness and death in the community. The medieval Office of the Dead grew out of early rites closely related to one of the oldest parts of the liturgy, the old Roman Ordo Defunctorum. The ordo, preserved in an eleventh-century manuscript, is thought to be the earliest Christian funeral rite that survives today and may have come from the liturgy of the late antique 7 This departure from the long-held tradition of keeping the living and the dead separate was not popular among many pagan citizens. Julian the Apostate articulated the view of the pagan Greco-Roman population when he wrote, ‘you keep adding many corpses newly dead to the corpses of long ago. You have filled the whole world with tombs and sepulchres.’ Julian the Apostate, The Works of the Emperor Julian, trans. Wilmer Cave Wright, vol. 3, Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann, 1923), 419. The move of the Christian dead into the city was strongly associated with the developing cult of the martyrs. Many of these exemplary individuals who died for their beliefs became foci of church communities. Early churches were called martyries. Davies, Death, Burial and Rebirth in the Religions of Antiquity, 193. 8 Gen. 23; Matt. 27:57; Augustine, ‘On Care to Be Had for the Dead’, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Phillip Schaff and Kevin Knight (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co.; New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia Online, 1887), 541, accessed April 1, 2023. http://www.newadvent.org/ fathers/1316.htm.

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Roman Church.9 The principal elements of the rite were the viaticum, psalms, and the procession to the place of burial. The lamentations and formal mourning periods of earlier traditions seemed to the first Christians an inappropriate way to greet what was supposed to be a blessed event. Throughout the ordo, there is a sense of optimism for the future of the deceased as they are released from the world of sin and enter a realm of spiritual perfection. The first order of business was the administration of the viaticum, the final provision for those journeying out of this world and into the next. It was intended to assist the soul when it came to judgement and be a stamp of membership in the fellowship of the church. The story of Christ’s own resurrection was read aloud during the final moments, a reassurance to the dying that through Christ, who defeated death by dying, their lives, as his, would continue in the next world. The ritual does not include transference of the ‘citizenship’ of the dying individual away from the realm of the living to the realm of the dead. Throughout the deathbed ritual, the dying person is fully a member of the living community, albeit one about to take their leave. By the medieval period, pre-liminal rites of separation had been established in last rites, and having undergone this transfer of citizenship, it became difficult for someone who recovered from deathly illness to re-enter the community of the living. Immediately after death, psalms were sung. The tone was hopeful. The response Subvenite sancti dei was followed by the verse Suscipiat te Christus. These were followed by a psalm, one of either Delexi quoniam (Ps. 114) or In exitu Israel (Ps. 113), and an antiphon, Chorus angelorum.10 Psalm 113 is a joyful expression of a clear relationship between God and his people, a relationship where the dead can confidently look to God to help them make this transition from one life to the next. Psalm 114, which is mentioned in the Apostolic Constitutions (c. 400) in connection with burial rites as well, is a direct and topical account of this help; the psalmist writes, ‘For he hath delivered my soul from death: my eyes from tears, my feet from falling.’11 Once these psalms had been completed, the body was washed and placed on a bier. There were no specific psalms prescribed to accompany this action, although the antiphon that was sung just before the procession left the 9 There are some who assert that the Ordo is Frankish in origin. Paxton, Christianizing Death, 37. The following discussion focuses on this manuscript, Ordo XLIX. It should be noted that there are other manuscripts that support the organization and attitudes found in Ordo XLIX. For a detailed study of many of these related manuscripts, see Damien Sicard, La liturgie de la mort dans l’Église latine des origines à la réforme carolingienne (Münster: Achendorff’sche Buchdruckerei, 1978). 10 Sicard, La liturgie de la mort, 14; Paxton, Christianizing Death, 39. 11 Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, eds., ‘Apostolic Constitutions’, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, trans. James Donaldson, vol. 7 (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co.; New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia Online, 1886), Book 6:30, accessed April 1, 2023. http://www.newadvent. org/fathers/07156.htm. ‘Gloriosa in conspectu Domini mors sanctorum eius.’ The psalm is now numbered 115:15; ‘Quia eruit animam meam de morte oculos meos a lacrimis pedes meos ab offense’, Ps. 114:8.

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house, De terra formasti, speaks of God dressing the bones in flesh and spirit as an image of the bodily resurrection.12 The antiphon was followed by further psalms sung as the body was prepared for the procession.13 While the body was being set in the church, the antiphon Tu iussisti nasci me, domine was sung, followed by Psalm 41, Quemadmodem, the antiphon In paradise dei ducant te angeli, and Psalm 4, Cum invocarem.14 These again expressed positive sentiments, and the welcome reception that the soul would receive in heaven. Both psalms proclaim trust in God, hope for the future, and assurance of rest.15 Once the body had been placed in the church, a continuous series of chanted psalms, responses, and readings from the Book of Job began, which did not cease until the burial took place.16 Job had long been a significant part of funeral ritual: both Tu iussisti nasci me and De terra formasti have texts derived from the Book of Job.17 The story of Job, with its tale of separation from, trial by, and eventual reconciliation with God, relates to the condition of death, judgement, and salvation which the deceased was undergoing. Job stands in the tradition of texts such as the Testament of Abraham where the created confronts the creator about their situation. In addition, the trials that Job endured without losing faith established a standard for the bereaved to emulate. The last stage was the interment of the body. At the site of burial, the Roman ordo includes prayers, the antiphon Aperite mihi portas iustitiae, and psalm Confitemini domino. The language is consistent with that found in the other psalms and antiphons of the ordo. There is considerable emphasis on mercy, goodness, and the salvation that will be the reward of the faithful and just.18 The complex concepts around the relationship of the body and the soul, the character of death, and the nature of the resurrection required time to come to terms with for many new Christians. From the second to the fourth century, scholars and clerics wrote treatises that clarified these ideas and also solidified what would become the official doctrine of an emerging ecclesiastical institution. This difficulty was increased by the nature of the early church; it was geographically dispersed and 12 ‘My redeemer, you formed me from the earth and dressed me in flesh; Lord resuscitate me on the last day.’ In some manuscripts this text is also sung at the grave site. Paxton, Christianizing Death, 40. 13 Gaudete iusti, Dominus regit, and Dominus regnavit are indicated most frequently. Dominus regnavit, the most common of the three, is the incipit for three different psalms in the Vulgate – 92, 96, 98. Several manuscript witnesses make it clear as psalm 92. Sicard, La liturgie de la mort, 122. 14 Sicard, La liturgie de la mort, 4. 15 ‘The light of thy countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us: thou hast given gladness in my heart…. In peace in the self same I will sleep, and I will rest: For thou, O Lord, singularly hast settled me in hope.’ Ps. 4:7–10. 16 Orent omnes pro ipsa anima sine intermissione. Sicard, La liturgie de la mort, 4. 17 On Job’s relevance to the preparation for death see also this volume, Chapter 4. Sicard, La liturgie de la mort, 124; Paxton, Christianizing Death, 42. 18 ‘I shall not die, but live: and shall declare the works of the Lord….This is the gate of the Lord, the just shall enter into it.’ Ps. 117:17–20.

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included people from many different social and religious backgrounds. There were established churches in places as far as Gaul, Egypt, India, and Spain.19 The spread of Christianity to the edges of the Roman Empire created a problem: How was the orthodox liturgy agreed on by the various ecumenical councils, to be maintained so far from the heart of doctrinal development in Rome? The natural solution was to export educated clerics who would be able to teach their brothers in distant locales. However, travel was slow and the receipt of news and new theological developments was sporadic. The farthest provinces began to develop their own liturgical processes in response to the environment in which they were already established. In Gaul this was particularly evident in monastic houses that were relatively autonomous from the larger churches in towns and city centres. These institutions began to formulate liturgical procedures that were then standardized and transmitted regionally during the Carolingian period. It was here that the Office of the Dead began to take on the form that was used in the later medieval period. The Office of the Dead and Carolingian Reform It is only at the beginning of the ninth century that one finds clear evidence of the Office occurring as a fixed event in the daily horarium. A document from the second half of the eighth century containing details of observances at Monte Cassino states that upon the death of a brother, the community was to recite the psalmi speciales for him after Vespers of the day (these psalms were later known as the seven Penitential Psalms), with litanies.20 A document from the early years of the ninth century, c. 811–812, drawn up by the monks at Fulda, indicates that the practice in that house for commemoration of a dead brother included a service held twice a day, after Lauds and Vespers, consisting of the antiphon Requiem Aeternam, the first part of the psalm, Te decet hymnus Deus, a verse, and a collect. Fulda also saw fit to commemorate the death of their first abbot with ‘a vigil, and fifty Psalms’ on the first day of every month.21 Both these monasteries were large 19 Anon., ‘The Teachings of the Apostles’, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, trans. B. P. Pratten, vol. 8 (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co.; New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia Online, 1886), 2:1–10, accessed April 1, 2023. http://www.newadvent.org/ fathers/0854.htm. 20 Monte Cassino was founded by St. Benedict c. 530 and was the birthplace of the Benedictine Rule. The monastery was looted by the Lombards c. 580 when the community removed to Rome. It was restored in 718 under Abbot Petronax and remained a large, thriving, and influential community until the mid-eleventh century. Edmund Bishop, ‘On the Origin of the Prymer’, in Liturgica Historica; Papers on the Liturgy and Religious Life of the Western Church, ed. Edmund Bishop (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1918), 216. 21 The first Abbot of Fulda drew his monks from Rome and surrounding areas, including Monte Cassino. The commemorative practices used at this monastery are thought to reflect commemorative practice in Italian monasteries generally. Bishop, ‘On the Origin of the Prymer’, 216.

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and influential Benedictine houses during these years, yet however close the links between such foundations, it seems they did not share identical commemorative practice. The independence of monastic institutions and the various origins from which these houses arose allowed a variety of different commemorative traditions to be in use in the Frankish kingdoms at the beginning of the ninth century. With the effort of the Carolingian kings to create a unified Christian society and the related task of bringing order and uniformity to the practice of the faith, a more consistent ritual for the dead emerged out of regional traditions. The Carolingians took a much more active interest in church ritual than their predecessors. There was an interest in the proper maintenance of monastic rules that reflected the growing concern with a salvation achieved through intercessory prayer and penance, which had become a mainstay of the Frankish church in the preceding centuries. As well as reflecting a general concern for salvation, the interest of governmental circles encouraged a degree of uniformity in church ritual that would enable a closer association through common practice between the diocese and provinces of the widespread kingdom. Many scholars agree that the earliest appearance of the Office of the Dead in the form popular in the daily practices of the later medieval period occured in the Order of Centule (now St. Riquer in Picardy) around the year 800 under the Abbot of St. Riquer, Angilbert (793–814), who was a disciple of Alcuin and a mentor of Charlemagne’s son Pippin.22 Angilbert wrote: for the memory of all the faithful departed, [we] should be eager to celebrate watch day and night Vespers, nocturnes and Matins [Lauds] most devoutly.23

Edmund Bishop, one of the first scholars to produce early evidence of the Office, underlines that what Angilbert proposed was a daily recital of an office in memory of the dead, including Vespers, Matins, and Lauds, and this sets it apart from other mentions of commemorative services.24 Amalar, a contemporary of Angilbert and fellow disciple of Alcuin, also refers to an Office for the Dead, in this instance recited as a commemorative service on the third, seventh, and thirtieth days after decease, in addition to nine psalms, lessons, and responses which were said for 22 See J. B. L. Tolhurst, The Monastic Breviary of Hyde Abbey, Winchester: Mss. Rawlinson Liturg. e. 1*, and Gough Liturg. 8, in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Volume VI: Introduction to the English Monastic Breviaries, Henry Bradshaw Society (London: Printed for the Society by Harrison and Sons, 1942), 107; Ottosen, The Responsories and Versicles of the Latin Office of the Dead, 32. 23 Thomas Symons, ‘Monastic Observance in the Tenth Century: I. The Office of All Saints and of the Dead’, The Downside Review 50–51 (1932): 150; Suzanne M. Hilton, ‘A Clunaic Office of the Dead’ (Masters thesis, University of Maryland, College Park, 2005), 43. 24 Ottosen, The Responsories and Versicles of the Latin Office of the Dead, 32.

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the dead at the beginning of each month.25 The practice indicated by Amalar of reciting the Office on specific days after death was one that was in continuous use throughout both the ancient and medieval periods, in memory of both religious and lay deaths. Bishop asserts that Benedict of Aniane was largely responsible for the spread of the Office of the Dead as a daily service. Under the auspices of Louis the Pious, son of Charlemagne, Benedict set up a monastery at Aachen called Inde. The house followed the Benedictine rule, with the addition of several reforms to monastic life that Benedict of Aniane had developed himself. One of the developments introduced by Benedict was an increased emphasis on commemoration of the dead that suggests the evolution of an Office of the Dead. With increased numbers in monastic houses and the corresponding decrease in the manual labour required of each member of the community, the monks were able to devote more time to new devotional practices that were performed in addition to the usual horarium. At Inde, for example, each monk was encouraged to recite to himself fifteen psalms in three sets just before Matins began: one for the faithful living, one for the faithful dead, and one for the recently deceased. A short prayer or collect relating to the theme of the set followed each of the groupings. This recital became a universal practice by the tenth century.26 A synod held in 817 at Aachen proved important in establishing an Office of the Dead. The purpose of the synod was to acquaint the other abbots in the region with the reforms in use at Inde with the intention that they be instituted in other communities. It seems that Benedict made an attempt at this meeting to establish the daily recitation of an Office of the Dead as one of the reforms to be translated to the other houses. The fiftieth resolution of the synod relates to prayers for the dead, stating that the psalmi speciales should be said for benefactors and the dead. The psalmi speciales were recited at Monte Cassino as part of their practice for commemoration for a dead brother and were thus texts likely to be already familiar to the abbots. Another resolution from the synod suggests an Office of the Dead should be recited after Compline but includes the stipulation that this be an occasional occurrence. It seems that the suggestion of a daily recitation was not popular, and this notion was abandoned for the sake of diplomacy.27 25 Ottosen, The Responsories and Versicles of the Latin Office of the Dead, 33; Symons, ‘Monastic Observance in the Tenth Century’, 151. The nine psalms, lessons, and responses recited for the deceased each month closely resembles the month’s mind, in which a full Matins of the Dead was recited in commemoration of a particular death. 26 It is not stated whether these are the fifteen gradual psalms. However, in view of later practice, it seems likely that they were. The spread of the practice was likely encouraged by Inde’s role as a model institution for others in Gaul. Bishop, ‘On the Origin of the Prymer’, 213–14. 27 Ottosen, The Responsories and Versicles of the Latin Office of the Dead, 32.

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The abbot of Reichenau, anticipating the reforming verve of Benedict of Aniane, sent two monks to Inde before the synod in 817 to witness the cursus performed there and experience the reforms firsthand. In the report drawn up, these men make mention of the performance of a ‘vigils for the Dead’: As soon as Vespers of the day are over, they immediately say Vespers of the dead, with antiphons, and after Compline, Matins of the dead with antiphons and responses, sung with full and sonorous voice and with great sweetness; next morning after Matins of the day, Lauds of the dead.28

Although the monks do not specify in this passage the daily recitation of this program, it is implied by the statement that the Offices for the Dead be recited after Offices of the Day that were a daily occurrence, and they give no indication that the Offices of the Dead were limited to special occasions. The program the two monks record is very similar to the Office of the Dead that becomes the foundation of commemorative services in the later medieval period and suggests that an Office of the Dead had been established at least by 816.29 While there is no documentation that records whether Benedict of Aniane’s reforms at Inde included a daily Off ice of the Dead other than the suggestive testimony of the two monks of Reichenau, nor any that record the implementation of such an Office at the Synod of Aachen, it seems likely that these reforms and the meeting at Aachen provided the starting point for the wider spread of the Office: 120 to 130 years after this meeting, a daily Office of the Dead was universally admitted among Benedictine monks from various regions.30 The Medieval Office of the Dead The Regularis Concordia, a code of monastic law produced in England between the years 959 and 975 during a relatively stable period in the century, contains various instructions regarding the recitation of an Office of the Dead with relation to its incorporation into the pattern of Hours performed daily during winter and summer 28 Bishop, ‘On the Origin of the Prymer’, 217. 29 Tolhurst, The Monastic Breviary of Hyde Abbey, 107. Some years after the 817 synod at Aachen, Amalar of Metz mentions his monastery’s Office of the Dead was performed on specific days for commemoration, not as a daily occurrence. He also indicates that some houses, and specifically Fulda, commemorate their dead at Lauds and Vespers each night excepting Eastertide and feast days, a change from the practice previously held at Fulda in the years between c. 811 and 812 and the synod at Aachen. Amalar goes on to indicate that others houses said daily Masses for the dead and still others recited a series of nine psalms and nine lessons with the accompanying responses. Bishop, ‘On the Origin of the Prymer’, 218. 30 Bishop, ‘On the Origin of the Prymer’, 219.

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seasons.31 It is clear from this record that the Office of the Dead was a regular feature of the Divine Office and was fully adopted by the mid-tenth century. The Office of the Dead in the Regularis Concordia, comprising Vespers, Matins, and Lauds, was much the same as the Office is now. The organization of the three Hours of the Office were based on the Hours of the Divine Office: each comprised a set series of psalms, versicles, and anthems. The selection of these responses and versicles changed with the region or use in which the Office was practised. This occurred with greater frequency in mainland Europe, where there were many regional uses. Some uses dominated a region: the Use of Sarum in England or the Use of Paris in France might be found in the Office of the Dead anywhere in the country and in combination with other uses. The Use of Rome, especially in the later medieval period, is found in books all over Europe.32 Vespers of the Dead began with the anthem, skipping the introductory versicles found in the Vespers of the Day. There were then five psalms, each with an anthem. These were followed by a versicle, usually A porta inferi, the Magnificat and anthem, and Pater Noster.33 Vespers ended with Dominus vobiscum, a series of collects that varied based on the occasion (funeral, feast day, etc.), and finally Dominus vobiscum, Requiescant in pace, Amen. Matins consisted of three nocturns each comprising three invariable psalms accompanied by anthems and followed by a versicle. Each nocturn also had three lessons with accompanying responses. The lessons were from the Book of Job, with some variation occurring in the last lesson.34 The responses, like the versicles, could vary considerably from place to place. Matins ended with psalms and collects as did Vespers. Lauds followed the same form as Vespers, with five psalms followed by an anthem and finishing with versicles and collects.35 Lanfranc, the first archbishop of Canterbury appointed under Norman rule, compiled a set of ‘constitutions’ governing the monastic day that were drawn from 31 Thomas Symons, Regularis Concordia Anglicae Nationis Monachorum Sanctimonialiumque (The Monastic Agreement of the Monks and Nuns of the English Nation), Medieval Classics Series (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1953), ix. 32 See Ottosen, The Responsories and Versicles of the Latin Office of the Dead. This volume deals with the regional variations in depth throughout, but chapters 2 and 3 are especially relevant. 33 In early texts, Psalms 145 and 141 and the versicles Requiem Aeternam and A porta inferi follow the Pater Noster. These additions were later dropped as a result of chapter reforms in the twelfth century. Tolhurst, The Monastic Breviary of Hyde Abbey, 109. 34 Ottosen categorized the majority of Office of the Dead uses in Europe as belonging to his Group 1d, which used the following set of readings for the nine lessons: Job: 7:16b–21, Parce mihi; Job 10:1–7, Tedet animam meam; Job 10:8–12, Manus tuae; Job 13:22–28, Responde mihi; Job 14:1–6, Homo natus; Job 14:13–16, Quis mihi; Job 17:1–3, 11–15, Spiritus meus; Job 19:20–27, Pelli meae; and Job 10:18–22, Quare de vulva. These were dominant in the uses of England and France, the mendicant and other monastic uses, and from the twelfth century in the influential Use of Rome. Ottosen, The Responsories and Versicles of the Latin Office of the Dead, 62. 35 Tolhurst, The Monastic Breviary of Hyde Abbey, 111.

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the practices of various influential continental houses, such as Cluny and Metz, and also included his own additions and alterations. These constitutions provide an example of the ideal shape of the Office and funeral during the twelfth century.36 Once a member of the community had been judged ill unto death, he was continually read to, from the passion and other gospel narratives and from the Psalter. This was to be done ‘without ceasing so long as he remains alive’.37 The infirmarer was responsible for alerting the community when death was imminent. At this time the community was called to the side of the dying brother, reciting the Credo as they went. The community chanted the seven Penitential Psalms and the ordinary litany. Once the soul had left the body, the bells were rung, a responsory sung, and the commendation of the soul begun. In the meantime, the corpse was removed to be washed and dressed for burial. When the corpse had been prepared, the priest sprinkled the hearse with holy water and censed. The brothers said the Pater Noster, followed by the priest reciting Et ne nos; A porta inferi and the collect. The bells were tolled, and the cantor began a response which the community chanted as the body was moved to the church. They repeated the Pater Noster, Et ne nos; A porta inferi and collect on arrival. A number of the brethren remained with the corpse chanting psalms, while the remainder of the community returned to complete the tasks interrupted by the alarm.38 The brothers were rarely absent from the side of the deceased, a contingent of monks always left with the hearse, reciting the Psalter, commendations of the soul, and the Office of the Dead with Verba mea – all of these frequently repeated and carried on throughout the night.39 The entire community celebrated the Mass for the dead brother in the morning. After the sermon, the deceased was absolved by the abbot, who commanded thirty Masses to be said for him in thirty days. 40 36 For an archeological approach to monastic death see Gilchrist and Sloane, Requiem: The Medieval Monastic Cemetery in Britain, 22, 25. 37 David Knowles, The Monastic Constitutions of Lanfranc, Medieval Classics (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1951), 122. 38 Lanfranc adds that the body be washed by a monk of the same order as the deceased. Thus, a priest for a priest, a deacon for a deacon, etc. An exception is made for the death of children, who are attended to by converses rather than their fellows. The chamberlain was responsible for the provision of the burial clothes, and while the body was being washed, he was present with the appropriate grave clothes as well as a needle and thread for sewing and ‘all else that pertains to his office and the task in hand’. Knowles, The Monastic Constitutions of Lanfranc, 123–25. 39 If the brother died so late in the evening as to make the recitation of at least two nocturnes for him impracticable, the whole community remained in the church to keep the vigil. Knowles, The Monastic Constitutions of Lanfranc, 125–26. 40 This Mass was said in addition to the public Mass. This ensured that a Mass was recited for the dead man every day for the thirty days beginning the day after his burial. Knowles, The Monastic Constitutions of Lanfranc, 127.

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The time allotted for the burial of the body depended on the time of death. Burial usually followed a night vigil and took place after High Mass. The monks went to the body singing the Verba mea while the bells were tolled three times, calling those at a distance to the funeral. The brothers and the children arranged themselves around the bier holding lights. When the cantor intoned the antiphon in paradisum, the community left the church, singing In exitu Israel. The procession to the grave, in which the body came last, was accompanied by a tolling of the bells that lasted until the body had been laid in the grave. At the graveside, the community arranged themselves as they would to stand in the choir. Collects were recited, and the grave was sprinkled with holy water and censed. Two of the brothers who were outside the grave held the pall over it, while two others took the body from the hearse and placed it into the hands of those who had gone into the grave. The body was laid out with a scroll of words of absolution set on his breast. The body was covered and the candles extinguished, and the community returned to the church. 41 From the eleventh century on, there are plenty of written records of the Office of the Dead as performed in monasteries. 42 However, the Office of the Dead, as well as the numerous other devotions springing into common use in monastic communities, had yet to be transferred to the secular clergy. Some monastic sources, such as Lanfranc’s Constitutions, found an immediate audience in the community at Christ Church Canterbury but also would have been used by other communities as well.43 While the instructions in this compilation are most applicable to a monastic setting, there are indications that both monastic and secular communities were intended readers. 44 The transfer of these new observances from the monastic environment to the secular institutions, particularly collegiate and cathedral churches, occurred at the discretion of individual abbots and bishops. The Office of the Dead and other accretions to the daily Hours were adopted primarily during the twelfth century and were completely absorbed by the end of the thirteenth, a period that also saw the founding of many new cathedral churches. There is little surviving evidence that might allow us to fix the dates for the first appearance of these accretions in the secular liturgy. However, those fragments that remain 41 If the death occurred during or after the night Hours but before the morning, he was to be buried after High Mass. If the death occurred after the morning wake-up call, the funeral was postponed until after chapter on the following day, unless a reason caused the burial to take place earlier, after the High Mass or None. Knowles, The Monastic Constitutions of Lanfranc, 128–30. 42 Examples have survived from as many as twenty institutions in England alone. Tolhurst, The Monastic Breviary of Hyde Abbey, 108. 43 On the dissemination of the Constitutions see Richard Pfaff, The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 108–10; H. E. Cowdrey, Lanfranc: Scholar, Monk, and Archbishop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 159. 44 The language of the Constitutions suggests Lanfranc may have intended a wider readership that just his own community. Cowdrey, Lanfranc: Scholar, Monk, and Archbishop, 106.

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indicate that it is likely that the Office of the Dead was a part of the public service by the mid-thirteenth century. 45 By the end of the twelfth century, this Office was being performed with some exceptions on a daily basis in addition to the Office of the Day. While it was performed regularly, it was not always recited in its complete form. Instead, there were numerous variations and shortened forms of the Office, which would be used from day to day. Often only three of the nine lessons, responses, and versicles that formed Matins were recited, with the others inserted on a rotating basis. Regardless of how much of the Office was being performed, it was established by this point that the daily performance of the Office of the Dead was part of the obligatory Hours and prayers required of the professional religious. In addition to the Office of the Dead being performed as part of a daily round of religious observances in monastic and some secular churches, it was also an important aspect of parochial life as a part of funeral observances and commemorative services. 46 The Office was performed on the occasion of deaths in the community as well as in memory of past deaths to commemorate individuals from the parish on ‘mynd’ days. Additionally, other community-based corporate bodies such as guilds performed the Office in memory of their deceased members and on ‘All Souls’ for the deceased members of a parish.

The Office of the Dead in Devotional Books The creativity of the professional religious was not confined to the commemoration of the dead; during this time, additions such as the graduals psalms and the litany were also working their way into common practice. By the tenth century, the fifteen gradual psalms before Matins, the Matins, Lauds and Vespers of the Dead, Vespers and Lauds of All Saints, seven Penitential Psalms, and the litany after Prime were all in widespread use. By around 950, with the exception of the Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the commendations, the texts that become the principals of the Book of Hours were in place. 47 These items, which formed a daily round of supplemental prayer in monastic communities, developed during the same period, with the Office of the Dead being the first of the additions to the Divine Office to be accepted and put into use by the secular clergy in lay communities.48 The Office of the Dead developed in conjunction with those supplementary devotions that 45 There are, for example, several pre-1305 statutes from St. Paul’s Cathedral in London that mention the Office of the Dead. Bishop, ‘On the Origin of the Prymer’, 233. 46 John Harper, The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from the Tenth to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 105. 47 Bishop, ‘On the Origin of the Prymer’, 220. 48 Bishop, ‘On the Origin of the Prymer’, 231.

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would eventually be so widely used and so popular that they were bound together into their own volume as a Book of Hours. Given the importance of the Office of the Dead in devotional life, it is not surprising to find that it was an intrinsic part of the development of this example of popular piety. In written records of the Office, whether ecclesiastical statutes or the Books of Hours, the Office of the Dead hours are referred to by various terms. Vespers is frequently called after the first anthem, Placebo. Similarly, Matins is called Dirige after its first anthem, or Vigilae mortuorum.49 Lauds is very infrequently separated from Matins, and thus Dirige commonly refers to both Hours.50 In documents from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, the Office of the Dead is most often referred to as Dirige or Placebo and Dirige. Reading the Office of the Dead This is a book about images in books, and the focus of the discussion will be on those images. However, since this is a book about books and since the ‘viewer’ discussed throughout is also a reader, it is useful to take a moment to consider what this reader-viewer is doing when looking at the Office of the Dead in a devotional book. The question of literacy, the laity, and the use of devotional literature like the Book of Hours is a vexed one. It is difficult to know definitively how literate lay people were in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Some of the problems are foundational to the subject. Michael Clanchy, writing about the change from oral exchange to written documents before 1300, identifies some of the difficulties and confusions surrounding issues of modern versus medieval language, as terms such as ‘literate’ and ‘illiterate’ were defined and used in the medieval period in a manner quite different from today. He highlights the change in our understanding of what literacy is and how it can be measured and raises the issue of what constitutes literacy in the multilingual society of medieval Europe.51 Clanchy and others such as Katherine Zieman have noted the complexities and confusion that arise in the discourse on literacy when terms and notions pertaining to modern literacy are 49 We see this use in the Regularis Condordia where Matins of the Dead is referred to as Vigils of the Dead. Symons, Regularis Concordia, 22. 50 Lauds is occasionally called after the first anthem, Exultabunt. Tolhurst, The Monastic Breviary of Hyde Abbey, 108. 51 Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record (London: Edward Arnolds, 1979), 182–84; Amtower, Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages, 35. Rosamund McKitterick and Laurel Amtower have subsequently discussed these concerns specifically as related to the early and late medieval periods, respectively. Rosamund McKitterick, The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 2–3; Amtower, Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages, 35–37.

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applied to discussions of medieval practices.52 Concerns of this nature regarding the theory, history, and interaction of orality and literacy have led to a variety of approaches among scholars. Walter Ong, for example, postulated a scheme that places literacy above orality as an advancement toward individuality and critical thinking. Joyce Coleman, on the other hand, suggests that oral and literate culture in the medieval period co-existed as equal partners, describing an environment in which ideas of literacy as ‘progressive’ cannot be usefully applied.53 In addition to the difficulties of definition, some of the problems in the history of literacy arise from the challenges of interpreting the surviving evidence: Susan Cavanaugh has used wills to estimate numbers of books owned in England in the medieval period, Nicholas Rogers has written on the healthy imported book trade of the fifteenth century, and M. B. Parkes and Paul Saenger have used developments in scripts to posit changes in readership.54 Each of these approaches targets a specific kind of evidence and applies the findings to the wider subject of medieval literacy as a whole. While such studies add to the corpus of knowledge regarding medieval literacy, the specificity of the evidence and the ephemeral nature of the subject mean that many facets must remain conjecture. Although these difficulties persist, it is largely agreed that the laity were not as illiterate as was once thought.55 The Book of Hours, owned by both the enormously wealthy and the comparatively poor, those with the most education and those with little, poses an interesting problem for scholars assessing how the book was used. With such diverse ownership, it must have been open to similarly diverse usage. One approach to the problems of definition is the division of reading abilities into various types of literacy. Kathryn Smith, in discussing fourteenth-century Books of Hours, talks about a specifically ‘devotional’ literacy, while R. N. Swanson discusses ‘passive’ literacy.56 Both Smith’s and Swanson’s literacies are based on a holistic concept of the devotional landscape, 52 Katherine Zieman, Singing the New Song: Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 118. 53 Walter J. Ong, ‘Orality, Literacy, and Medieval Textualization’, New Literary History 16 (1984): 1–12; Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 1982); Joyce Coleman, ‘Interactive Parchment: The Theory and Practice of Medieval English Aurality’, The Yearbook of English Studies 25 (1995): 63–79; Coleman, Public Reading and Reading the Public. 54 Susan Hagen Cavanaugh, ‘A Study of Books Privately Owned in England, 1300–1450’ (PhD diss., Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, 1980); Nicholas John Rogers, ‘Books of Hours Produced in the Low Countries for the English Market’ (MLitt thesis, Cambridge, Cambridge University, 1982); M. B. Parkes, ‘The Literacy of the Laity’, in Scribes, Scripts and Readers: Studies in the Communication, Presentation and Dissemination of Medieval Texts (London: Hambledon Press, 1991), 285; Paul Saenger, ‘Silent Reading: Its Impact on Late Medieval Script and Society’, Viator 13 (1982): 367–414. 55 Higgitt, The Murthly Hours: Devotion, Literacy and Luxury in Paris, England and the Gaelic West, 173; Parkes, ‘The Literacy of the Laity’, 283, 296. 56 R. N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, c. 1215–c. 1515 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 78–79; Kathryn A. Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England: Three Women

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and neither are based exclusively on text. ‘Devotional’ literacy as discussed by Smith is characterized by an ‘expanded consciousness’ of religious texts and literature and a simultaneous enriched engagement with pictorial imagery.57 Swanson’s ‘passive’ literacy is similarly characterized by an awareness of the value of texts and involves a receptivity to, and memory for, the content of such texts even when direct access to them was not possible.58 On a practical level, Parkes identifies three varieties of literacy, that of the professional reader, the cultivated reader, and the pragmatic reader, while Saenger identifies readers as having either ‘phonetic’ or ‘comprehension’ literacy.59 The division of literacy into types appropriate to different tasks or levels of education allows for flexibility and diversity in who is considered literate and what they do with their literacy – an openness that is vital when considering the widely owned Book of Hours. Consideration of literacy in the context of the cultural environment of the reader, ‘devotional’ literacy, must contribute to how prayerbooks were understood, and Saegner’s notion of ‘phonetic’ and ‘comprehension’ styles of literacy can be usefully applied to Books of Hours, as these permit enormous variety in how the books were approached by the reader. Some of the owners of these books could read in the ‘comprehension’ manner. Educated readers such as clerics or wealthy men might have been literate enough to read in this sense of silently comprehending the written words. However, many readers would have a more basic level of Latin understanding. For these book owners, ‘phonetic’ literacy may more accurately describe their approach to the book. Saenger describes this type of literacy as one in which the reader recognizes letters and associated phonetic sounds. The reader verbally ‘sounds out’ the text, decoding letters and syllables individually rather than words, and then hears and interprets the sounds produced. The Office of the Dead was a text that a regular churchgoer would already be familiar with through a lifetime of exposure and rote memorization, so the sounds the phonetic reader produced would be easily related to the ritual language of the liturgy.60 Zieman adds to Saenger’s comprehension/phonetic reading dichotomy by suggesting that the abstract ability to read anything (i.e. to read comprehensively) was not a skill that even ambitious layfolk would have aspired to. Rather, she suggests that the and Their Books of Hours, The British Library Studies in Medieval Culture (London: British Library, 2003), 264–65. 57 Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion, 3–4; Margaret Aston, Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London: Hambledon Press, 1984), 101–33. 58 Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, c. 1215–c. 1515, 79. 59 Parkes, ‘The Literacy of the Laity’, 275; Paul Saenger, ‘Books of Hours and the Reading Habits of the Later Middle Ages’, in The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, ed. Roger Chartier (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 141–73. 60 Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 191.

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laity would have been more interested in ‘repertory-based’ reading, a style of literacy wherein texts such as the Book of Hours were transmitted or learned by social practice, from ‘person to person’ as much as from ‘page to person’.61 Laurel Amtower has suggested that the Book of Hours, by combining aural and visual exposure to the Latin of the Mass and Office, over time would have improved the reading ability of the book owner and thus would be a contributing factor in the increased literacy of the later medieval period.62 If this is so, then it is possible that a ‘phonetic’ or ‘repertory-based’ reader may have eventually developed into something more closely approaching a ‘comprehension’ reader through practice and exposure. While a precise translation of the text could not be produced by the ‘phonetic’ or the ‘repertory-based’ reader, in the case of the Book of Hours, this may not have hampered understanding due to the reader’s pre-existing ‘devotional’ literacy – his or her familiarity with the texts from lived experiences in which these words were aurally present. Medieval thinkers themselves distinguished ‘types’ of reading, of which lectio divina was considered among the most effective as a devotional practice. The exemplary devotional reader was the Virgin. She is often pictured in manuscript and panel paintings reading her book alone in a lofty church interior or private chamber at the moment of the annunciation. In many of these representations, the book she reads appears to be a Book of Hours. In her cloistered isolation, she practices the ‘divine reading’ valued by the monastic establishment.63 All readers, and women in particular, were encouraged to follow her example. Royal MS 2 A XVIII (fol. 34; Fig. 1-1) captures both the Virgin exemplar and the aspiration to emulate her in the image of the annunciation. In the upper half of the page Mary, eyes lowered, hands folded, and lips closed, turns away from her book to greet the arrival of Gabriel. Her self-containment and spiritual focus are indicated by her gestures and by the chapel-like enclosure that she occupied alone (until the arrival of the angel). Below, in an historiated initial, a woman kneels before her open book and raises her gaze up toward the Virgin, just as her prayer also rises up toward the Virgin on a banderole.64 The female reader’s 61 Zieman, Singing the New Song: Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England, 131. 62 Amtower, Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages, 37. See also Michael Clanchy, ‘Images of Ladies with Prayer Books: What Do They Signify?’, in The Church and the Book: Papers Read at the 2000 Summer Meeting and the 2001 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. Robert N. Swanson (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004), 111; Sandra Penketh, ‘Women and Books of Hours’, in Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, ed. Lesley Smith and Jane H. M Taylor (London: The British Library, 1996), 270. 63 Laura Saetveit Miles, ‘The Origins and Development of the Virgin Mary’s Book at the Annunciation’, Speculum 89, no. 3 (2014): 632–69. 64 ‘Mat[er] ora filium ut post h[unc] exiliu[m] nob[is] donet gaudiu[m] sine fine.’ Royal MS 2 A XVIII ‘The Beauchamp Hours’, Hours, England (London), c. 1430, fol. 34. London: British Library. Kathleen L. Scott,

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Fig. 1-1. Royal MS 2 A XVIII ‘The Beauchamp Hours’, Hours, England (London), c. 1430, fol. 34. London: British Library. © The British Library Board.

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aspiration to read like the Virgin is emphasized by the visual echoes between them: both women wear white gowns with rich blue overdresses, their books rest in the same position, and both books are bound in bright red. The image of the reading Annunciate Virgin embodies the attributes of the lectio divina that was the basis for devotional reading practices in the medieval period, and the visual and material links between the person who holds the book and the Virgin in Royal MS 2 A XVIII reflect the desire among devout lay people to read like Mary, the literate mother of God. However, without good Latin or the time to set aside for this slow digestion of spiritual food, for most lay readers, true monastic-style lectio divina was not feasible. Nonetheless, the spirit of lectio divina was encouraged in the lay readership by use of the vernacular and by a shift of emphasis to images and imagery as an alternative kind of text that could also be ‘ruminated’ on.65 The Book of Hours is an unusual lay text in that it remained in Latin even while more and more vernacular literature was made available, but its contents also reflect the heightened value of images in late medieval reading. In gazing at the images and putting voice to the liturgical Latin of the Office of the Dead, the reader at home or in church was connected to both the traditional, solitary, Latin-based lectio and to the newer, image-oriented lectio, which involved creative engagement with imagined sound and sight. A reader of Royal MS 2 A XVIII fol. 34 receives the impression that the woman and the Virgin illustrated within it are reading the same book, perhaps the book the reader also has in front of them, a Book of Hours. The physically present reader, the illustrated female reader, and the reading Virgin form a self-contained community of devout readers, connected through time and place by a reading practice supported by devout looking. It is one of the most intriguing aspects of the Books of Hours that the same format should have appealed to such a wide range of ability. It is clear that readers were eager to own and engage with this text, with whatever literacy skills they possessed. With this in mind, the images that accompany the writings take on particular importance as a non-word-based text. The images form an integral part of the Office of the Dead in Books of Hours: they were read and interpreted by all levels of readers/viewers, and in a culture where visual cues were often used by the church to teach and remind, the images contained in books became an important feature used to both inform and assist the reader.66 Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390–1490, A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles (London: H. Miller, 1996), no. 37. 65 Vincent Gillespie, ‘Lukynge in Haly Bukes: Lectio in Some Late Medieval Spiritual Miscellanies’, in Looking in Holy Books: Essays on Late Medieval Religious Writing in England (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 131–33. 66 Clanchy, ‘Images of Ladies with Prayer Books: What Do They Signify?’, 114–15.

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*** In the vibrant culture of Christian faith during its early years, the prevalent attitude toward death was that it was a welcome end to a tiresome physical existence that was fraught with temptation. It was a joyful beginning to a new spiritual life. Care for the sick and dying, as well as care for the dead, was a Christian duty and one of the more obvious ways that Christians visibly differentiated themselves from existing religious practices and a significant aspect of Christian life, then and in succeeding centuries. Burial of the dead numbered among the acts of mercy that were advocated for every good Christian. Images of caring for the dead appear in church decoration, such as stained glass and wall painting, and in manuscripts to remind parishioners of their duties.67 The primary function of the ninth-century Office of the Dead was as a funerary rite enacted immediately after death. It was both a funerary and commemorative service in which the deceased himself was present one last time, speaking through the celebrant. However, once it became customary to celebrate the Office of the Dead daily, the Office began to serve a secondary purpose – one focused on commemoration. In this guise the Office was principally used as a means of remembering the faithful, both the named and anonymous departed, and praying for their safe deliverance from purgatory. Thus, the service was less intimately tied to the circumstance of an individual death. Instead, the texts of the Office of the Dead were interpreted as expressive of the sentiments of all suffering souls in the afterlife. By the thirteenth century, when the Book of Hours including the Office of the Dead was making an appearance in lay and religious society, it was this commemorative purpose that was often dominant in the minds of the readers. While the Office was read during a funeral, it was also read in times of personal prayer and meditation as a reflection on mortality and as a reminder of life’s frailty. We have seen that the Book of Hours developed in conjunction with the increasing accretions to the monastic horarium, such as the Office of the Dead. It is unsurprising that the Book of Hours would be one of the principal modes of dissemination for this Office nor, given that the Book of Hours reflected the growing lay interest in personal devotions, that these Hours should be elaborated with the addition of historiated initials and illuminations. The presence of the Office of the Dead in such a book is itself an indication of the importance of death and the role of the Office in daily devotional practices and in the general devotional lives of medieval communities. 67 See, for example, the Acts of Mercy in Yates Thompson MS 31, fol. 110v, with an image of three clerics reading a service at the graveside, as earth is shoveled over the cloth-wrapped corpse. Yates Thompson 31 ‘Breviari d’Amour’, Spain (Catalonia?), late 14th century, fol. 110v. London: British Library. O. Elfrida Saunders, English Illumination (Florence: Casa Editrice, 1928), 139–40. Images of the Acts of Mercy and the burial of the dead also appear in stained glass, as at the church of All Saints, North Street in York.

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Bibliography Amtower, Laurel. Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Anon. ‘The Teachings of the Apostles’. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 8 of 10 vols., edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, translated by B. P. Pratten. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co.; New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia Online, 1886. Accessed April 1, 2023. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0854.htm. Ariès, Philippe. Images of Man and Death. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. Aston, Margaret. Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion. London: Hambledon Press, 1984. Athanasius. On the Incarnation. Translated by Sister Penelope Lawson. New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003. Augustine. ‘The City of God’. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, edited by Philip Schaff and Kevin Knight, translated by Marcus Dods. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co.; New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia Online, 1887. Accessed March 18, 2023. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1201.htm. Augustine. ‘On Care to Be Had for the Dead’. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, edited by Phillip Schaff and Kevin Knight. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co.; New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia Online, 1887. Accessed April 1, 2023. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1316.htm. Autrand, Françoise, Patricia Stirnemann, Inès Villela-Petit, and Emmanuelle Toulet. Les très riches heures du duc de Berry et l’enluminure en France au début du XVe siècle: Exposition au musée Condé du 31 mars au 2 août 2004. Chantilly: Musée Condé, 2004. Bernard of Clairvaux. St Bernard of Clairvaux’s Life of St Malachy of Armagh. Edited by H. J. Lawlor. Translations of Christian Literature, Lives of the Celtic Saints, V. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1920. Bishop, Edmund. ‘On the Origin of the Prymer’. In Liturgica Historica; Papers on the Liturgy and Religious Life of the Western Church, edited by Edmund Bishop, 211–37. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1918. Bynum, Caroline Walker. The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336. Lectures on the History of Religions, N.S. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Cavanaugh, Susan Hagen. ‘A Study of Books Privately Owned in England, 1300–1450’. PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1980. Clanchy, Michael. From Memory to Written Record. London: Edward Arnolds, 1979. Clanchy, Michael. ‘Images of Ladies with Prayer Books: What Do They Signify?’ In The Church and the Book: Papers Read at the 2000 Summer Meeting and the 2001 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, edited by Robert N. Swanson, 106–22. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004.

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Coleman, Joyce. ‘Interactive Parchment: The Theory and Practice of Medieval English Aurality’. The Yearbook of English Studies 25 (1995): 63–79. Coleman, Joyce. Public Reading and Reading the Public in Late Medieval England and France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Cowdrey, H. E. Lanfranc: Scholar, Monk, and Archbishop. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Daniell, Christopher. Death and Burial in Medieval England, 1066–1550. London: Routledge, 1997. Davies, Jon. Death, Burial and Rebirth in the Religions of Antiquity. London: Routledge, 1999. Donaldson, James, trans. ‘Apostolic Constitutions’. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7 of 10 vols., edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co.; New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia Online, 1886. Accessed April 1, 2023. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/07156.htm. Gilchrist, Roberta, and Barney Sloane. Requiem: The Medieval Monastic Cemetery in Britain. London: Museum of London Archaeology Service, 2005. Gillespie, Vincent. ‘Lukynge in Haly Bukes: Lectio in Some Late Medieval Spiritual Miscellanies’. In Looking in Holy Books: Essays on Late Medieval Religious Writing in England, 145–74. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. Harper, John. The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from the Tenth to the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Higgitt, John. The Murthly Hours: Devotion, Literacy and Luxury in Paris, England and the Gaelic West. London: British Library, 2001. Hilton, Suzanne M. ‘A Clunaic Office of the Dead’. Masters thesis, University of Maryland, College Park, 2005. Jordan, Louis Edward. ‘The Iconography of Death in Western Medieval Art to 1350’. Masters thesis, University of Notre Dame, 1980. Julian the Apostate. The Works of the Emperor Julian. Translated by Wilmer Cave Wright. Vol. 3. Loeb Classical Library. London: William Heinemann, 1923. Knowles, David. The Monastic Constitutions of Lanfranc. Medieval Classics. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1951. McKitterick, Rosamund. The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Miles, Laura Saetveit. ‘The Origins and Development of the Virgin Mary’s Book at the Annunciation’. Speculum 89, no. 3 (2014): 632–69. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Routledge, 1982. Ong, Walter J. ‘Orality, Literacy, and Medieval Textualization’. New Literary History 16 (1984): 1–12. Ottosen, Knud. The Responsories and Versicles of the Latin Office of the Dead. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1993.

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Panofsky, Erwin. Tomb Sculpture: Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini. London: Thames and Hudson, 1964. Parkes, M. B. ‘The Literacy of the Laity’. In Scribes, Scripts and Readers: Studies in the Communication, Presentation and Dissemination of Medieval Texts, 275–97. London: Hambledon Press, 1991. Paxton, Frederick S. Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe. London: Cornell University Press, 1990. Penketh, Sandra. ‘Women and Books of Hours’. In Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, edited by Lesley Smith and Jane H. M Taylor, 266–80. London: The British Library, 1996. Pfaff, Richard. The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Rogers, Nicholas John. ‘Books of Hours Produced in the Low Countries for the English Market’. MLitt thesis, Cambridge University, 1982. Rowell, Geoffrey. The Liturgy of Christian Burial: An Introductory Survey of the Historical Development of Christian Burial Rites. Alcuin Club Collections. London: SPCK for the Alcuin Club, 1977. Saenger, Paul. ‘Books of Hours and the Reading Habits of the Later Middle Ages’. In The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, edited by Roger Chartier, 141–73. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989. Saenger, Paul. ‘Silent Reading: Its Impact on Late Medieval Script and Society’. Viator 13 (1982): 367–414. Saunders, O. Elfrida. English Illumination. 2 vols. Florence: Casa Editrice, 1928. Scott, Kathleen L. Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390–1490. A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles. London: H. Miller, 1996. Sicard, Damien. La liturgie de la mort dans l’Église latine des origines à la réforme carolingienne. Münster: Achendorff’sche Buchdruckerei, 1978. Smith, Kathryn A. Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England: Three Women and Their Books of Hours. The British Library Studies in Medieval Culture. London: British Library, 2003. Swanson, R. N. Religion and Devotion in Europe, c. 1215–c. 1515. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Symons, Thomas. ‘Monastic Observance in the Tenth Century: I. The Office of All Saints and of the Dead’. The Downside Review 50–51 (1932): 449–64, 137–52. Symons, Thomas. Regularis Concordia Anglicae Nationis Monachorum Sanctimonialiumque (The Monastic Agreement of the Monks and Nuns of the English Nation). Medieval Classics Series. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1953. Tolhurst, J. B. L. The Monastic Breviary of Hyde Abbey, Winchester: Mss. Rawlinson Liturg. e. 1*, and Gough Liturg. 8, in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Volume VI: Introduction to the

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English Monastic Breviaries. Henry Bradshaw Society. London: Printed for the Society by Harrison and Sons, 1942. Toynbee, J. M. C. Death and Burial in the Roman World. Aspects of Greek and Roman Life. London: Thames & Hudson, 1971. Zieman, Katherine. Singing the New Song: Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

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Regular Death: Reading the Funeral and Imaginative Practice Abstract: This chapter explores the ways medieval readers engaged with images of ritual through imaginative and meditative reading practices. The repetitive and formulaic nature of the imagery is considered as a visual and imaginative invitatory to the reader-viewer to be absorbed by the image. Images of ritual offer several avenues to the reader through which to engage with an objectified ‘self’, in the representation of the material signifiers of social identity, and in the focus on the corpse within the communal setting. Finally, the evocation of sounded and somatic experiences of the Office of the Dead as represented and experienced through the image is discussed. Keywords: funeral, community, self-fashioning, reader engagement, imagination, sound, ritual

The twenty-first-century popular media image of death is the Grim Reaper or a shambling zombie. However, sensational films and novels aside, when most of us think of death, this is not what comes to mind. It is our own dead we think of, not as a decayed body but as the person they were when they were with us: friend, relative, or colleague. What we recall is a ‘social’ body, a person who was part of a complex of family, community, and broader social networks and who defined and was defined by those relationships. We do the same for ourselves. If we consider the impact of our own deaths, it is usually in the context of how our absence will impact the relationships we are part of. This sense of identity-in-community is essential to our perception of ourselves. It embeds us within a complicated web of interconnected relations: kith and kin, civic, institutional, and economic. Death creates absence and leaves a gap in this tightly woven social fabric. The Off ice of the Dead is unusual among the texts of the Book of Hours in that it is what we might call a ‘functional’ office. Its function was to prepare a community to manage loss, as well as a body for burial and a soul for the afterlife. It was performative in a way the texts of the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin

Schell, S., Image and the Office of the Dead in Late Medieval Europe: Regular, Repellent, and Redemptive Death. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463722117_ch02

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Mary, the other principal text of the Books of Hours, were not. People attended the Office of the Dead; there was an ‘audience’ of family, mourners, priests, and community members. These attendees were at once hearing the Office and potentially participating in it. It was a service that occupied a place in the lived experiences of readers and non-readers alike, an experience of death that was a regular part of life. The images at the Office of the Dead overwhelmingly represent this experience in images of the ‘regular’ death. The images are regular in several senses of the word. As the most common subject of the Office, these funeral scenes are the ‘regular’ or usual choice of subject in this space. The composition of the images themselves demonstrate regularity in the sense of having a reoccurring pattern or arrangement of parts. Given the frequency with which the images appear, the viewer’s encounter with such an image could also be considered ‘regular’ through repeated exposure. Finally, these are images of liturgical process and are thus images of a death that conforms to the established rules and conventions governing medieval Christian death – a ‘regular’ death in the sense of happening ‘according to the rules’. The subject usually presents the viewer with a pall-draped coffin, surrounded by candles, and with mourners and clerics in attendance.1 What we do not see in these images is a corpse. Instead, we see the community actions and structures that occur because of a corpse. As R. C. Finucane has neatly expressed it, ‘death ritual was not so much a question of dealing with a corpse as of reaffirming the secular and spiritual order by means of a corpse.’2 This chapter examines how the ‘regular’ death images work to affirm these relationships for the medieval reader in the context of a lay prayerbook with liturgical text. By picturing a moment of collective cognition when the group acknowledges what a death means for the community as a community, the images emphasize both the contemporaneity and social relevance of the shared experience and text. Through the image the reader navigates toward an understanding of social death. The images create an imaginative space within the book that evokes the place outside the book and encourages a reader to participate in their own and others’ social deaths by reading themselves into the image. By emphasizing community, the images provide a space in which the reader can consider the parallel instances of absence and continuity using the imaginative devotional reading practices encouraged in the late medieval period. The following chapter explores the ways a reader could engage with the images through imaginative and meditative reading practices. The repetitive and formulaic nature of the imagery is considered as a visual and imaginative invitatory to the 1 As described by Lanfranc. Knowles, The Monastic Constitutions of Lanfranc, 124–25. 2 R. C. Finucane, ‘“Sacred Corpse. Profane Carrion”: Social Ideals and Death Rituals in the Later Middle Ages’, in Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, ed. Joachim Whaley (London: Europa Publications Limited, 1981), 41.

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reader-viewer to be absorbed by the image. The space and place of the liturgical image (dis)places the reader imaginatively within the physical surroundings of the Office and in time, allowing the images to be ‘wherever’ and ‘whenever’ the reader needs them to be. The ‘regular’ death images offer several avenues to the reader through which to engage with an objectified self in the representation of the material signifiers of social identity and in the visible focus on the invisible corpse in the communal setting. Finally, the images evoke the sounded and somatic experiences of the Office of the Dead, recalling the reader to the movements and spaces that accompany the performance of the funeral offices. The reader is thus joined to the wider community through the imaginative and recollective experiences inspired by what they see within the pages of the book.

Seeing into the Office: Imagining As introduced in Chapter 1, medieval reading was both like and unlike the activity we are familiar with now.3 The expression ‘reading an image’ is one frequently encountered in art historical texts,4 and in the context of pictures in medieval books, it has some merit. The reading practices of the twelfth through fifteenth centuries were various: interactive, communal, solitary, non-linear, silent, sounded, emotive, and intellectual – often several of these at once. In the medieval understanding of reading, we find a set of practices that embraced the image as a natural component of text, with both the viewer-reader and maker-writer applying similar practices to texts as to images. The medieval reader understood that reading was a somatic activity, located in and happening through the body. To read was to take into oneself the forms one regarded, whether letter or image. To imagine was to ‘see’ with an embodied inner eye. All seeing was considered a fundamentally sensory experience, whether what one looked at was text, image, or that evening’s meal. The optical science of the period held that to see was to be physically joined to the material world (through rays emitted either 3 Medieval reading has been the focus of much scholarly investigation, ranging from explorations of adequate definitions for ‘literacy’ in the period, the impact of gender and class on readers, to ways in which readers and writers collaborated as co-authors of texts. On reading the Book of Hours specifically, see this volume, Chapter 1. Additionally, Franz H. Bäuml, ‘Varieties and Consequences of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy’, Speculum 55, no. 2 (1980): 237–65; Ong, ‘Orality, Literacy, and Medieval Textualization’. On women, literacy and devotional practice, see Annette C. Grisé, ‘Women’s Devotional Reading in Late-Medieval England and the Gendered Reader’, Medium Ævum 71, no. 2 (2002): 209–25; Susan Groag Bell, ‘Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors or Culture’, Signs 7 (1982): 747–68. 4 On the use of this phrase, see Elizabeth Sears, ‘“Reading” Images’, in Reading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object, ed. Elizabeth Sears and Thelma K. Thomas (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 1–7.

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by the object or by the eye).5 Reading was therefore a task based in the body more than in the mind. From Hugh of St. Victor to William of St. Thierry, theologians discussed the practice of reading as a physical action that was bound up with engagement of the senses and in this way joined the reader with the outside world.6 It was also a morally inflected activity, as texts such as the widely disseminated De Oculo Morali make clear. De Oculo Morali, composed by Peter of Limoges in the thirteenth century, is directed at preachers and discusses how sight participates in the spiritual enrichment (or imperilling) of the soul.7 In such a formulation, to look upon pious images was to begin on a path of spiritual growth that would proceed from the exterior to the interior world through various levels of perception, beginning with the bodily eye (oculus corporis) and progressing to the inner eyes (oculus interior, oculus mentis, and oculus cordis).8 Each of these eyes ‘saw’ at a further remove from the physical world and stressed the vital importance the ability of the mind to recall and ruminate on sights previously seen. Augustine and Aquinas make explicit the role of the imagination in spiritual seeing by referring to part of inner vision as visio imaginaria.9 In the Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, Nicholas Love’s adaptation of the fourteenth-century Meditationes vitae Christi, the reader is frequently called to imagine, to ‘behold’, the scene the author has described.10 The following passage from the Friday readings on the crucifixion will suffice as an example: ‘Take hede now diligently with all thyn hert alle thoo thinges that be now to come and make the there presente in thy mynde / byholdynge all that schal be done 5 On the intricacies of medieval ideas on optics, see David C. Lindberg, ‘The Science of Optics’, in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 338–68; Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Suzanne Lewis, Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 6–10. 6 Helen Solterer, ‘Seeing, Hearing, Tasting Woman: Medieval Senses of Reading’, Comparative Literature 46, no. 2 (1994): 130. 7 Over a hundred extant manuscript copies and three fifteenth-century printed editions attest to the popularity of this text. David L Clark, ‘Optics for Preachers: The De Oculo Morali by Peter of Limoges’, The Michigan Academician 9 (1977): 329–43; Kathleen Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England, 1350–1500 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 150–55. 8 Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages, 122–23. 9 S. Ringbom, ‘Devotional Images and Imaginative Devotions’, Gazette Des Beaux-Art 73 (1969): 162; Clark, ‘Optics for Preachers’, 338. 10 On the role of imagination in the Meditationes vitae Christi and subsequent adaptations, see Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages, esp. chs. 4 and 6. For a critical assessment of imagination in Love’s translation, see Ian Johnson, The Middle English Life of Christ: Academic Discourse, Translation, and Vernacular Theology, Medieval Church Studies (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013). Especially ‘Translating Meditation for “Men & Women & Euery Age & Euery Dignite of the Worlde”: Nicholas Love’s Sovereign Ymaginacion’, 95–146.

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aȝenst thy lord Jesu and that be spoken or done of hym and so with the ynner yȝe of thy soule byholde som settinge and sicchinge the crosse fast into the erthe’.11

This passage asks the reader in quick succession to make the scene ‘present in thy mind’ and to ‘behold’ with the ‘inner eye of the soul’. The author uses words for imaginative seeing to encourage the reader to enter more completely into the text. In doing so, the reader envisions (brings into vision) the details of the text in the mind’s eye. The Mirror was among the most popular devotional texts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and is just one example of a genre of devotional texts that encouraged the reader to vividly conjure up devout subjects before the inner eye so that they felt as if they were ‘really there’.12 Barbara Newman has argued that these texts functioned as ‘visionary scripts’ structuring imaginative engagement and providing helpful limits keeping the lay reader within the bounds of orthodoxy.13 However, the invitation in these texts to ‘see’ and ‘hear’ combined with the call of affective devotional practice to ‘feel’ would have been a powerful combination for readers seeking a truly immersive experience, and the line between ‘devout seeing’ and the more problematic ‘visions’ were difficult to police.14 Texts such as the Mirror, and the broader understanding of sight as active and affecting as outlined in De Oculo Morali, cultivated a reader who was prepared to encounter the image, textual or visual, not as a hinderance or distraction but as an aid to a somatically framed, experiential style of pious contemplation – feeling, hearing, and seeing what is before them in text or image. When confronted with images in the Office of the Dead, readers who were practised at this imaginative reading were thus prepared to engage with the images through the senses and in the body, with their ‘bodily ears’ and ‘with thyne eiȝen’.15 Through sight, sound, and space, the reader was immersed in the world of the 11 Nicholas Love, The Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ, A Translation of the Latin Work Entitled Meditationes Vitae Christi Attributed to Cardinal Bonaventura, Made before the Year 1410 by Nicholas Love, Prior of the Carthusian Monastery of Mount Grace, ed. Lawrence F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), 237. 12 On the Love and Pseudo-Bonaventuran Mediations see Elizabeth Salter, Nicholas Love’s ‘Myrrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ’ (Salzburg: Institut Für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1974); Michelle Karnes, ‘Nicholas Love and the Medieval Mediations on Christ’, Speculum 82, no. 2 (2007): 380–408. 13 Barbara Newman, ‘What Did It Mean to Say “I Saw”? The Clash between Theory and Practice in Medieval Visionary Culture’, Speculum 80, no. 1 (2005): 25–28. 14 Elizabeth Scarborough, ‘Living in the Time of Christ: Margery Kempe’s “Devoute Ymaginacion”’, in Devotional Culture in Late Medieval Engand and Europe: Diverse Imaginations of Christ’s Life, ed. Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 367–68. 15 ‘as theyh thou herdeſt hem with they bodily eeres / or ſeie hem with thyne eiȝen done.’ Love, Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ, 12.

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image, being, hearing, and seeing the social environment of the funeral. While the discussion of the spiritual value of devotional seeing usually focused on particularly emotive subjects from the life of Christ and the Virgin, such as the crucifixion, five wounds, the nativity and the lamentation, the practice of imaginative devotional seeing could be applied to any pious image. Although calling to mind events from one’s own experience rather than from the life of Christ, images of death in their many varieties are similarly emotive and make a prime subject for an imaginatively engaged reader. In the deliberate erosion of the boundary between reading and seeing (what Love refers to as ‘devout imagining’), the reader is adjured to become a participant rather than a spectator. Indeed, Bonaventure suggested that the process of imaginative seeing was so effective at absorbing the attention of those who practice it that it would ‘inevitably’ result in their active participation in the imagined scene.16 The beholder of an image of the funeral with all the familiar accoutrements and additions that contemporary fashion dictated need not have applied any particularly strenuous mental energies to the task of entering the imaginative space of the image as a witness to, and participant in, the proceedings it records. As a prompt activating the visio imaginaria, such a response may have been almost automatic in a religious culture that encouraged this type of engagement with images.17 Through contemplation of the liturgical scene, the reader could be transported in time and space, seeing and hearing the sights and sounds as though truly ‘beholding’ them. In Time and Space When Nicholas Love invited his reader to hear and see a text with his bodily ears and eyes, he was asking them to leave the ‘real’ world behind and to fully commit to the devout imagination, ‘pyttynge awey for the tyme and leuynge alle other occupaciouns and beſyneſſes’.18 The familiar and repetitive quality of the ‘regular’ death images facilitated the readers’ efforts in several ways. By presenting a scene that he or she was already conversant with, the funeral image draws on the recollection of a shared communal experience as well as on the readers’ imaginative capabilities, meeting them ‘half-way’ as they worked to ‘put away’ concerns beyond this moment of devotional activity. Additionally, the location, compositional regularity, and iteration of the image reinforced the expected association between the visual 16 Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages, 133. 17 John of Salisbury also writes about the use of imagination to assist with perception and understanding of texts in the context of teaching. As cited in Lewis, Reading Images, 6; John of Salisbury, The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury: A Twelfth-Century Defense of the Verbal and Logical Arts of the Trivium, trans. Daniel D McGarry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955), 66–67. 18 Love, Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ, 12.

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shape and liturgical form of the funeral, preparing the reader for the text to come but also linking it to the performed Office. The images usually appear as miniatures placed above the opening text of the Dirige, on the facing page in particularly grand books, or as a historiated initial; in all cases they precede the text. The regularity with which these funeral images are used at the opening of the Office of the Dead allowed them to function as visual ‘bookmarks’ signaling the text that follows; recognition of the scene indicates the content of the text. Images can be read in this way even where textual literacy is lacking, or perhaps in a rudimentary stage, enabling any reader to orient themselves toward an expected text.19 The placement of the images is significant, for as all readers (and publishers) know, a good first line matters. In this case the image is that first line. It precedes the text and thus is the first thing the reader encounters. This is especially true of historiated initials where the image is contained within and sometimes interacts with the first letter of the first line of text. In this case there is no possibility of not seeing the image, as it is bound up in the text itself. In this situation the images are positioned to condition the reader’s expectations for the text – not only which text it is (as place marker) but how that text is. That is, how should a reader approach these words? How should they understand them? Just as one must arrive at church before hearing the Office at a real funeral, the funeral image with its familiar space sets up the reader to mentally ‘arrive’ before reading the Office. This visual welcome mat is important because an unusual feature of the Office of the Dead funeral images is that they do not directly illustrate the content of the Office of the Dead texts, nor are they of biblical or sacred figures. The Hours of the Virgin, for example, the principal office around which the Book of Hours is structured, is often illustrated with vignettes from her life and the early life of Christ, such as the annunciation, visitation, and nativity.20 These images invoke religious or celestial landscapes, such as the Holy Land or the court of heaven seen in coronation images.21 By contrast, the Office of the Dead, with texts largely drawn from psalms and from the Book of Job, does not usually illustrate those texts but instead offers images of 19 Rebecca Krug, Reading Families: Women’s Literate Practice in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 70–74. 20 Wieck et al., Time Sanctified, 60. On the general trends and notable exceptions to this rule in English books, see Nigel Morgan, ‘English Books of Hours c. 1240–c. 1480’, in Books of Hours Reconsidered, ed. Sandra Hindman and James H. Marrow (London: Harvey Miller, 2013), 76. 21 The court of heaven takes many forms. See for example ‘Neville of Hornby Hours’, Egerton MS 2781. Hours. English, London?, c. 1450. British Library, London, fol. 20v; ‘Harley MS 2884’. Hours. Netherlandish, 1440–60. British Library, London, fol. 102v, with golden and delicate red patterned backgrounds, or the verdant garden of ‘Add. MS 16997’. Hours. French, Paris, early 15th century. British Library. London, fol. 84v. Jacques Coene and J. A. Herbert, Miniatures from a French Horae: British Museum Add. MS 16997, Fifteenth Century (London: British Museum, 1927).

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the ‘now’ rather than a religious past or a celestial future. The Office of the Dead images are unique in this way. The temporally up-to-date images facilitated the immersion of the reader in the world of the image by mitigating the visual distance between what is imaged and the lived experiences of the reader. Sarah Stanbury identifies a similar ‘dissolving’ of the divide between text and image in devotional writing that attempts to evoke the events of Christ’s life. This occurs not only through ekphrasis but also through emphasis on an immediacy of connection between the spectator and the scene, and through the erasure of historical distance (in this case between the scene described and the reader who ‘views’ the image in his or her imagination).22 This is often achieved by calling attention to affecting details (tone of voice, facial expression, etc.) that enliven the scene with a recognizable humanity.23 While not so distant in time and place as the imagined Holy Land, the funeral image draws on a similar capacity in the reader to read themselves into the temporal and spatial environment that the image demands through an evocation of the familiar emotional landscape of the funeral. In both cases the reader is invited to sink into the reading as a sensual experience and to be called away to another time and space, whether this is Jerusalem or one’s own parish church. Many of the images of ‘regular death’ could be described as repetitive and formulaic, but these very qualities offer an entry point for our imaginative reader. The ‘sameness’ and familiarity of the funeral images function to invoke a sense of time that is cyclical rather than linear and that emphasizes the regular recurrence of this event in the community calendar. Each iteration of the Office is liturgically the same as the one before and yet commemorates a different individual. The image thus brings together individual and community identity by collapsing time through liturgical process. ‘Liturgical’ time, as opposed to calendar time, insists on the role of repeated ritual as a method of marking the passage of time. The Book of Hours itself is designed to assist lay readers to engage with the liturgical hours that measure and mark the lives of the professional religious. In this liturgical measuring, the ‘time’ for the funeral will come again and again, each occurence embracing members of the community as participants and witnesses to the ritually marked passage of (life)time. The anytime-ness evoked by the funeral image is emphasized by the anyplaceness of many of them. Images from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries rarely introduce details of space in the scene. Instead, the players enact their roles in a non-space, usually on a background of blue or red diapered patterns or of gold 22 Stanbury, Visual Object of Desire, 177. 23 Michelle Karnes notes that these imagined details might directly contradict scripture, but always with the purpose of more deeply engaging the reader as they added individually conceived ‘thoughtful and reasoned’ particulars. Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages, 172–78.

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Fig. 2-1. Detail, Egerton MS 1151, Hours, England (Oxford), 1260–70, fol. 118. London: British Library. © The British Library Board.

grounds. The historiated initials of the fourteenth-century Hours Huntington MS HM 1346 fol. 119 or Bibliothèque municipale de Boulogne-sur-Mer MS 93 fol. 58 both set the funeral against a gold ground, while the thirteenth-century Egerton MS 1151 fol. 118 (Fig. 2-1) and the Walters Hours, MS W. 102 fol. 55, have red and blue patterned backdrops.24 These backgrounds are non-descriptive yet beautifully and attentively rendered, in a similar manner to the holy spaces called to mind by the shining gold grounds of the Byzantine icon and mosaic tradition and evoked in the medieval west by gilded 24 MS HM 1346, Hours, England, early 14th century, fol. 119. San Marino: Huntington Library; MS 93, Hours, England (York?), late 14th century, fol. 58. Boulogne-sur-Mer: Bibliothèque municipale de Boulogne-sur-Mer; Egerton MS 1151, Hours, England (Oxford), 1260–70, fol. 118. London: British Library; MS W. 102 ‘The Walters Hours’, Hours, England, c. 1290–1300, fol. 55. Baltimore, The Walters Art Museum. C. W. Dutschke, Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Huntington Library (San Marino: Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1989), II, 580–82; A. Gérard, Catalogue Des Livres Manuscrits et Imprimés Composant La Bibliothèque de La Ville de Boulogne-Sur-Mer. Première Partie: Manuscrits (Boulogne-sur-Mer: s.n., 1844), 77–79; N. J. Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts, 1250–1285, A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles (London: Harvey Miller, 1988), no. 161; Lucy Freeman Sandler, Gothic Manuscript 1285–1385 (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 1986), II, no. 15.

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statues and bejewelled crucifixes.25 The rendering of the liturgical scene in the nonspace of the holy ‘other’ avoids any reference to the specificities of calendar time and bolsters the reader’s sense that the actions depicted belong to the recursive time of the liturgical year. They become a visual equivalent to the liturgical text itself, always familiar, always accessible for the task of managing and processing a community death. The sense of shared ritual time can be evoked in other ways than the abstract non-space. Many of the funeral images of the fifteenth century are larger and more detailed than earlier, smaller historiated initials and do provide details of fictive architectural spaces. These details rarely articulate any particular place, but they also do not exclude many possibilities of place. They depict space (in this case the idea of a chapel or church), but they do not depict place (a known, identifiable chapel or church).26 The architectural elements of these images are depicted in broad terms, communicating to the reader a generalized space in which the Office might occur, an appropriate structural setting for the commemorations of the dead rather than any one specific location. In this way, the images bypass references to specific social, economic, and geopolitical identifiers, instead depicting a shared mental space that all readers might recognize: Church rather than church. The space in which the liturgical drama unfolds in the images is part of what makes the images flexibly adaptable and responsive to the interpretive needs of the reader.27 Just as the reader of a text like Love’s Mirror would ‘dissolve’ the boundaries between Chepstow and Calvary through imaginative engagement, so too might a reader find in the funeral image a path to their own parish church. For the imaginatively engaged reader, the image recalls the physical elements of the places they know and its very particular particularities: the sound of the Office there, the size and form of the structure, that irritating drip where the roof leaks. The sounds and the words of the laments of Job and the plangent psalms that comprise the Office are physically contextualized as the reader mentally moulds the image, fashioning from the generic space depicted on the page a place of experienced familiarity. The Office of the Dead is thus located through the image in the contemporary communal spaces of the medieval parishioner and provides a context in which the texts are performed. Liturgical time has been described as time in which ‘the things of the past and of the future and even the eschatological 25 Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2011), 58, and n. 49 on the significance of gold. 26 On space and place as agents of social power, see Robert D. Sack, ‘The Power of Place and Space’, Geographical Review 83, no. 3 (1993): 326–29. A more art historical focus is found in Meg Boulton, Jane Hawkes, and Heidi Stoner, eds., Place and Space in the Medieval World (London: Routledge, 2017), Introduction; Margaret Goehring, Space, Place and Ornament: The Function of Landscape in Medieval Manuscript Illumination (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), chs. 3 and 4. 27 Goehring, Space, Place and Ornament, 109–10.

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things … are condensed and experienced mystically as something living and present before our eyes.’28 The flexibility of these images in time and space/place allows them to be funerals of the past and future experienced imaginatively through sound and space in the present as the reader encounters them anew each time they open their book. In so doing, they are joined with their immediate community and to the broader community of Christians as they engage with the ritual time that marks the passing of the dead. In devout imagining, readers are called to ‘see’ with an inner eye and to use the mind to build a sensually rich mental image – an experienced image. The ‘regular death’ images discussed here are visually set before a reader rather than existing only in the mind, but as we have seen, many of the tasks involved in devout imagining are transferable to the funeral imagery in what we might call ‘devout seeing’, the ability to read oneself into an image as a way of deepening a contextual understanding of the text. This practice could be a deeply individualized activity, setting the reader apart during his or her engagement with this style of pious contemplation. However, by exploiting the images’ quality of interchangeability and considering them as reflective of shared experience, the solitary reader is necessarily joined to the community, bringing private contemplative and public performative experiences together in one image. Like the turning of the seasons, the funeral is part of the regular pacing of medieval life and the devotional ‘clock’ of the community, marking the passage of the years through the lives and deaths of its members. In the ‘regular’ death image, the collective routines of the community are ‘both concretely experienced and shared at a distance and over time’ through liturgical iteration.29 Whether the images provide a glorious nowhere in which the funeral is enacted or depict details of liturgical space, they enable the reader to vicariously participate in this communally experienced accounting of time. The images thus articulate a ritual time and space (in both the quotidian and sacred sense of time) that is enacted with the community and through the Office of the Dead even at the moment of death. Social Place and Visual Material: The Self as Stuff Death introduces an absence to the social sphere and momentarily disrupts established community networks. It is clear from material and testamentary evidence that in the highly visible and widely recognized form of funeral ritual, parishioners found an ideal space in which to articulate their own social identities for a final 28 E. Theodorou as quoted in Konstaninos D. Kalokyris, ‘Byzantine Iconography and “Liturgical” Time’, Eastern Churches Review 1 (July 1966): 359. 29 David Morgan, The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 59; Bryan, Looking Inward, 15.

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time. At times, the preoccupation with material and performative elaborations of the funeral rites suggest that this may even have been considered its primary, or at least co-primary, purpose. The material trappings of the funeral envisaged in the ‘regular’ death images are available for interpretation along social or hierarchical lines but more meaningfully they become a form of self-representation, a way of displaying one’s social body in the community for a final time. The funereal function of social separation is foregrounded in aspects of ritual performed for the highest and lowest in the land. In the pomp and circumstance of many royal funerals, the physical and social deaths of a monarch are separated. Care was taken to ensure that only the material death was lamented and to confirm the longevity of the social. The most famous instance of this is of course the cry ‘The King is Dead! Long Live the King!’ – a verbal confirmation that although the body of the king has died, the social role occupied by the deceased has not died but carries on in the person of the newly ascended king.30 In contrast, at the bottom of the social scale, parts of the formal funeral rites were sometimes appropriated to emphasize the isolation of lepers from the community. The Third Lateran Council of 1179 encouraged the uptake of a ritual of separatio leprosorum in which elements such as the Penitential Psalms and Mass for the Dead were performed over the living leper who took on the role of the corpse, complete with hearse, pall cloth, and scattering of earth.31 During the proceedings the priest would read out the prohibitions on dress and social interactions which now governed the life of the leper.32 This ‘funeral’ signaled the individual’s social death, and at the conclusion of the rites, they were no longer a member of the social body but instead permanently removed to the periphery, an example of a ‘living death’.33 This form of social exclusion as living death was also adopted voluntarily by women wishing to live an anchoritic life. The text and rites of the Office of the Dead formed an important part of the ceremonies of enclosure, and anchorites were encouraged to recite the Office of the Dead every day.34 30 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1985), 314–450, esp. 412–13. Sally Badham notes that some version of this practice of confirming the vivacity of social roles at the funeral also occurred at the level of lord of the village manor. Sally Badham, Seeking Salvation: Commemorating the Dead in the Late Medieval English Parish (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2015), 203. 31 Finucane, ‘Sacred Corpse. Profane Carrion’, 55; Saul Nathaniel Brody, The Disease of the Soul: Leprosy in Medieval Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 64. 32 Brody, The Disease of the Soul: Leprosy in Medieval Literature, 65–69. 33 This was not the only response to leprosy in the community. See also Elma Brenner, ‘The Leprous Body in Twelfth- and Thirtheenth-Century Rouen: Perceptions and Responses’, in The Ends of the Body: Identity and Community in Medieval Culture, ed. Jill Ross and Suzanna Conklin Akbari (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 239–59. 34 Denis Renevey, ‘Looking for a Context: Rolle, Anchoritic Culture, and the Off ice of the Dead’, in Medieval Texts in Context, ed. Denis Renevey and Graham D. Caie (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 196–201.

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The adaptation of the funeral rite to these purposes suggests that the distinction between bodily and social death was broadly understood and that the social was at least as important as the bodily death commemorated at any funeral. These instances remind us how significant communal and publicly constructed identities were for medieval parishioners, identities that could be seen by readers through imaginative engagement with the images presented in the Office of the Dead. The visual opportunities to embellish the funeral ranged from the participation of community members to the inclusion of candles, textiles, hearses, and even architectural structures. The following examines two of these elements, lights and mourners, as consciously employed by medieval parishioners at their own funerals and used in the imagery to suggest these social relations. Hugo de Tunstede (†1346), the rector of Catton in Yorkshire, indicated in his will that at his funeral his body should be surrounded by four poor men clothed in black tunics with hoods and holding torches.35 A wealthier contemporary of Hugo, Walter Percehay, Lord of Ryton Manor (†1344), also in Yorkshire, asked that his body be processed through the manor village with his arms and the arms of his ancestors carried before him.36 At the very top end of the social scale, at the funeral of Henry VII in 1509, the body of the king was preceded by a ‘vast number’ of prelates and servants of the Royal Household, while 600 more followed in full black mourning carrying lit torches.37 Mourners were active participants in commemorative practices and gave social significance to the event as well as demonstrating networks of influence and obligation in the community. Through their involvement the medieval funeral worked to maintain a cohesive social structure.38 Hugo de Tunstede specifically named the four poor men that he wished to have around his coffin.39 Walter Percehay requested his tenants form the convoy for his body, asserting even after his death his social role as lord of the manor. In 35 James Raine and John William Clay, Testamenta Eboracensia, or, Wills Registered at York: Illustrative of the History, Manners, Language, Statistics, etc. of the Province of York, from the Year MCCC. Downwards, Publications of the Surtees Society (London: J.B. Nichols and Son, 1836), 17–19. See also Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, 166. 36 Raine and Clay, Testamenta Eboracensia, 6–7. 37 Some of these participating in the procession were from the parish of St. Andrew Hubbard, whose wardens recorded receipt of 12d for ‘the bearing of 6 torches for the king’ in 1509. Clive Burgess, The Church Records of St Andrew Hubbard, Eastcheap, c. 1450–c. 1570, vol. 34, London Record Society (London: London Record Society, 1999), 91; Paul S. Fritz, ‘From “Public” to “Private”: The Royal Funerals in England, 1500–1830’, in Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (London: Europa Publications Limited, 1981), 62. 38 Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, 165. 39 ‘Item volo quod circa corpus meum sint quatuor personae pauperes, induti tunicis nigris cum capuciis, tenentes quatuor torticeos, quorum quilibet sit ponderis vij librarum cerae: nomina vero personarum predictarum sunt ista, Johannes de Wartre, Willielmus de Berlay, Willielmus Belle, Galfridus de Cornewayl.’ Raine and Clay, Testamenta Eboracensia, 18.

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Percehay’s funeral this is reinforced by the inclusion of his arms and the arms of his ancestors in the proceedings. These are not merely markers of rank; they are markers of family relations, history, rights, privileges, and relationships with other families and the wider community. Not only are the villagers acting as both audience and participant in his funeral; they are also witness to a posthumous attestation to marriage relationships, political and economic alliances, and seigneurial rights. The provision of mourning dress, the enfolding black cloaks seen everywhere in ‘regular’ death images, were an important visible marker of the position of the deceased because of the implied financial outlay they represented. In the well-known 1463 will of John Baret of Bury, he left mourning gowns to many in his extended community. In addition to five men and five women receiving black and white gowns, respectively, he willed that ‘my executoures, my kyndrede, my frendys, and seruauntes haue gownys of black as many as ben expressyd be name in this my seid wille, and if my executours wille adde any moo thereto I graunte hem fulle pover.’ Since Baret names many people in his will, this is a substantial financial commitment and therefore reflective of his economic position in the community. 40 Notably, the gowns of black go to a wide range of groups, distributing the gifts across social and economic lines and uniting them in purpose and appearance during their part in the performance of his funeral. The crowd of black-clad mourners that attended this funeral are thus representative of Baret’s own community – his friends, his family, his servants, the poor of his choosing. Baret’s will and gift ensure that he has this community united visibly and bodily around him at his own moment of social departure. The use of lights at the funeral was essential. Particularly resonant for funeral rites, lights were symbolic of the resurrection, and the materials themselves were theologized as the body of Christ.41 However, wax was expensive, making providing 40 Samuel Tymms, ed., Wills and Inventories from the Registers of the Commissary of Bury St. Edmund’s and the Archdeacon of Sudbury, Camden Society Old Series 49 (London: AMS Press, 1850), 18. At the top of the scale, 3 kilometres of black cloth was used to clothe around 950 mourners at the funeral of Edward III. Chris Given-Wilson, ‘The Exequies of Edward III and the Royal Funeral Ceremony in Late Medieval England’, The English Historical Review 124, no. 507 (2009): 268. On the importance of charitable gifts of clothes in testamentary bequests in France and England, see Kathleen Ashley, ‘Material and Symbolic Gift-Giving: Clothes in English and French Wills’, in Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Clothwork and Other Cultural Imaginings, ed. Jane Burns (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 137–46. 41 As expressed for example in the Candlemas prayer: Hanc in honore pio/Candelam porto Mariæ./ Accipe per ceram Carnem de Virgine veram, /Per lumen numen /Majestatis que cacumen. /Lychnus est anima/Carne latens praeopima. Translation in Jacobus, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, ed. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), vol.1, 149. Margaret Aston, ‘Death’, in Fifteenth-Century Attitudes: Perceptions of Society in Late Medieval England, ed. Rosemary Horrox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 219; Herbert Thurston, ‘Candles’, in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 3 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1908), accessed March 28, 2023. http://www. newadvent.org/cathen/03246a.htm.

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lights among the greatest draws on the parish purse. Individual parishioners as well as groups such as guilds worked to provide them to all members of the community.42 In 1454 Nicholas Honey donated ninety-three dozen candles to various charities: I leave 93 dozen candles to be distributed in the following manner: to relieve the poor and infirm at Bethlehem outside Bishopsgate, 10 dozen; to the Charterhouse next to Smithfield, 12 dozen; to the poor priests of the house of St Augustine Pappey under the wall, London, 7 dozen; to the prisoners of Fleet, 4 dozen; to the prisoners of Newgate, 6 dozen; to the prisoners of Ludgate, 7 dozen; to the prisoners of King’s Bench, 6 dozen; to the prisoners of the Marchalsea, 6 dozen; to the prisoners in the Bishop of Winchester’s prison, Southwark, 2 dozen; to the poor men lying in the hospital of the Blessed Mary Rouncival near Westminster, 7 dozen; and to be distributed to the poor on the day of my funeral, 20 dozen; and to Agnes Levet, 7 dozen. 43

Donations of wax, usually on a less lavish scale, appear regularly in wills from the fourteenth century. 44 Just as the gift of mourning dress demonstrated both f inancial status and charitable engagement of the deceased within the community, the distribution of lights by testators demonstrated the broader networks operative during their lives. The wealth and public generosity of Nicholas Honey’s bequest of ninety-three dozen candles is perhaps ostentatious, but it was a very visible use of material to articulate networks of obligation and communal support reaching beyond his immediate parish community.45 In choosing to discharge his charitable obligation to foundations as well individuals in this manner, Honey’s lights place him at the centre of a web of charitable and commemorative actions that extend out from his parish into the wider social and spiritual landscape of London. 42 Sarah Schell, ‘Death and Disruption: Social Identity and Representation in the Medieval English Funeral’, in Art and Identity: Visual Culture, Politics and Religion in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Sandra Cardarelli, Emily Jane Anderson, and John Richardson (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 73–74. In England the huge paschal candles were sometimes melted down to provide funeral tapers to the poor. Herbert Thurston, ‘Paschal Candle’, in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 11 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911), accessed March 18, 2023. http://www.newadvent.org/ cathen/11515b.htm. 43 Burgess, Records of St Andrew Hubbard, 34:242–43. 44 In addition to the donation of new wax, some testators provided the means to procure wax by donating a yearly income or even bees themselves to the church. Aston, ‘Death’, 220. 45 As expressed, for example, in the injunction in Matt. 25 to offer succour to the sick and the imprisoned. Frederick S. Paxton, ‘The Early Growth of the Medieval Economy of Salvation in Latin Christianity’, in Death in Jewish Life: Burial and Mourning Customs Among Jews of Europe and Nearby Communities, ed. Stefan C. Reif, Andreas Lehnardt, and Avriel Bar-Levav (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 23–26.

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The use of lights to mark out places or persons of social importance was extremely common. The networks built by this type of bequest might be social or occupational rather than spiritual, though they are frequently both. Testators leave lights to their own parish church but might also choose to remember the parish of a previous spouse, ancestor, the burial place of deceased children, or important family relatives and patrons. Joan Rogers (†1495) is a case in point. Joan, wife of a London vintner, requested: xij new torches and iiij new tapers of wax to burn about my body at my Dirige and Mass of Requiem… Of the xij torches I bequethe vij; that is to say, ij torches are to go to the parish church of St Leonard in Shoreditch beside London where I was born, ij other torches to the parish of St Botolph without Bishopsgate of London, another ij torches to the church of St Andrew abovesaid, and the seventh torch to the fraternity of the blessed Trinity held and kept in the said parish church of St Andrew. 46

St. Leonard’s was the parish in which she was born, and St. Andrew’s was the parish in which she was buried. The two churches are in near vertical alignment walking north from the Thames following Gracechurch Street into Bishopsgate. At the midway point in this journey and marking the gates of the city of London is St. Botolph without Bishopsgate. It is not difficult to imagine regular pauses at St. Botolph as she made the journey. The bequests articulate the very path that Joan walked during her life, perhaps many times, as she travelled from her childhood home to her adult home and back. In addition to marking the emotional and physical geography of Joan’s life, these gifts also remember the liturgical passage from baptism in one parish to burial in another, steps on the Christian pilgrim’s journey. Honey’s bequest gifts new wax, but many testators specify the further use to which their own funeral lights might be put, as Joan does here, creating a material connection between the deceased and the community. Provision for lights and the distribution of those lights in the immediate and broader community thus allowed parishioners a layered opportunity to literally cast light on their social place, obligations, and networks. The preceding section looks at just two aspects of the material embellishment of the funeral. The men and women discussed above, Hugo de Tunstede, Walter Percehay, Nicholas Honey, John Baret, and Joan Rogers, all used the opportunity these customary material embellishments offered to visually articulate their place in the community and their connections within it. The choice and disposition of mourners and provisions for dress and lights reflect the social environment of the 46 Burgess, Records of St Andrew Hubbard, 34:215–17.

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deceased. Through these choices, testators attempted to construct a ‘likeness’ of their social selves out of the media available at the funeral, which could be made expressive of the networks enjoyed in life. This social self could be represented in the stuff of the funeral while the physical self, the body, remained out of sight. For the viewer of the ‘regular’ death images, the inclusion of lights and mourners is not only about making the funeral image resemble familiar practices in an effort to create an ‘accurate’ image. These elements are constituents of a kind of visual manifestation of the relationships and life journey of the defunct; the lights and mourners have a semantic field that includes these social identities and represents the hidden participant, the deceased. In such a scenario, it is not possible for the medieval viewer to see lights or mourners in an image of the regular death without also seeing the implied networks connoted by these items. The repetitive nature of the ‘regular’ death images has been noted, as has the efficacy of their generic quality in enabling the reader to use the image as part of a meditative reading practice which is adaptive to their own lived experiences and comprehension of death. In the same way, the importance of the social self is acknowledged in the ‘regular’ death image through inclusion of the accoutrements of the funeral, and the reader sees themselves in the image through those materials. It is not necessary that these items be identical to any one reader’s previous experience of the funeral, because the inclusion of these lights and mourners at all communicate the valued complexity and diversity of the social self in a society in which identities were constructed primarily via familial and community bonds. While representation of a non-specific funeral is by far the most common type of the ‘regular’ death images, there are instances where the genesis of a book is known and where it is therefore possible to posit a correlation between the kind of funeral depicted and the social identity of the intended reader. 47 The Bohun manuscripts provide one instance where this can be observed. Egerton MS 3277 (fol. 142) and MS Adv. 18. 6. 5 (fol. 48) were made for the wealthy and well-connected Bohun family in the fourteenth century. 48 In these books, the Office of the Dead images depict 47 Some Books of Hours were adapted to the expectations of particular readers and families, as owners added dates of personal significance to the calendars, penned in prayers addressed to their own problems and concerns, and even sewed or glued in additional images collected and saved for this purpose. For example, MS XVI. K. 6 ‘The Pavement Hours’, Hours, England (York), c. 1420, York: York Minster Library. This volume contains a number of sewn in images that have been added to the original bound text. Neil Ripley Ker and Alan J. Piper, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), IV, 727–30; Grounds, ‘Evolution of a Manuscript: The Pavement Hours’, 118–38. 48 On the Bohun family manuscripts, see the published work of Lucy Freeman Sandler, esp. Lucy Freeman Sandler, Illuminators and Patrons in Fourteenth-Century England: The Psalter and Hours of Humphrey de Bohun and the Manuscripts of the Bohun Family (London/Toronto: British Library and University of Toronto Press, 2014); Lucy Freeman Sandler, The Lichtenthal Psalter and the Manuscript Patronage of the Bohun Family (London/Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2004), 7–28. Egerton MS 3277 ‘Bohun Psalter-Hours’. Psalter/

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Fig. 2-2. Detail, Egerton MS 3277 ‘Bohun Psalter-Hours’, Psalter/Hours, England, c. 1361–73, fol. 142. London: British Library. © The British Library Board.

funerals consistent with the status of the family, including the elaborate canopied hearses favoured by the well-to-do. 49 In Egerton MS 3277 (Fig. 2-2), the marginal spaces around the text contain images of death and burial which may refer to the funeral proceedings of Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel.50 Along the spine of the D is the hearse; it is a tall structure, with four principal pillars supporting two stepped tiers creating a peaked roof covered in candles.51 It is easy to imagine the visual impact of the hundreds of lit tapers, which carried associations of wealth and position as well as of spirituality. The Hours, England, c. 1361–73, fol. 142, London: British Library; MS Adv. 18. 6. 5 ‘The Psalter of Eleanor de Bohun’, Psalter, England, 1382–c. 1396, fol. 48. Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland. Sandler, Gothic Manuscript 1285–1385, II, 151–54, n. 135 and 163–65, n. 142. 49 The complexity and ornamentation that the hearses of the wealthy reached could be immense. In 1461 Edward IV spent a sum roughly equal to more than £100,000 in today’s money on a hearse. Anne F. Sutton, Livia Visser-Fuchs, and P. W. Hammond, The Reburial of Richard, Duke of York, 21–30 July 1476 (London: The Richard III Society, 1996), 2. Calculation based on the National Archives Currency Converter 1270–2017, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/. Accessed April 1, 2023. 50 Sandler, Gothic Manuscript 1285–1385, II, 153. 51 Sutton, Visser-Fuchs, and Hammond, The Reburial of Richard, Duke of York, 5.

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Fig. 2-3. Detail, Additional MS 50001 ‘The Hours of Elizabeth the Queen’, Hours, England (London), c. 1425, fol. 55v. London: British Library. © The British Library Board.

books that contain funeral scenes such as these are often richly executed throughout and manifest the social place of the Bohun reader by visually conf irming the expensive and ephemeral forms of commemoration that a Bohun reader might have reasonably expected to be present at his or her own funeral. In these examples the image meets an intended reader halfway in the work of imaginative immersion and facilitates the process of self-identification more directly by closely aligning the lived experience of death possessed by a Bohun reader with the representation of death encountered in this devotional setting. Egerton MS 3277 is an instance of a relationship between the image of the funeral and reader, but this is by no means common. In another manuscript of the same period, also originating with aristocratic patrons, the funeral depicted does not mirror social place in the same way. The Hours of Elizabeth the Queen, Additional MS 50001, was likely produced in London in the early fifteenth century (Fig. 2-3).52 It bears evidence of having been in the ownership of Cecily Neville, 1st Duchess of Warwick, and Elizabeth of York, queen to Henry VII, although neither of these women were the first owners of the book. The manuscript may have been commissioned by one of the Neville family, perhaps Cecily’s father. It contains eighteen large miniatures, several smaller miniatures, historiated and decorated initials, and 52 Additional MS 50001 ‘The Hours of Elizabeth the Queen’, Hours, England (London), c. 1425, fol. 55v. London: British Library. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390–1490, II, 171–76, n. 55.

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extensive border decoration. By every measure, it is a lavishly illustrated volume designed for an aristocratic reader. The Office of the Dead illustration (fol. 55v) shows the funeral. While the high quality of the illustration certainly suggests an expensive commission, and by association an intended reader of some importance, the details of the funeral depicted do not. We might reasonably expect to see the hordes of mourners and elaborate hearses that appear in the Bohun manuscripts. The obsequies of elite families such as the Nevilles or the Bohuns were not simple affairs. However, the funeral presented in this manuscript is restrained, with no elaborate hearse or procession and a mere handful of mourners in attendance. It is often not possible to know the f irst owner of a Book of Hours, let alone whether the methods of production allowed for the kind of specificity noted above in the Bohun manuscripts. The Hours of Elizabeth the Queen demonstrates that even when we can locate a manuscript’s origin reasonably accurately, the status of the owner and the elaboration of the funeral scene may not correspond. Wealthy patrons, it seems, felt no need to insist on a scale of funeral that they might expect for themselves. Within the image-funeral, any coffin, pall, lights, number of mourners, or other material embellishments are meaning laden, carrying implications of social presence that can be used and interpreted by the reader regardless of the scale of funeral that they might expect for themselves. There are lots of little ways in which these ‘regular’ death images vary. They are more or less detailed, of high and low quality; some are large and others small. What they share, however, is a concern with representing a recognized, dignified, attended, and properly executed service – very much a ‘regular’ funeral. In this respect they reflect aspirations for social recognition and dignity in life. A fancy death suggests that one made good in life. Simple though the compositions sometimes are, these are not pictures of shabby funerals. The candles are tall and fat, the palls are voluminous and decorative, the mourners are in mourning garb, the clergy are out in force. The images reinforce the idea of the good death made visible through the (expensive) stuff of commemoration and, by association, the idea of a good life lived. They also capture medieval aspirations for death. A ‘good death’ was one for which the faithful were prepared. Part of being prepared was having one’s worldly goods in order and articulating through testament and testimony what one desired to happen after death. John Baret’s long and detailed will is a prime example of this. He outlines all manner of particulars about what he expects to happen during his funeral and makes provisions for his tomb and continued memorials.53 For the reader of the Office, these images of a well-planned, well-attended funeral engage with their own desire to structure 53 Tymms, Wills and Inventories from the Registers of the Commissary of Bury St. Edmund’s, 15–44.

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this last public appearance in a communal space. The reader is invited to see in these images a social self that is self-fashioned and presented to the community: a portrait of the social body painted in the performance and accoutrement of a funeral. The effort medieval parishioners made to visually articulate their social position through the components of the funeral reminds us of two challenges in representing and confronting one’s own mortality. The first is that the image of the corpse (very much not on display in these images) remains difficult to acknowledge as our own inevitable future. It is much easier for us to see ourselves in the familiar dressings of the funeral than to comprehend what it is to be a lifeless body. This form of self-identification, through dress, possessions, and other forms of material display, is practised throughout life, and in the ‘regular’ death image, it is an easy step to see the funeral trappings as a meaningful extension of this practice into the immediate post-death moment (as indeed, it is). A corpse is unfamiliar as ‘me’ and stays unfamiliar no matter how many others we have seen. For the reader seeking to understand what it looks like to die and what it means to be dead amongst others who are living, it is more intuitive to look at and to understand the material of the funeral as an image of self than it is to understand the corpse as oneself. This way of reading the ‘regular’ death image privileges the importance of identity-incommunity over that of identity-in-body. The second is that medieval men and women did their utmost to delay the moment of their own social death, to prevent themselves from being absent from the world of the living even after their own physical deaths. The gifts of mourning dress or the distribution of lights to the wider community helped to maintain material ties to the deceased after death. However, just as the physical body dissolves, so too does the social body. If the materials of the funeral can be read as a portrait of the social self, it is a portrait that gradually fades over time as the lights burn up and the cloth wears out. In the ‘regular’ death image, however, these markers of self remain stable and available for each reader to recognize and interpret. Absence is the essence of the social death, frightening to those who will remain and unfathomable to those who will be gone, but it is also the reason for the funeral and the subject of the image. The very nature of death as absence invites images and practices that recall the absent and thus provide avenues to include them. Here, the carefully rendered material stuff of the funeral in the ‘regular’ death images manifests both the absence of the social self and recalls it. Like a shadow, the shape of the communally structured identity is still clearly visible, but only momentarily. As the community adapts, as the sun shifts, so too will the social shape of the deceased fade from view as the living body already has.

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Reader as Body The unseen but implied body of the deceased in the coffin is central to the ‘regular’ death compositions, and it often takes up more space than any other single element. In MS Adv. 18. 6. 5 (fol. 48), the coffin and hearse occupy so much of the pictorial space that the figures in the image are stuffed around the edges. In Edinburgh University Library, MS 39 fol. 70 (Fig. 2-4), a more modest coffin is centrally placed and surrounded by a cluster of black-clad mourners.54 Although a body is presumably present (we cannot tell), neither its humanness nor its deadness is seen in these images. The inorganic and unrevealing form of the coffin is the single visual reminder that everything in the image is a result of, and focused on, a human corpse. In an age that was familiar with illustrations of bodies in various states of deadness, there is a notable lack of interest in the body in the ‘regular’ death imagery. This deemphasis on the physical is at odds with the gleeful indulgence in descriptions of bodily death and decay that one finds in the literature and images of this time, including some Books of Hours.55 However, this very lack of body provides a space for imaginative devotional seeing, in which an assumed body reflects the needs of the reader and can metamorphose between states as ‘mine’, ‘other’, and ‘all’ bodies in the Christian community. The generic nature of the ‘regular’ death images allows them to be any funeral and all funerals, which the reader interprets to suit their particular circumstances and devotional needs. When the Office was read for the souls of the general community of the Christian dead, the implied body was not ‘me’ or ‘mine’ but rather ‘any’ and ‘all’ members of the community. Neither the viewer nor the maker of the image knows what any one funeral will look like, but the ‘regular’ death imagery presents a recognizable possible future into which a reader can insert their own experiences, losses, and devotional desires. The non-specificity of the body allows a flexible any-person reading of the image, just as the non-specificity of setting and place allows for the image to be anywhere and anytime. The image can thus be adapted to suit the various reasons that a reader might engage with the Office of the Dead. The image’s imagined corpse could be any corpse, but as medieval devotional practice encouraged remembrance of family, friends, and patrons through formal prayer, it would frequently be a known body, such as a relative, neighbour, or child. One could, for example, read the Office for the soul of a recently deceased parent, 54 MS 39, Hours, England, c. 1420–40, fol. 70, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Library. Catherine Robina Borland and University of Edinburgh Library, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Western Mediæval Manuscripts in Edinburgh University Library (Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, 1916), 69–73; Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390–1490, 235–37, n. 81. 55 See this book, ‘Repellent Death’.

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Fig. 2-4. MS 39, Hours, England, c. 1420–40, fol. 70. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Library, Heritage Collections. © The University of Edinburgh. CC-BY licence.

allowing the unseen body to become that absent body. The general funeral becomes an image of that funeral, evoking specific memories of a particular time and place. The picture is transformed by association, and in that moment of immersive reading, it is the funeral of that parent, just as the words of the Office that accompany it are the words of the Office of the Dead that were performed at the parent’s funeral. In this way, the reader brings into the Book of Hours a specific moment in their own history by investing personal meaning in the absent body of the Office image. It is the reader’s use and engagement with the ‘regular’ death image that makes it meaningful rather than any internal quality of subject matter or iconography.56 The devotional meaning of this imagery is thus not inherent to the image but is 56 Morgan, The Sacred Gaze, 55.

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profoundly relational. It is not only an imagined body of the deceased that gives the funeral image valency but the imagined body in relationship to the reader’s own real body; the reader is constitutive of the meaning of the work. Indeed, the reader’s own body is situated before the image of the funeral just as the reader’s body has been situated in real space during the performance of the Office at funeral services. In both cases, the meaning of the funeral (image or otherwise) changes with the relationship between the viewer/participant and the (imagined) corpse. The ‘regular’ death images consistently provide a ‘mourner’s eye view’ of the proceeding, inviting the reader to be present in this capacity. The foreground emptiness permits the viewer a clear and unobstructed view of the coffin. The emphasis on the coffin is a visual meditation on the purpose of the text with which the reader has already begun to engage and a reminder of what is at stake in the task. However, a visual and spatial distance exists which the reader must cross to imaginatively approach the coffin and join the other mourners. The devotional in-between space is a visual buffer between the reader who is embarking on the reading and those in the images who are now (and are always) already deeply engaged with the text, meaning, and performance of the Office of the Dead. Together these visual qualities create an atemporal initiatory space which gradually incorporates the reader as they mentally move from the external everyday to an internal devotional space, in the process imaginatively moving from the outside to the inside of the circle of mourners. The interior orientation is modelled for the reader by the other mourners in the image. They do not engage with the viewer, they rarely look up, and their faces are often obscured. They remain oblivious to the presence of the viewer, entirely absorbed by their own devotions. Evelyn Reynolds identifies the medieval exemplar of mourning, the Pietà, as one of the ‘paradigmatic representations of absorption’ in medieval imagery.57 Drawing on Michael Fried, Reynolds argues that images of intense absorption or concentration like the Pietà invite mimetic engagement from the viewer while simultaneously denying them access to the group, as represented concentration (like real concentration) fails to acknowledge bystanders. In the representation of the Pietà, it is the absolute quality of Mary’s concentration, her isolation, and her lack of awareness or involvement with the viewer which ultimately exclude them from joining in Mary’s grief.58 As the medieval exemplar of mourning behaviour, the Pietà bears comparison with the ‘regular’ death images. 57 Evelyn Reynolds, ‘Trance of Involvement: Absorption and Denial in Fifteenth-Century Middle English Pietàs’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 116, no. 4 (October 2017): 439. 58 Reynolds, ‘Trance of Involvement: Absorption and Denial in Fifteenth-Century Middle English Pietàs’, 440–41. The Pietà, in Books of Hours and elsewhere, was frequently portrayed without any surrounding narrative details of landscape or setting, isolating the object of devotional attention. Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages, 255.

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Both images use absorption to represent the emotional intensity of contemplating death, particularly of contemplating a death near to us, and to encourage emotional engagement from the viewer. In the case of the Pietà, while this absorptive image may prompt the viewer to pursue co-feeling, the inaccessibly divine nature of the subject sets the mourning mother of God at a remove from the viewer, ‘beyond affective reach’.59 The ‘regular’ death images, on the other hand, present an image of mourning that is affectively available to the reader. It becomes so by leaving devotional and physical ‘space’ for the viewer within the image itself. In MS 39 the centre foreground space is framed by mourners who appear to deliberately step aside to grant the reader access to the liturgical space. The mourning figures do not need to acknowledge the viewer, because the composition itself maintains the open invitation to join with the participants. This structural opening enables the reader to engage with the others without interrupting the devotional absorption that they display and thus facilitates rather than blocks the invitation to mimetic engagement with the devotional task in this familiar liturgical rite. Additionally, the invitation to the reader to ‘join in’ as a mourner is reinforced by one or several of the mourning figures inhabiting the foreground space nearest to the viewer. The mediating figure is rooted within the frame of the image but occupies the space between the reader-viewer outside the frame and the remaining group of mourners and clergy. This mourner is oriented toward the coffin just as the reader is oriented toward the coffin. They are an embodiment of the physical attitude and behaviours that the reader is encouraged to emulate and are a visual bridge to the larger community represented by the remaining figures and clergy. In Edinburgh MS 39, this role is performed by the seated foreground mourner who echoes the physical position of the reader. Both the viewer of the image and the figure in the image hold their prayerbooks open to the Office of the Dead text, each contributing to the community work of prayer and observance. Via this figure, the devotional space of the image extends beyond the mediating mourner in the image to include the viewer without. The viewer ‘steps in’ to fill the empty space of the image, joining the community and completing the encircling of the coffin. In this way, the reader’s own body fills the compositional gap in the image and the metaphorical absence in the community group. The role of the mourner is one that people played multiple times over the course of a lifetime, close-up at funerals of family and friends as well as from a distance at the funerals of the noble or noteworthy of the community. The reader may read the Office while imagining him or herself as one of the mourners; indeed, they may have stood just where the figures in the image do, dressed as they are and 59 Reynolds, ‘Trance of Involvement: Absorption and Denial in Fifteenth-Century Middle English Pietàs’, 440.

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bearing lights or torches similar to those represented. The cultivation of imaginative presence through images allows the reader to be an active participant in funeral ritual whether or not they are present at a ‘real’ funeral. Through engagement with the image, the reader takes a spiritual place among the community of mourners in the image-funeral. In the ‘regular’ death image, the viewer is invited to be the mourner but also to be the mourned. An imaginative engagement with mortality was the only avenue available for a somatically rooted preparation for one’s own death. The mental ‘dress rehearsal’ enabled by activities such as reading and viewing the Office of the Dead images and texts was encouraged as part of a regime supporting the soul health of the devout.60 As part of this practice, the invocation to a devotional ‘behold’ becomes a call to the reader to see their own funeral and to take on the role of the corpse themselves. As an introduction to the Office text, the ‘regular’ death image, with its lack of visible body, initiates this practice by providing an ‘empty’ space for the imaginative reader to inhabit: the coffin. The image becomes a ‘you-are-here postcard’ from an inevitable future, helping to situate the reader as a dead body and shape an emotional space in which the reader is conscious of reading the Office of the Dead as though reading over their own corpse. While it withholds sight of a body, the ‘regular’ death imagery acknowledges the essential presence of a body by visual emphasis on the coffin. As noted above, the compositional structure is such that there is nothing obscuring the view of this object. It is centrally situated and slab-like in its insistent, angular occupation of the space. It is the clear destination, the hard stop of the eye’s journey through the image. For the reader intent on imagining themselves into that box, the visual path is unobstructed. The familiarity of the scene reinforces the inevitable reality of the moment, but it is an uncanny image. After all, when the reader is dead, they cannot be witness to these events. This uncanny quality highlights the complex relationship between seeing the body as ‘mine’ or ‘other’ and the impossibility of understanding death except through the deaths of others. We have, and can have, no advance subjective experience of our own deaths. To fill in this experiential gap and provide fodder for the imaginative engagement with their own mortality, the reader uses whatever experience of death they have, and these deaths are necessarily the deaths of others.61 In addition to emotional responses to the deaths of others, the reader’s experiences of death would include participation in the Office proceedings, recollections of 60 Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion, 97; Daniel McCann, Soul-Health: Therapeutic Reading in Later Medieval England (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018), 28. 61 Sylvain Camilleri, ‘A Phenomenology of Death in the Second Person’, The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 8 (2008): 140.

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which are already prompted by the image. As the reader looks on the ‘regular’ death image and draws on this knowledge, they make themselves into the perceived body as well as the perceiving body. The reader’s own body becomes the contemplated ‘other’, considered, for a period of meditation, as they would another’s body rather than their own. The objectification of the imaginatively dead body allows the reader to apply to themselves what they experienced at the death of others. As they project their own ‘othered’ body into the coffin, the grief, fear, relief, and other responses to death that the reader has known and suffered in the past can be suffered in the present on their own behalf. They can mourn themselves. Similarly, although we can have no subjective experience of our own permanent absence from the community, through the image the reader can gaze on their ‘own’ absent corpse and speculate. In the eye of the reader-viewer, the anonymous mourners of the ‘regular’ death imagery are recast as known friends or relations. The anonymous clergymen are recognized as confessors, teachers, and preachers from the community. The reader themselves occupies a foreground seat as a participant at their own funeral, mourning in advance their own loss of life. In all guises, the imagined body in the coffin, whether our own or another, is significantly framed by community. The ‘regular’ death imagery’s emphasis on the social body is underlined by its lack of physical articulation. In these images the reader-as-mourner gazes at the inferred body as the visual centrepiece of the liturgical and social pageant that is the funeral, rather than viewing it as a physical remnant. The body in the box may be corporeal, but the body on display is the social body.62

Hearing Community: Image and Liturgy Church ritual was a multi-sensory experience. People attended both to hear and to see the Mass. The first exposure to the Office of the Dead for most people was almost certainly not as silent text but as sounded words and visual experiences. The ability of sound to be simultaneously experienced and contributed to by large groups is unique among the senses, and the shared sound of funeral ritual is part of how it functioned to structure collective mourning. Church and funerals were rich and distinctive aural spaces. The impact of this sound environment on those experiencing it, the participatory nature of sound, and capacity of sound to transport the listener were used by the devout to intensify the imaginative experience. When Nicholas Love primed his lay readers for the immersive experience of devotional reading, he did not just tell them to see what they read but also to hear it as though 62 The significance of the corpse as representative of bodily death is examined in the next chapter.

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with their own ‘bodily eeres’.63 The ‘regular’ death images invoke the soundscape of the Office of the Dead and invite the reader to engage with sound as well as sight as part of their reading practice. They do this on two levels: inside and outside the frame. The images have an implied internal soundscape that operates within the confines of the image frame. They depict people in the process of making sound, and these sounds have a known shape in the memory of the reader. The images were also seen and read in relationship with the broader sounded environment outside the frame – that is, they could be used while in an aurally complex space such as a church or at a funeral itself. Both the soundscape in the image and the use of the image in a soundscape recall the specific tones of the Office of the Dead. Together with the visual aspects, these elements work to generate a sensorially rich involvement with the image for the reader. The soundscape of the Office of the Dead as experienced by the reader is connected to the community orientation of lay and professional religious life, as well as to devotional practices which encouraged reading that was sounded aloud. When practised with an attentive mind and heart, reading aloud was considered the best approach to reading the hours and offices of the monastic life. The reader sees with the eyes the letters on the page, shapes with the lips the holy words, and hears with the ears the sounds of the church. Pierre des Gros wrote in 1464 that reading aloud prompted devotion. It united thought and attention; served God with body and soul; and reflected the gospel’s call to speak with the ‘heart’s abundance’.64 The production of sounds was an expected and encouraged part of a devotional practice. The liturgically true nature of the Office of the Dead text in the Book of Hours meant that when the reader vocalized the texts of the Office, they were joined to other members of the Christian community who were also hearing and speaking this identical text. They were thus directly engaged with the communal Christian liturgical practice that is depicted within the ‘regular’ death image. A lay reader could share these sounds with others by reading in company. Parishioners used the common space of the church for various purposes outside the established rounds of Office and Mass, some directly and some more indirectly 63 ‘as theyh thou herdeſt hem with they bodily eeres / or ſeie hem with thyne eiȝen done.’ Love, Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ, 12. 64 ‘And this vocal heartfelt prayer produces four benefits. First, it prompts devotion […] The second [benefit] is the congregation of thought and attention, as thought focuses better when the voice joins devotion since, because faulty words distract from good thought, the good [words] unite and bond one with God. The third is full service to God, as it is right that man serves God with all he has taken from God. Since he has taken soul and body, it is right that he serves God by soul through prayer and by heart and body through vocal prayer. The fourth is redundancy since, through such prayer, the devotion of soul resonates in the body as Jesus Christ has said in the Gospel: of the heart’s abundance, the mouth speaks.’ As quoted in Sterponi, ‘Reading and Meditation in the Middle Ages: Lectio Divina and Books of Hours’, 672. Both Luke 6:45 and Matt. 12:34 contain verses that refer to the ‘heart’s abundance’.

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related to the religious business of the church. For some, such as Margery Kempe, it provided a place for devotional reading.65 The sound of the reading happening there would have been a constituent of the familiar sound of the church. A manuscript copy of the Speculum peccatoris (Douce MS 365, Oxford, Bodleian Library) made for Margaret of York in the late fifteenth century contains a digression castigating loud (and vain) church readers: ‘And there are others, especially young ladies, who show you large books of hours, very pretty ones, which are gilded inside and outside. While they hold them open, they pester you with such a flood of words so that all they do is hinder others in their devotions and sometimes even hinder the priest saying the mass.’66 The readers in the statement are engaged with their books in a communal setting, impacting the overall soundscape. An alternative account emerges from a Venetian ambassador to London in 1500. He presents an elegant picture of literate ladies attending Mass with Books of Hours and occupying themselves ‘with some companions, reciting it in church verse by verse, in a low voice, after the manner of churchmen’.67 These readers were neither silent nor alone as they engaged with the texts and images of their books; this instance of devotional reading was a social interaction. It is an example of the socially oriented ‘aural’ culture that existed alongside and complimented both the oral and literate modes of knowledge sharing in the later medieval period.68 Throughout the Book of Margery Kempe, for example, Margery describes ‘reading’ with her confessor and various mentors, such as the bishop of Lincoln, Philip Repingdon, and the scholar and cleric Alan of Lynn, this despite the fact that she claims early in her text that she is illiterate and would thus be unable to read as we know it today.69 Margery is practising aurality: she ‘reads’ with her ears in the company of others. In so doing, she engages aurally with the 65 Margery Kempe was saying her prayers at church with ‘hir boke in hir hand’ when a piece of the vaulting at Saint Margaret’s Church fell down on her. Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 83, lines 654–65. 66 This was a popular text of the period and circulated in English, French, Dutch, and German. The above passage appears only in this manuscript copy: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce MS 365, Devotional miscellany. Flanders, c. 1475. Andrew Taylor, ‘Displaying Privacy: Margaret of York as Devotional Reader’, in Cultures of Religious Reading in the Late Middle Ages: Instruction the Soul, Feeding the Spirit, and Awakening the Passion, ed. Sabrina Corbellini, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 25 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 286–87. 67 Charlotte Augusta Sneyd, trans., A Relation, or Rather a True Account of the Island of England; with Sundry Particular of the Customs of These People, and of the Royal Revenues under King Henry the Seventh about the Year 1500 (London: Camden Society, 1847), 23. As cited in Rentz, Imagining the Parish in Late Medieval England, 152. 68 Joyce Coleman defines aurality as the practice of reading aloud to an audience of one or more listeners. Coleman, ‘Interactive Parchment’, 64, n. 6. 69 On the tension between orality and literacy in the Book of Margery Kempe, see Robert C. Ross, ‘Oral Life, Written Text: The Genesis of the Book of Margery Kempe’, The Yearbook of English Studies 22 (1992):

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written word, participating in discussion, debate, and reiteration of the texts as she seeks to understand them.70 Some of the Speculum’s irritating girls or the Venetian ambassador’s elegant ladies may have been doing the same with their pretty gilded books as they read the Office of the Dead. In the situations described, the readers are also collectively viewing the images associated with the texts. Aurality enabled moments of sociability as the activities of reading/listening transformed into conversation and back again over the subject of the text.71 The ‘regular’ death image is part of the Office text and thus also part of the conversation. These moments of exchange allow a collective cogitation where the viewers can consider the connotation of the image not only for themselves but for the group. In addition, by reading the text and viewing the image of the Office of the Dead in conjunction with others outside the structure of the performed Office, the readers have the opportunity to pause, discuss, reflect, and otherwise engage with concepts of death in an intimate social interaction. The communicative moment is supported and intensified by the shared experience of both the sight (in the image) and the sound (of the reader) of the Office. Readers also engaged with the Office images in tandem with the structured performances of the Office, where they would simultaneously see and hear the words of the Office as it was performed. Reading in this situation is reflected in the imagery of the ‘regular’ death, as in MS 39, fol. 70 (above, Fig. 2-4), or MS Richardson 34, fol. 88v (Fig. 2-5).72 In these images the reading mourners in the foreground look down on their own books while also being part of the funeral proceedings. From their location, the figures in the image participate in, but are also audience to, the performance of the clergy – just as the reader outside the frame of the image was potentially both participant and audience member at a funeral. The communal nature of funeral liturgy is enhanced by the ‘communicative moment’ achieved through a shared experience of the Office as both seen and heard. The mourners with books pictured in these images are both viewers and listeners, just as the reader

226–37; Diana R Uhlman, ‘The Comfort of Voice, the Solace of Script: Orality and Literacy in “The Book of Margery Kempe”’, Studies in Philology 91, no. 1 (1994): 50–69. 70 Ryan Perry and Lawrence Tuck, ‘“[W]Heþyr Þu Redist Er Herist Redyng, I Wil Be Plesyd Wyth Þe”: Margery Kempe and the Locations for Middle English Devotional Reading and Hearing’, in Spaces for Reading in Later Medieval England, ed. Mary C. Flannery and Carrie Griff in (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), passim, but esp. 140–42, 145. 71 Coleman, ‘Interactive Parchment’, 71, 74. 72 MS Richardson 34, Hours, England, c. 1470, fol. 88v. Cambridge, MA: Houghton Library, Harvard University. W. H. Bond, C. U. Faye, and Seymour de Ricci, Supplement to the Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada (New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1962), 247; Roger S. Wieck, Late Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts, 1350–1525, in the Houghton Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard College Library, 1983), 92, no. 45.

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Fig. 2-5. MS Richardson 34, Hours, England, c. 1470, fol. 88v. Cambridge, MA: Houghton Library, Harvard University.

holding the book outside the image is both viewer and listener; both encounter in their books the written and the spoken words of the Office. For readers looking at an image of the Office while they are at the Office, they are not only reading-hearing the funeral service but potentially also seeing-seeing

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it, both in the book and physically before them. This must certainly have been the case for the readers of Richardson 34 and MS 39 if their owners took them to church on such an occasion. This double seeing enabled the reading practice discussed above, making it easier for the reader-viewer to conflate the somatic experiences of the Office with the devotional practice of commemoration. The readers are actively participating publicly with what the image encourages them to do when they read privately. The double seeing both promotes and confirms devout social behaviours whether publicly shared or privately emulated. The ‘regular’ death images thus visually confirm both the social nature of the experience of death and the importance of sound as a method of community engagement in and participation with it. There were three funerals which readers could experience, possibly all at once: the funeral in reality, the funeral in the image, and the funeral imagined in the mind of the reader. While the first two have material manifestation and exist outside the reader, the last is immaterial and interior to the reader. Achieving vivid interior sight through devotional seeing was the goal of contemplative practice and one which could be aided by the real and remembered inclusion of the immaterial, reverberating sounds of sung collective prayer. The ‘regular’ death images were essential in assisting readers to connect with these sounds of communal practice even in the absence of a surrounding auditory experience. All people, literate or otherwise, would have been familiar with the sounds and structures of the funeral services for the dead, as they first encountered the Office in this form. The lay reader is thus always aware of the primary, aural form of the Office as existing before and beyond their engagement with it as text. When looking at the ‘regular’ death image, the memory of the sound of the Office is immediately triggered before any further engagement with the sight of, or sounding of, the text that follows. The sound implied by the image alone is sufficient to cause the internal audiation of the Office by the reader, who was familiar with the musical shape and sound of the Office through much prior exposure. Just as ‘devout seeing’ encouraged the reader to dissolve boundaries between what is real and what is imagined in the visual realm, the familiar soundscape implied in the ‘regular’ death image is unconstrained by the fictive border of visual representation, resonating ‘beyond the material confinement of the visual object’.73 The seen sounds of the image prompt the aural memory of the reader, which is accessed through the visual: they ‘hear’ it as they gaze at the image. Even a silent, solo reader might thus be engaged with the sounded nature of liturgical text and, via the image, with the full communal parish experience of the mourner-reader. The image of 73 Suzanne Wijsman, ‘Silent Sounds: Musical Iconography in a Fifteenth-Century Jewish Prayer Book’, in Resounding Images: Medieval Intersections of Art, Music and Sound (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 313.

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the funeral steps in for being at a funeral. In both cases the Office of the Dead is heard, seen, and shared. In the public space, the sounds of church provided readers with an external auditory prompt that evoked the painted ‘sounds’ contained within the image as well as the remembered sounds of funerals previously attended. Additionally, the reader was not a passive consumer of the soundscape but an active contributor to it. The murmur of sound issuing from readers ‘after the manner of churchmen’ was in emulation of the performance of the clergy. The liturgical nature of the Office is a critical means through which the reader was joined to the multitudes of other individuals, friars, monks, bishops, priests, and laity saying precisely these devotions, perhaps synchronously, across the Christian world and through time. As the reader speaks the words of the Office, they are linked through this action to the performed and sounded liturgical event, the same event that is presented to the reader in the ‘regular’ death image. The images of the funeral thus play a role in affirming the social role of reading practice both visually and aurally. A solitary reader may have read without immediate companions, but they certainly read in companionship with the community of living and dead. Whether reading an Hours in company with others or alone in quiet contemplation, the reader vicariously ‘joins in’ via the image, imaginatively present in the space and soundscape of death ritual. The familiar and widespread nature of the Off ice of the Dead, its recurrence and presence in the community, and its role as an active practice of remembering meant that readers read with a profound awareness of the Christian community, even when reading in circumstances that might be deemed private. Medieval devotional reading could be profoundly social, with readers sharing their own physical space as well as the book, images, text, and sounds of the Office of the Dead. It might also be undertaken as a solitary pursuit. In either case, devotional reading practices embraced a complex auditory environment. For Nicholas Love as for Pierre des Gros, sound was as important as sight as a sensory avenue inducing the right state of mind for prayerful activity. Much of medieval life was experienced aloud and with others. Death was no different. The communal nature of religious life in the parish was a part of how death was perceived (as absence from the community) and how death was dealt with (through shared and structured community interactions). The community may be explicit in such an experience (as at church) or implicit (as when reading at home), but knowledge of that community remains present. For the private reader as for the public reader, the ‘regular’ death images envision both the aural and visual experience of the Office and provide visual access to the rich soundscape that surrounds the figures depicted. To see the ‘regular’ death image was to hear the Office, and to hear it was to share space and place with others.

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*** There was plenty of vernacular religious reading to do in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.74 So what was the continued allure of the Office of the Dead and the Latin Book of Hours for so many lay readers in these centuries? Perhaps for many it was their intermediary status. The ‘regular’ death image and the Office text were not an approximation of the monastic hours of a religious life; they were the hours of the religious life. In the body of the church, these texts and images provided connective liturgical tissue between the clergy and the laity. When they saw, heard, and said – or imagined seeing, hearing, or saying – the Office of the Dead, they knew themselves to be directly engaged with the broader religious community thinking about and processing the inevitable end of life. This chapter has emphasized ways in which the ‘regular’ death image worked to locate the reader in relationship to their community as mortals, mourners, and readers. It functioned as an invitation to engage with the content to come, a visual ‘Venite’ preparing the reader for the consideration of death and mortality. The formulaic nature of the imagery offered a template without instruction which any reader could imaginatively adapt to their own physical or temporal surroundings. By accepting the visual invitation, the reader could rehearse placing themselves in the setting of social death in various guises. In the material attributes of the funeral such as candles or mourners, the reader might see their own social body represented, their connections and networks made visible in the stuff of the funeral. The body of the reader could take the place of mourner, corpse, or both at once, inviting personal reflection on the meaning of death and absence in the context of community. These images also provided a point of access to the commemorative community that could be flexibly used at any time, in any place, and by anyone. The verisimilitude of the ‘regular’ death image worked to draw in the reader and immerse them in the ‘world’ of the book. By creating a visual space within the bounds of the book that echoes the world without, the borders between reality and imagination were blurred. The boundaries between seeing and experiencing were often deliberately smudged in medieval texts, allowing ‘seeing a thing’ to become ‘experiencing a thing’ in the context of affective religious practice. Such a transition would be easy for the looking reader of the Book of Hours, presented with an image that (more or less) accurately reflected a visually familiar ritual situation in the commemorative services for the dead and simultaneously evoked the sounds and spaces of that performative moment through both the image and the text. In doing do, the image expanded the reader’s encounter with the textual 74 Vincent Gillespie, ‘Vernacular Books of Religion’, in Looking in Holy Books: Essays on Late Medieval Religious Writing in England (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 145–74; Bryan, Looking Inward, 2.

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Office, embracing them in a somatic experience that evoked the complexities of individual and communal encounters with death. The funeral image in the Office of the Dead presented a way for the reader, alone or in company, to imaginatively engage with the devotional life of the broader community, parochial and confessional. By showing the reader a representation of the social body, the image of ‘regular’ death offered paths for understanding human mortality through expressions of identity-in-community. They allowed readers to vicariously participate in social death by evoking the spatial, aural, and visual experience of the Office through the combination of image, sound, and text. Medieval reading was a task that required not only the ability to apprehend material visually or aurally but also the ability to make connections between various forms of meaning construction. It is together, not alone, that these sound-image-text experiences immersed the reader in a sensorially and imaginatively rich devotional space through the practice of a vernacular lectio that used outer perception as a path to inner knowledge. The ‘regular’ death image reinforced the social structures and communal identities of life: a social death rather than a bodily death. All this is not to say that communal identity overrode, or was more important than, a private sense of self.75 The following chapter turns to representations associated with the individual body, the soul, mortality, and personal responsibility for salvation – the ‘repellent’ death. Bibliography Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. Translated by Helen Weaver. London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981. Ashley, Kathleen. ‘Material and Symbolic Gift-Giving: Clothes in English and French Wills’. In Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Clothwork and Other Cultural Imaginings, edited by Jane Burns, 137–46. New York: Palgrave, 2004. Aston, Margaret. ‘Death’. In Fifteenth-Century Attitudes: Perceptions of Society in Late Medieval England, edited by Rosemary Horrox, 202–29. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Badham, Sally. Seeking Salvation: Commemorating the Dead in the Late Medieval English Parish. Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2015. Bäuml, Franz H. ‘Varieties and Consequences of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy’. Speculum 55, no. 2 (1980): 237–65. Bell, Susan Groag. ‘Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors or Culture’. Signs 7 (1982): 747–68.

75 Bryan, Looking Inward, passim, esp. 5.

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Biernoff, Suzannah. Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Bond, W. H., C. U. Faye, and Seymour de Ricci. Supplement to the Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada. New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1962. Borland, Catherine Robina, and University of Edinburgh Library. A Descriptive Catalogue of the Western Mediæval Manuscripts in Edinburgh University Library. Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, 1916. Boulton, Meg, Jane Hawkes, and Heidi Stoner, eds. Place and Space in the Medieval World. London: Routledge, 2017. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315413655. Brenner, Elma. ‘The Leprous Body in Twelfth- and Thirtheenth-Century Rouen: Perceptions and Responses’. In The Ends of the Body: Identity and Community in Medieval Culture, edited by Jill Ross and Suzanna Conklin Akbari, 239–59. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Brody, Saul Nathaniel. The Disease of the Soul: Leprosy in Medieval Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974. Bryan, Jennifer. Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Burgess, Clive. The Church Records of St Andrew Hubbard, Eastcheap, c. 1450–c. 1570. Vol. 34. London Record Society. London: London Record Society, 1999. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. New York: Zone Books, 2011. Camilleri, Sylvain. ‘A Phenomenology of Death in the Second Person’. The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 8 (2008): 139–56. Clark, David L. ‘Optics for Preachers: The De Oculo Morali by Peter of Limoges’. The Michigan Academician 9 (1977): 329–43. Coene, Jacques, and J. A. Herbert. Miniatures from a French Horae: British Museum Add. MS 16997, Fifteenth Century. London: British Museum, 1927. Coleman, Joyce. ‘Interactive Parchment: The Theory and Practice of Medieval English Aurality’. The Yearbook of English Studies 25 (1995): 63–79. Dutschke, C. W. Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Huntington Library. San Marino: Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1989. Finucane, R. C. ‘“Sacred Corpse. Profane Carrion”: Social Ideals and Death Rituals in the Later Middle Ages’. In Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, edited by Joachim Whaley, 40–60. London: Europa Publications Limited, 1981. Fritz, Paul S. ‘From “Public” to “Private”: The Royal Funerals in England, 1500–1830’. In Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, 61–79. London: Europa Publications Limited, 1981. Gérard, A. Catalogue Des Livres Manuscrits et Imprimés Composant La Bibliothèque de La Ville de Boulogne-Sur-Mer. Première Partie: Manuscrits. Boulogne-sur-Mer: s.n., 1844.

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Gillespie, Vincent. ‘Vernacular Books of Religion’. In Looking in Holy Books: Essays on Late Medieval Religious Writing in England, 145–74. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. Given-Wilson, Chris. ‘The Exequies of Edward III and the Royal Funeral Ceremony in Late Medieval England’. The English Historical Review 124, no. 507 (2009): 257–82. Goehring, Margaret. Space, Place and Ornament: The Function of Landscape in Medieval Manuscript Illumination. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. Grisé, Annette C. ‘Women’s Devotional Reading in Late-Medieval England and the Gendered Reader’. Medium Ævum 71, no. 2 (2002): 209–25. Grounds, Amelia. ‘Evolution of a Manuscript: The Pavement Hours’. In Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England, edited by Margaret Connolly and Linne R. Mooney, 118–38. York: York Medieval Press, 2008. Jacobus. The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints. Edited by William Granger Ryan. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. John of Salisbury. The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury: A Twelfth-Century Defense of the Verbal and Logical Arts of the Trivium. Translated by Daniel D McGarry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955. Johnson, Ian. The Middle English Life of Christ: Academic Discourse, Translation, and Vernacular Theology. Medieval Church Studies. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. Kalokyris, Konstaninos D. ‘Byzantine Iconography and “Liturgical” Time’. Eastern Churches Review 1 (July 1966): 359–63. Kamerick, Kathleen. Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England, 1350–1500. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Kantorowicz, Ernst H. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1985. Karnes, Michelle. Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Karnes, Michelle. ‘Nicholas Love and the Medieval Mediations on Christ’. Speculum 82, no. 2 (2007): 380–408. Kempe, Margery. The Book of Margery Kempe. Edited by Barry Windeatt. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004. Ker, Neil Ripley, and Alan J. Piper. Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. Knowles, David. The Monastic Constitutions of Lanfranc. Medieval Classics. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1951. Krug, Rebecca. Reading Families: Women’s Literate Practice in Late Medieval England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. Lewis, Suzanne. Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Lindberg, David C. ‘The Science of Optics’. In Science in the Middle Ages, edited by David C. Lindberg, 338–68. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

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Love, Nicholas. The Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ, A Translation of the Latin Work Entitled Meditationes Vitae Christi Attributed to Cardinal Bonaventura, Made before the Year 1410 by Nicholas Love, Prior of the Carthusian Monastery of Mount Grace. Edited by Lawrence F. Powell. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908. McCann, Daniel. Soul-Health: Therapeutic Reading in Later Medieval England. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018. Morgan, David. The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Morgan, N. J. Early Gothic Manuscripts, 1250–1285. A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles. London: Harvey Miller, 1988. Morgan, Nigel. ‘English Books of Hours c. 1240–c. 1480’. In Books of Hours Reconsidered, edited by Sandra Hindman and James H. Marrow, 65–96. London: Harvey Miller, 2013. Newman, Barbara. ‘What Did It Mean to Say “I Saw”? The Clash between Theory and Practice in Medieval Visionary Culture’. Speculum 80, no. 1 (2005): 1–43. Ong, Walter J. ‘Orality, Literacy, and Medieval Textualization’. New Literary History 16 (1984): 1–12. Paxton, Frederick S. ‘The Early Growth of the Medieval Economy of Salvation in Latin Christianity’. In Death in Jewish Life: Burial and Mourning Customs Among Jews of Europe and Nearby Communities, edited by Stefan C. Reif, Andreas Lehnardt, and Avriel Bar-Levav, 17–42. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. Perry, Ryan, and Lawrence Tuck. ‘“[W]Heþyr Þu Redist Er Herist Redyng, I Wil Be Plesyd Wyth Þe”: Margery Kempe and the Locations for Middle English Devotional Reading and Hearing’. In Spaces for Reading in Later Medieval England, edited by Mary C. Flannery and Carrie Griffin, 133–48. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Raine, James, and John William Clay. Testamenta Eboracensia, or, Wills Registered at York: Illustrative of the History, Manners, Language, Statistics, etc. of the Province of York, from the Year MCCC. Downwards. Publications of the Surtees Society. London: J.B. Nichols and Son, 1836. Renevey, Denis. ‘Looking for a Context: Rolle, Anchoritic Culture, and the Office of the Dead’. In Medieval Texts in Context, edited by Denis Renevey and Graham D. Caie, 192–210. Abingdon: Routledge, 2008. Rentz, Ellen K. Imagining the Parish in Late Medieval England. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Reynolds, Evelyn. ‘Trance of Involvement: Absorption and Denial in Fifteenth-Century Middle English Pietàs’. Journal of English and Germanic Philology 116, no. 4 (October 2017): 438–63. Ringbom, S. ‘Devotional Images and Imaginative Devotions’. Gazette des Beaux-Art 73 (1969): 159–70. Ross, Robert C. ‘Oral Life, Written Text: The Genesis of the Book of Margery Kempe’. The Yearbook of English Studies 22 (1992): 226–37.

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Sack, Robert D. ‘The Power of Place and Space’. Geographical Review 83, no. 3 (1993): 326–29. Salter, Elizabeth. Nicholas Love’s ‘Myrrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ’. Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1974. Sandler, Lucy Freeman. Gothic Manuscript 1285–1385. London: Harvey Miller, 1986. Sandler, Lucy Freeman. Illuminators and Patrons in Fourteenth-Century England: The Psalter and Hours of Humphrey de Bohun and the Manuscripts of the Bohun Family. London/ Toronto: British Library and University of Toronto Press, 2014. Sandler, Lucy Freeman. The Lichtenthal Psalter and the Manuscript Patronage of the Bohun Family. London/Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2004. Scarborough, Elizabeth. ‘Living in the Time of Christ: Margery Kempe’s “Devoute Ymaginacion”’. In Devotional Culture in Late Medieval Engand and Europe: Diverse Imaginations of Christ’s Life, edited by Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry. Turnhout: Brepols, 2014. Schell, Sarah. ‘Death and Disruption: Social Identity and Representation in the Medieval English Funeral’. In Art and Identity: Visual Culture, Politics and Religion in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, edited by Sandra Cardarelli, Emily Jane Anderson, and John Richardson, 71–96. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. Scott, Kathleen L. Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390–1490. A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles. London: H. Miller, 1996. Sears, Elizabeth. ‘“Reading” Images’. In Reading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object, edited by Elizabeth Sears and Thelma K. Thomas, 1–7. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Smith, Kathryn A. Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England: Three Women and Their Books of Hours. The British Library Studies in Medieval Culture. London: British Library, 2003. Sneyd, Charlotte Augusta, trans. A Relation, or Rather a True Account of the Island of England; with Sundry Particular of the Customs of These People, and of the Royal Revenues under King Henry the Seventh about the Year 1500. London: Camden Society, 1847. Solterer, Helen. ‘Seeing, Hearing, Tasting Woman: Medieval Senses of Reading’. Comparative Literature 46, no. 2 (1994): 129–45. Stanbury, Sarah. The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Sterponi, Laura. ‘Reading and Meditation in the Middle Ages: Lectio Divina and Books of Hours’. Text & Talk: Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse Communication Studies 28, no. 5 (2008): 667–89. Sutton, Anne F., Livia Visser-Fuchs, and P. W. Hammond. The Reburial of Richard, Duke of York, 21–30 July 1476. London: The Richard III Society, 1996. Taylor, Andrew. ‘Displaying Privacy: Margaret of York as Devotional Reader’. In Cultures of Religious Reading in the Late Middle Ages: Instruction the Soul, Feeding the Spirit, and Awakening the Passion, edited by Sabrina Corbellini, 275–96. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 25. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013.

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Thurston, Herbert. ‘Candles’. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 3. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1908. Accessed March 18, 2023. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03246a.htm. Thurston, Herbert. ‘Paschal Candle’. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 11. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911. Accessed March 18, 2023. http://www.newadvent.org/ cathen/11515b.htm. Tymms, Samuel, ed. Wills and Inventories from the Registers of the Commissary of Bury St. Edmund’s and the Archdeacon of Sudbury. Camden Society Old Series 49. London: AMS Press, 1850. Uhlman, Diana R. ‘The Comfort of Voice, the Solace of Script: Orality and Literacy in “The Book of Margery Kempe”’. Studies in Philology 91, no. 1 (1994): 50–69. Wieck, Roger S. Late Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts, 1350–1525, in the Houghton Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard College Library, 1983. Wieck, Roger S., Lawrence R. Poos, Virginia Reinburg, and John Plummer. Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life. New York: George Braziller, in association with the Walters Art Gallery, 1988. Wijsman, Suzanne. ‘Silent Sounds: Musical Iconography in a Fifteenth-Century Jewish Prayer Book’. In Resounding Images: Medieval Intersections of Art, Music and Sound, 313–34. Turnhout: Brepols, 2015. Woolf, Rosemary. The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968.

3.

Repellent Death: Time, Rot, and the Death of the Body Abstract: This chapter focuses on variations of corpse imagery, including the shrouded and exposed corpse, the lively corpse, and the skeleton. As a group these images address reoccurring themes present in the visual and literary treatments of medieval bodily death: identity loss, agency, disruption, and time. In addressing these concepts through their impact on the body, these images encouraged readers of the Office to confront fundamental fears associated with physical dissolution. Keywords: corpse and decay, identity, liturgy, memento mori, three living and the three dead, embodiment

It is likely that everyone has at some time in their lives bitten into an overripe fruit. Some may have been unlucky enough to have reached into the cupboard for a potato and to have felt fingers sinking into the malodorous blackened flesh of vegetable rot. Our reactions are swift – we spit out the rotten fruit and jerk back our potato-befouled fingers almost before we have time to think about it. Our response to rot is sensible: at home and at sea, as in our stomachs, rot can be dangerous, presaging sickness, disease, collapse, or founder. It is a charged term redolent with an instinctive disgust, revulsion, and even fear, particularly when it is applied to the dead human body. The social death visualized in ‘regular’ death images constructs death through the environment of church and community. The processes for confronting social death in the late medieval period were well developed, but there remained a deep ambivalence about the physical nature of death and the accompanying, and inevitable, rot of the body. The concern for the fate of the body is reflected in the ‘repellent’ death images which depict subjects that confront the reader with the physical realities of death. They present an array of images that dwell on the corpse in various states. In ‘regular’ death images, the dead might be socially present, but they are visually absent. In ‘repellent’ death images, the dead are consistently, and insistently, present and corporeal.

Schell, S., Image and the Office of the Dead in Late Medieval Europe: Regular, Repellent, and Redemptive Death. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463722117_ch03

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The contemplation of the corpse for the purposes of spiritual enrichment has a long history in Christian practice. Medieval preachers and teachers used the putrefaction of the body as the paramount example of sin made visible, of the vanity of the world, and of our profoundly brief sojourn in it. In keeping with this tradition, there was a decided interest in the late medieval period in seeing and considering the slow disintegration of the body as part of a pious meditation on the consequences of death. However, the time-sensitive and dangerous nature of human decay meant that the majority of real bodies were buried or otherwise disposed of quickly and passed out of visual experience. It was therefore the image of the rotting body that became central to this practice. Corpse imagery proliferated in the margins of prayerbooks, devotional literature, and church walls during the fifteenth century. The range and variety of images in the Office of the Dead which take the corpse as a subject substantiates the medieval appetite for visually exploring what ‘deadness’ meant for the body and, by extension, for the self. These images show the corpse in contrasting modes – inert or lively, hidden or exposed, passive or active, wet or dry – revealing a wide range of concerns, meanings, and roles for the dead body. For readers of the Office confronted by the ‘repellent’ image and engaged in the imaginative processes outlined in the previous chapter, gazing at the image of the corpse enabled vicarious access to the ultimate dead body under consideration, the reader’s own. As corpse images encompass a large and diverse range of illustrations, it is not possible to address them all; this chapter will not attempt to do so. Instead, the chapter will focus on a few variations of the corpse that appear often: the shrouded and exposed corpse, the lively corpse, and the skeleton. Although each of these subjects also has many interesting and unique iterations worthy of individual exploration, as a group they address some reoccurring themes present in the visual and literary treatments of medieval bodily death: identity loss, agency, disruption, and, fundamentally, time. To consider one’s own physical demise is not easy; it challenges our sense of who we are. For a medieval Christian, the separation of the soul from the body at death was a sign of humanity’s privileged status in God’s creation and plan for the world (humans alone have souls). It is the only path to salvation and eternal life, but it is also inconceivable. We identify with our bodies; we experience our ‘selfness’ and the world around us in and through bodies. What does it mean to be without a body? Even with the knowledge that the soul continued beyond the death of the body and that there would someday be a reunion of body and soul, in the immediate present the dissolving body was frighteningly like a dissolving self.1 The image of the corpse 1 The relationship between the ‘self’ and body continues to be a sticky problem. For some interesting reflections on the relevance of the medieval debate to modern issues such as organ transplant, see Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Continuity, Personal Survival and the Resurrection of the Body: A Scholastic Discussion in Its Medieval and Modern Contexts’, History of Religions 30, no. 1 (1990): 51–85.

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responded to the medieval reader’s sense of the body’s deep entanglement with concepts of individual identity and to associated concerns about the experience of the body after body and soul had parted ways. Death represents the ultimate disruptive force, no less so for our knowledge of its inevitability. Ideally, Christian death was merely one step on the journey of the soul toward a devoutly desired reunion with God, but in practice the enormity and irrevocable nature of this step was frequently characterized and visualized as a disruption to, rather than a continuation of, life. Death usurps our control, and with loss of control over the body came a fear of maltreatment and its connotation in the social and spiritual spheres. It divides time into a ‘before’ and ‘after’ that has implications for the souls’ agency in its own salvific cause. The ‘repellent’ death images harness the inherent disruption of death to create spaces in which to acknowledge this rupture. This is apparent in visionary images that expose the corpse outside of time or community and that allow the reader-viewer to dwell over the body momentarily paused between life and death. It is also evident in subjects such as the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead, in which natural, temporal, and social orders are disrupted, but it is subtly present in all images of the dead body, which arrest the processes of decay with paint and brush. The image of decay suspended in time is powerful precisely because of time’s insistence. In practical terms, the impact of time on the bodies of the dead dictated the schedule for the preparation and burial of the body; this created a liturgical unit, a ‘death-tide’ during which the body was ritually and spiritually moved from the community of the living to the community of the dead, in the process re-coding the body from agent to non-agent. It is time that dissolves the body, eroding our physical identities, and time that fades and transforms the memory of the dead. The images of the shrouded body and of the dry skeleton both testify to the long process of decay and the physical anonymity that accrues to the corpse. Time gives urgency to repentance and reform. ‘Lively corpse’ imagery addresses this need for temporal haste using the corpse as a warning and didactic trope. The time in ‘repellent’ death images functions as a caution to the reader that time remains, but perhaps not much, in which to secure a good death for themselves. Time carries the reader inexorably forward toward their own death as their own ‘numbered days’ are used up.2 The reification of death, its objectification from an abstract concept into a solid body in its most obvious physical manifestation, the corpse, is marshalled in the repellent imagery to inspire urgency and action among the devout while they maintain agency in their own cause. The living reader had no access to an embodied experience of death. Spiritual exercises were designed to aid the devout as they prepared for death but could not 2

Job 14:5.

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provide an experience of death to be ‘practised’ in advance. What the living do have access to is a somatic experience of the anticipation of death. Given our shared ignorance of the event and the church teachings on the potential disasters, it is not surprising that this anticipation was overwhelmingly experienced as fear.3 The fear of death is experienced not only on our own behalf but also in the presence of death and the dead. The deaths of others are the nearest thing to our own death we can know, and these experiences provide us with imaginative grist as we envisage the deaths of our own bodies to be ‘like’ (in some way) those we have witnessed. For the imaginatively engaged reader, the images facilitate consideration of their own bodily death and provide a visual bridge between an anticipated future experience (death) and a habitually hidden present sight (the rotting body). ‘Repellent’ death imagery frames death in practical, physical terms as an event rooted in the body, happening to the body, and ultimately destroying the body. In addressing concepts such as identity, agency, disruption, and time through their impact on the body, these images encouraged readers of the Office to confront and consider fundamental fears associated with physical dissolution and, in doing so, prepare the soul and strengthen the spiritual muscles so that the reader could consider their own fate with greater composure, if not enthusiasm.

Death-Tide: Time and Decay of the Body The medieval Christian calendar was full of marked periods of time in which particular behaviours, abstentions, feasts, or associated seasonal events occurred. These ‘tides’ formed units of time that enclosed specific series of actions or events. The period after death was similarly a kind of informal ‘tide’ for those involved, where bodily death was managed through social and religious customs. The inevitable rot of the body mandated a liminal period, the ‘death-tide’, between death and burial in which the body was the focus of religious ritual action and prayer as it was moved from home to church to grave. The fact of physical decay was one of the primary reasons John Mirk gave for the necessary movement of the body from the place of death to the church: þerefore mannus flesse, be hit neure so fayre no swere whyl it is on lyue, anone os it is dede, hit begynnuth to stynke and turn to foulest careyn þat is, and sonnest 3 Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that people do not naturally fear death but are taught to do so: ‘Naturally man knows how to suffer with constancy and dies in peace. It is doctors with their prescriptions, philosophers with their precepts, priests with their exhortations, who debase his heart and make him unlearn how to die.’ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (London: Basic Books, 1979), 54–55. See also comments scattered throughout, 82, 131, 208, 226–27, etc.

Repellent Death: Time, Rot, and the Death of the Body 

a man schall takon hys deth of þe sauuer þerofol. Wherefore hyt is brought to þe chyrch, to ben hud in þe erth that is halowod. 4

The second verse of a thirteenth-century death lyric poem articulates the journey the body makes during the death-tide period, as the poet lists the stages of preparation as a series of movements: Thanne I schel futte From bedde to flore, From flore to here, From here to bere, From bere to putte, And te putt fordut. Thanne lyd mine hus uppe mine nose. Of al this world ne give I it a pese!5

In images the movement of the corpse is used to visually articulate the action of time on the dead body and remind the reader not only of the ephemeral nature of the body but also of the inexorable nature of time itself. The Office of the Dead in Walters MS W. 102 (fol. 55) is illustrated with a small image of the bier. The poles used by the pall bearers to carry the body into and out of the church for burial are clearly visible, crossing the boundary of the picture frame as provided by the shape of the initial P. This both draws attention to the poles through their violation of the fictional space and serves to focus the attention of the reader on the bier which, as a result, has been placed in the reader’s space rather than in the imagined space of the image. In a similar composition in Egerton MS 1151 fol. 118 (Fig. 2-1), the poles rest on the letter D with no visible means of support within the picture-space.6 The visual emphasis on the long poles that were used to carry the bodies of the deceased into the church increases the immediacy of the time element as they stress physical movement and process. In MS W. 102, the implied movement of the bier in the opening initial is translated into movement in a funeral procession which appears 4 John Mirk, Mirk’s Festial: A Collection of Homilies by Johannes Mirkus (John Mirk), ed. Theodor Erbe, Early English Text Society Original Series 1 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1905), 294. 5 ‘Then I shall flit from bed to floor, from floor to shroud, from shroud to bier, from bier to pit, and the pit closed up. Then my house will lie upon my nose. I don’t care a bit about this world!’ As in R. T. Davies, ed., Medieval English Lyrics: A Critical Anthology (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 74–75. 6 MS W. 102 ‘The Walters Hours’, Hours, England, c. 1290–1300, fol. 55. Baltimore: Walters Art Museum; Egerton MS 1151, Hours, England (Oxford), 1260–70, fol. 118. London: British Library. J. J. G. Alexander and Paul Binski, Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England, 1200–1400 (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1987), 217, cat. 41. On these manuscripts, see also this book, ‘Regular Death’, n. 22.

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Fig. 3-1. MS BP.96, Hours, France (Paris), 1475–1500, fol. 133. New York: Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries.

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in the bas-de-page.7 In the bier images, the illustrated dead body is momentarily arrested in time, remaining with the reader’s living body before both move again in time, the dead body on to burial and the reader on to the following page. While the pallbearer’s poles are represented less frequently in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts, the emphasis on movement is found in serial images of death-tide that illustrate the path of the body in a sequence of stages from deathbed to grave. Together these images form a visual narrative of the ritual and theatrical progress of the body as it moves from a social and physical position of ‘recently alive’ to ‘definitely dead’. An example of the serial death-tide images is found in MS BP.96 fol. 133 (Fig. 3-1) in a full-page illustration.8 As the reader’s eye travels over the page, they see the body move through death toward burial. In the top right border, the dying man receives last unction and the viaticum. To the left in the central image is the deathbed, with family and clergy in attendance. Moving back into the border, below the last unction scene, the body is stitched into a tightly wrapped shroud. From ‘here to bere’ is found in the next scene, which shows the body being carried out to the churchyard by four men in Franciscan garb, and in the final scene, the body is lowered into a grave as the priest reads the burial service. This set of images presents a fairly complete account of the movements of the body from death to burial, but serial death-tide images are heterogeneous. There is no set number of images, no definitive choice of scenes which are selected, and no regular order in which they will appear. This unfixed approach relies on the reader’s knowledge of the topic and allows for a fluid reading of them in conjunction with the text. The scenes that are selected for inclusion are not presented in any standardized manner. As the illustrations do not necessarily follow an easy left-right, top-bottom ordering, the eye ‘flits’ over the page just as the poetic body ‘flits’ toward the grave as the reader recognizes and sorts the stages. To read the illustrations of MS BP.96 in the ‘correct’ order, the reader’s eye would zig-zag across the page from the upper right corner to the lower left corner. In MS M. 1003 (fol. 153v), they would begin in the bottom right-hand corner with a border illustration of 7 The funeral is of Renart the Fox (fols. 73–81), under texts for the Office of the Dead and the Hours of Jesus Crucified. Renart’s bier appears on fols. 76v–77r. Florence McCulloch, ‘The Funeral of Renart the Fox in a Walters Book of Hours’, Journal of the Walters Art Gallery (1962): 8–27. A similar bas-de-page procession occurs in the Luttrell Psalter portraying the Funeral of the Virgin. London, British Library, Additional MS 42130 ‘The Luttrell Psalter’, Psalter, England (Lincoln), 2nd quarter of the 14th century, fol. 99. Folio Society, The Luttrell Psalter (London: The Folio Society, 2006); Michelle Brown, The Luttrell Psalter, Commentary (London: The Folio Society, 2006). See also Michael Camille, Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England (London: Reaktion Books, 1998); Sandler, Gothic Manuscript 1285–1385, II, n. 10. 8 MS BP.96, Hours, France (Paris), 1475–1500, fols. 132v–133. New York: Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries. See also MS M.231, Hours, France (Paris?), c. 1485–90, fol. 137, New York: The Morgan Library & Museum, which is nearly identical to MS BP.96.

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the deathbed and then proceed up and left through the funeral to the burial (Fig. 4-9), the opposite direction of a traditionally organized word-text.9 The arrangement of images encourages the reader to engage with them by building their own meaningful relationships between the illustrations, approaching the images more like a mind map than a linear narrative. This technique can be found in other forms of medieval narrative. Alicia Marchant has argued that chronology was manipulated in some chronicles to emphasize a narrative’s emotional content by nesting out-of-order ‘secondary’ narratives within the structure of the overarching chronicle narrative. A story may begin, for example, by narrating the death of a principal character and then going back to recount how that death came to pass. This created a sequence of events that privileged emotive response over chronological veracity for maximum affective impact.10 For the imaginatively engaged reader-viewer, the death-tide images produce a similar environment, with each of the illustrated stages functioning as secondary stories within the overall death-tide narrative. In this approach the images are read in dynamically associative ways that permit readers to construct meaning autonomously, in ways that are personally signif icant within the established ‘frame’ of death-tide events. The reader may, for example, read all the smaller border images in relationship with the dominant image (usually the deathbed or burial scene), with the dominant image here functioning in a similar fashion to Marchant’s dominant narrative. The lack of a visual structure to reinforce the chronological order of events in these images does not obstruct the reader’s understanding of that chronology, nor does it obscure the teleological nature of these events: this is a familiar narrative, and the reader knows that however they read the images, the body, both the one of paint and parchment and the reader’s own, must ultimately end up in the ground. In addition to variety of presentation, there is also no defined set of scenes that is included in the death-tide narratives. MS BP.96, for instance, does not include a funeral service. MS M. 1003, with three death-tide scenes in the border illustrations (around a central image of the raising of Lazarus), illustrates the deathbed with last rites, the funeral service, and the burial. Pierpont Morgan MS M. 453 fol. 133v (Fig. 3-2) includes deathbed, shrouding, burial, and a scene of giving food to the hungry, perhaps the distribution of funeral alms.11 Nearly all illustrative sets of the death-tide narrative include the deathbed and the burial scenes but otherwise vary in scene selection and complexity. The omission or inclusion of any one scene between deathbed and 9 MS M.1003, Hours, France, c. 1465, fol. 153v. New York: The Morgan Library and Museum. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Landon K. Thorne, Jr., 1979. 10 Alicia Marchant, ‘Narratives of Death and Emotional Affect in Late Medieval Chronicles’, Parergon 31, no. 2 (2014): 92. 11 MS M.453, Hours, French, c. 1425–30, fol. 133v. New York: The Morgan Library and Museum.

Repellent Death: Time, Rot, and the Death of the Body 

Fig. 3-2. MS M.453, Hours, French, c. 1425–30, fol. 133v. New York: The Morgan Library and Museum. Purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) in 1911. Photographic credit: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

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burial would not negatively impact the understanding of the reader, to whom the whole sequence was very familiar. The reader may have already performed a role in this particular play and almost certainly would do so more than once in their lifetime. They would not only be familiar with the order of events but also with the details of the script, a portion of which (the Office) they are holding in their hands as they gaze at the images. Any lacunae in the visual pageant encourages the reader to imaginatively fill in the gaps, and irregularity in the visual structure of the narratives guides the reader to repetitively re-examine, re-configure, and reconsider the events. The crossovers between text and image and their differing structures on the page encourages active contemplation and mediation on death. The death-tide series thus do not need to include a complete account of events, as readers would supplement whatever does appear on the page with their own deep knowledge of this process. The selections do, however, prompt the reader to focus particularly on the moments portrayed. The importance of deathbed and burial scenes is reflected in the fact that one of them is nearly always selected as the dominant illustration on the page. In MS M. 453, the burial is the dominant image, whereas in BP. 96 it is the deathbed. By including both the deathbed and burial scene, the artist provides the opening and closing material, the first and last act of the pageant of death in which the corpse has the starring role. There is a visual and thematic echo between the rest of the dying in bed and the rest of the body in earth. Indeed, we still speak of ‘laying the dead to rest’ in both the physical and metaphorical senses. The pairing of the deathbed with the burial contrasts the last moments of life with the last moments of (visible) death. In both scenes, the corpse is surrounded by family, friends, and clerics praying over the physical remains of the deceased. In the poetic litany above, the body itself articulates its inexorable progress toward the grave as movement to a new dwelling as it is enclosed in its new hypogeal ‘house’.12 The images, like the poem, urge the reader to see in the deathbed-to-graveyard scenes the movement from home on earth to home in earth and would additionally bring to mind the knowledge (and funeral texts) reminding readers that they are made of earth. This well-known sentiment was iterated in Mirk’s funeral sermon: ‘for vche cors is vrth and comyth of þe erth, and lyuuth be þe earth, and is, at þe laste, beried in þe erth.’13 Through these ritual movements, the body is re-housed in the very medium from which it was made and to which it returns. Through a series of illustrated ‘scene changes’, the images encompass a death-tide narrative that uses movement in space as a stand-in for movement through time. By 12 Variants of the expression ‘the roof will rest on your nose’ are found in nearly all English ‘Body and Soul’ genre lyrics. Martin Stevens and A. C. Cawley, eds., The Towneley Plays (Oxford: Early English Text Society by Oxford University Press, 1994), II, 649. 13 Mirk, Mirk’s Festial, 294.

Repellent Death: Time, Rot, and the Death of the Body 

transforming the invisible abstraction of time into visible movements through time, the images attest to the ticking clock of decay. At each stage, the corpse is further removed from the community of the living, obscuring its identity, until finally, the body is removed entirely from sight. This process is a physical manifestation of analogous intangible journeys that the body is also making during death-tide, from friend to corpse and from community participant to an object of community endangerment. As the corpse is transferred through the illustrated stages, it is disassociated from the self it once was and the place it once held among the living. This is finally confirmed in the poem’s ending, ‘Of all this world ne give I it a pese!’, in which the corpse renounces any position or care he has for the world he once enjoyed. It is not his any longer. The arrow of time moves only forward, advancing the reader of the Office of the Dead closer to their own death. The unavoidable facts of physical decay and the equally unavoidable need for the living to respond to it generate a heightened awareness of time’s passage since the body last drew breath. During death-tide the body itself becomes the measure of time as it slowly disintegrates. The physical transit from deathbed to grave echoes the journey through life toward death and salvation that was fundamental to the medieval Christian’s eschatological conception of the structure of the world. Using time as a through-motif, the images and text work together in the Office of the Dead to confront the reader with the inevitability of their own eventual participation in the death-tide events as the corpse, while also offering comfort and reassurance through ritual and the evident care lavished on the bodies of the dead.

‘Nothing more base and abominable’: The Corpse The first verse of the thirteenth-century lyric quoted above neatly encapsulates the slow degradation of the body as it succumbs to the processes of putrefaction: Wanne mine eyhnen misten, And mine here sissen, And my nose coldet, And my tunge foldet, And my rude slaket, And mine lippes blaken, And my muth grennet, And my spotel rennet, And mine her riset, And mine herte griset,

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And mine honden bivien And mine fet stivien — Al to late! al to late! Wanne the bere is at the gate.14

The ‘signs of death’ lyrics were among the most popular religious lyrics of the medieval period, and the description in the poem comprises a standard list that reoccurs in didactic, medical, and sermon literature as a moral warning about the frailty of the body. Many preachers and writers relished in descriptions of the perishable nature of the human form.15 John Mirk describes the corpse as being made of ‘slem’ (slime) and ‘stinkyng’.16 The author of the Fasciculum Morum is similarly direct about the ravages of time on the body and its dangerous and repellent aspect. Like Mirk, he highlights the noxious smell of the decaying body: It is not allowed to stay in the house, lest the people there should die of its stench. It is not hung up in the air, lest it should infect it. It is not thrown into water, lest it should pollute that. What then? to be sure, the earth is dug up and it is … cast there and covered with earth like deadly poison, so that it may not be seen anymore.17

He concludes that there is ‘nothing more base or abominable than a corpse’.18 These passages highlight the fear and disgust inspired by the dead body and the need to dispose of it appropriately and with seemly haste. The evocation of a sensory field, the tactility of ‘slem’ and the olfactory assault of ‘stink’, is a recurring aspect in medieval descriptions of the dead body which assert the embodied nature of death and prompt an instinctive revulsion. 19 Foul and dangerous, 14 ‘When my eyes mist, and my ears hiss, and my nose is cold and my tongue folds, and my face goes slack, and my lips turn black, and my mouth gapes and my spittle runs, and my hair falls out, and my heart quakes, and my hand shakes, and my feet stiffen — it’s too late! Too late! When the bier is at the gate.’ Davies, Medieval English Lyrics: A Critical Anthology, 74–75. 15 Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages, 78–80; Siegfried Wenzel, Verses in Sermons: Fasciculus Morum and Its Middle English Poems (Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1978), 197–99. For some excellent descriptions of the rotting body, see G. R. Owst, Preaching in Medieval England: An Introduction to Sermon Manuscript of the Period c. 1350–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), 341–42. 16 Mirk, Mirk’s Festial, 294. 17 Siegfried Wenzel, ed., Fasciculus Morum: A Fourteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook, trans. Siegfried Wenzel (London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 719–21. 18 Wenzel, Fasciculus Morum, 719–21. 19 The sensory field is also evoked in the opposite direction as evidence of holiness, as in the ‘shining flesh’ of the uncorrupted bodies of long deceased saints. This is extensively discussed in the work of Caroline Walker Bynum. Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, 210–11; Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval

Repellent Death: Time, Rot, and the Death of the Body 

the decaying corpse was both a literal pollutant of the environment and an embodiment of the spiritual corruption resulting from sin, the original cause of death in the world. Corpse imagery is focused on the body but was presented to the reader both indirectly and directly as the shrouded or exposed corpse. The shrouded corpse is evidently a body but keeps signs of decay from the reader’s eye. Conversely, the fully exposed corpse forces the reader to view the dead body shorn of the trappings of ritual and often succumbing to rot. Both the hidden and revealed corpse engage the reader in a visual contemplation of physical ‘deadness’ and its ramifications for oneself and community in the present, and for the soul in the broader salvation narrative. Identity Loss Hidden corpse images are usually scenes drawn from the death-tide sequence, which present a view of a dead body cloaked in the shroud. These images navigate the choppy waters between the embodied self (in the community of the living) and the disembodied self (moving to the community of the dead). The recently defunct body was very much still ‘alive’ to communities and was a participant in the rearrangement of political and social structures. The body-identity connection is particularly clear in the case of elite deaths, where the corpse was more likely to be displayed.20 In these cases the visibility of the corpse confirmed the transfer of power from the deceased to a living heir. Funeral ceremony and burial provided a public event at which the mourners were witness to the end of one period of governance and could attest to the assumption of an heir to the recently vacated position of power. The Gorleston Psalter, illustrated in the early fourteenth century, includes a funeral of a bishop at the opening of the Office of the Dead (fol. 215).21 The bishop lies clothed in full ecclesiastical dress in an open coffin, with face, hands, and feet all exposed as another bishop presides: the bishop is dead, long live the bishop.22 Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 187, n. 32; Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe, 182–83. 20 For example, several fourteenth-century accounts indicate that the exposure of the face was assumed in instances of papal or princely funeral ceremonies. Elizabeth A. R. Brown, ‘Death and the Human Body in the Later Middle Ages: The Legislation of Boniface VIII on the Division of the Corpse’, Viator 12 (1981): 268, n. 195. 21 Additional MS 49622 ‘The Gorleston Psalter’, Psalter, England (East Anglia), c. 1310–24, fol. 215. London: British Library. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390–1490, II, 79. 22 Church officials could be interred in ecclesiastical dress. Dressed burial was otherwise uncommon. Danièle Alexandre-Bidon, ‘Le corps et son linceul’, in A Réveiller les morts: La mort au quotidien dans l’Occident médiéval, ed. Danièle Alexandre-Bidon and Cécile Treffort (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1993), 195.

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However, for most people, part of the ritual function of commemoration and interment was the physical distancing of the dead individual from the community of the living. This involved obscuring from view the clearest locus of individuality, the body, first by the shroud, then by coffin and pall, and eventually by the earth.23 As physical dissolution occurred, the identity of the deceased, once bound to his or her body, was loosed and reformulated as part of the communal memory of the parish. Without a physical form, individuals sought to shore up a ‘body’ of physical memory through gifts and bequests to the people and fabric of the community, as we saw in the previous chapter. The process of identity-disembodiment was not accomplished immediately upon death. In Northern Europe the body played an important role in anchoring the dead to the living for some time after death and burial. The dead maintained continuity with the community that they had left so long as they remained ‘body-shaped’, that is, fleshy.24 The full decay of the flesh was thought to take about a year, and during this time, identity and corpse were not fully separated but underwent a slow disentangling.25 The initial ‘fleshy’ period after death coincided with the period of greatest devotional intensity from the surviving family and community, with plenty of individual prayers requested in addition to sets of monthly minds and trental masses where finances allowed and, of course, remembrances when privately reading of the Office of the Dead. The rounds of prayer were particularly important at this time, as the ‘wet’ body could be dangerously susceptible to restless wandering, whereas a ‘dry’ body was considered fully dead, fully inert.26 There was little expectation that the body would forever remain in the grave. The body stayed in the ground until the flesh had decomposed, and then it was disinterred to make room for someone else. For most people the grave was thus not conceived as a place of final repose but rather as a temporary container for a rotting body. The images frequently give visual weight to this bodily transience. A burial scene in Sloane MS 2468 (fol. 163) shows a newly dug grave with a shrouded body being lowered into it, but the foreground of the image is littered with bones, ribs, tibias, and skulls, all skeletal elements which are clearly identifiable by the 23 Charlotte A. Stanford, ‘The Body at the Funeral: Image and Commemoration at Notre Dame, Paris, about 1304–18’, The Art Bulletin 89 (2007): 665. 24 Katharine Park, ‘The Life of the Corpse: Division and Dissection in Late Medieval Europe’, The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 50 (1995): 111–32. 25 Brown, ‘Death and the Human Body in the Later Middle Ages: The Legislation of Boniface VIII on the Division of the Corpse’, 251; Katharine Park, ‘The Sensitive Corpse: Body and Self in Renaissance Medicine’, Fenway Court. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum 1990–1991: Imaging the Self in Renaissance Italy (1992): 78. 26 Nancy Mandeville Caciola, Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), 240.

Repellent Death: Time, Rot, and the Death of the Body 

Fig. 3-3. Sloane MS 2468, Hours, France (Paris), c. 1420, fol. 163. London: British Library. © The British Library Board.

reader as human (Fig. 3-3).27 Other burial images like Yates Thompson MS 46 fol. 156v or MS A6 fol. 122 include the results of years of this practice: the background 27 Sloane MS 2468 ‘The Hours of the Umfray Family’, Hours, France (Paris), c. 1420, fol. 163. London: British Library. Janet Backhouse and British Library, Books of Hours (London: British Library, 1985), 52.

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of both images include charnel houses stacked to the roof with skulls.28 In these images the initial stages of decay are hidden by the shroud, but the end result is on display. The ‘repellent’ aspect of death emphasized here is that it is the first part of a process which continues to transform us after we cease to breathe until we are beyond recognition. This is reinforced in the Office of the Dead lesson texts which reference the transmutable nature of the corpse and refer to the consumption of the body by rot until only the bony remains remain.29 In both representations of the body in the aforementioned images, the identity of the body is invisible, hidden by the shroud or eroded by time. Almost immediately upon death, the physical identity of the deceased was obscured. In a marginal image on fol. 133v in MS M.453, the viewer is presented with the ritual effacement of the corpse from the sight of the living. Enacted between the illustrations of deathbed and burial, a dead man is laid out on the bed as a female relative, perhaps his wife, closes a shroud around him, sewing him into anonymity. Her task is not yet complete, and while his head is already encased, the shroud remains open from the mid-chest down, and the corpse is visible. In this image the reader sees the body of the dead man disappearing under their very eye; his face, the locus of physical identity, has already been enveloped. When the reader next sees the body in the large burial scene, he is enclosed, unknown, and anonymous as he is lowered into the ground. Images such as Yates Thompson MS 46, Sloane MS 2468, and MS A6 use the body to confront the viewer with visual reminders of the inevitable dissolving of the self as conceived as an identity-in-body. The reader-viewer is invited to imagine their own slow physical erasure as the defunct body is hidden from the sight of the living and dissolved into the stuff of the earth. They are encouraged to understand bodily death as identity dissolution, a process that begins at the point of death and continues until they are dug up and disassembled as anonymous bones. The disinterment and display of these bones marked a ‘final death’ when the body was gone and individual identity was no longer located in a physical form.30 Images of the shrouded corpse at the graveside present the reader with a death that is about process – a leaving rather than an immediate absence. The body is still surrounded by the support of religious ritual and social community, but this is the final time that they will share the same space. It is also among the final moments when the identity of the deceased is still unambiguously occupying the space of the (dead) body. In this liminal moment, the body and the identity of that body are assumed rather than seen, both in life and in the miniatures, but this does 28 MS A6, Hours, France, 1440–75, fol. 122. Lawrence: Kenneth Spence Research Library, University of Kansas; Yates Thompson MS 46, Hours, France (Paris), c. 1410–20, fol. 156v. London: British Library. 29 See Office of the Dead Lessons 4, 7, 8. 30 Camille, Master of Death, 197.

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not prevent readers from drawing on their own imaginative resources to supply knowledge of the decay that will have already begun to affect the corpse. Like the funeral scenes of the ‘regular’ death, the familiarity of the actions represented in the ‘repellent’ death burial enables the reader to imagine themselves into the shroud. Even if the reader gazing at the image of burial in the Office of the Dead had never witnessed a death or assisted with the preparation of a body (quite unlikely), the ‘signs’ would still have been familiar to them from poems and sermons that drew on the widespread death literature as well as from other images of the exposed corpse, which are discussed in the following sections. The reader’s imaginative world would thus fully equip them to see through the shroud to the body beneath. For the reader-viewer, images of burial were images redolent of bodily decay and identity loss despite the disguised nature of the shrouded corpse. Exposure and Agency Harley MS 2934 (fol. 106) opens the Office of the Dead with an image of an emaciated corpse, naked but for a wisp of winding cloth, lying stretched out on a green hillside (Fig. 3-4).31 His spindly arms are awkwardly bent, and his back is stiffly arched. At his feet is a wooden cross, and at his side is an open, emptied coffin. In images like this, the exposed corpse presents perhaps the most potent (and pungent) of the ‘repellent death’ imagery in Books of Hours because it manifests disrupted expectations and preparations, relishes the ghoulish and the grim, and can be confrontational rather than contemplative in character. The exposed corpse was a frightful vision, shocking in part because it violated social norms regarding the care for and preparation of the body. The corpse was not supposed to be on display at all, and certainly not in a state of advanced putrefaction. Care for the dead was a social and religious duty and was taken seriously by those preparing for death and those involved in the rites after death. It was a charitable duty for all Christians and numbered among the Seven Works of Mercy.32 In the churchwarden accounts from St. Mary at Hill (1512–13), the wardens record that William Hewys and Thomas Monden were responsible for ‘gadryng of the Almys in the chyrche which shall be for reserwed toward beryalles of pure pepułł and oyer dedes of charite’.33 31 London, British Library, Harley 2934, Hours, France (Troyes), c. 1410. 32 The first six Works of Mercy have their biblical origins in Matt. 25:42–46. Later, drawing on the book of Tobit, burial of the dead was added to what became the medieval Seven Works of Mercy: ‘To visit, to quench, to feed, to ransom, clothe, harbour or bury’. Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologiae of St Thomas Aquinas, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Second Revised Edition (New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia, 1920), II:II; Q32, accessed April 1, 2023. http://www.newadvent.org/summa/index.html. 33 Henry Littlehales, The Medieval Records of a London City Church (St. Mary at Hill) AD. 1420–1559, Early English Text Society Original Series 125, 128 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1904), 284.

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Fig. 3-4. Harley MS 2934, Hours, France (Troyes), c. 1410, fol. 106. London: British Library. © The British Library Board.

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The same accounts note payments from parishioners for burying strangers.34 Similarly, Mirk’s examination of conscience asked ‘Hast þow holpe by þy myȝt / To burye þe dede as byd owre dryȝt?’35 With the weight of religious and social expectation dictating careful treatment and disposal of the corpse, an unprepared body carried negative connotations of having been forgotten, neglected, rejected, or punished by the social and religious community. The social significance of denying burial and the implications of being unable to bury the dead (with the concomitant value of charitable provision for it) are attested in romance literature such as the tale of Sir Amadace. In the tale the impecunious and improvident Sir Amadace encounters a widow keeping vigil over the body of her merchant husband, whose burial has been delayed because of unpaid debts that the widow cannot redeem. Sir Amadace spends his own money settling the debts and providing burial rites for the stranger.36 The story highlights the power of the exposed corpse to exert influence on the living both as a physical object and as a sign of disruption in the community. The writer of Sir Amadace does not neglect to iterate the physical results caused by weeks of exposure. Before Sir Amadace even enters the chapel where the corpse resides, it is described on three occasions as having ‘such a stinke’ that no one can remain in the vicinity. The smell of rot ‘smote’ the nose of Sir Amadace’s young squire, causing him to fear for his life, a word that conveys the active violence of the rotting body.37 Sir Amadace, when he finally enters the chapel, comments on the danger of loitering around decaying bodies, saying to the widow: ‘Me likes full ill, / Ye ar bothe in plyit to spille,/ He lise so lung on bere.’38 The merchant is dead, but his corpse makes its present felt by poisoning the air around it and causing danger to the living who approach it. It is impossible to ignore, even for the passing stranger. The corpse is exposed in this manner as a form of social and religious punishment: the widow cannot settle the debt owed by her dead husband, and the creditor, another merchant of the town, demonstrates his wrath by ‘foridding the earth’ to 34 Thomas Colyns (in 1491–92), Thomas Bate (1492–93), and Richard Clossys (1498–99) are all recorded as having paid for the ‘the buryyng of a straunge manne in the Churche yarde’. Littlehales, The Medieval Records of a London City Church, 78, 171, 183, 232. 35 John Mirk, Instructions for Parish Priests, ed. Edward Peacock, Early English Text Society. Original Series 31 (London: Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1868), 45, lines 1469–70. 36 For a full discussion of the Tale of Sir Amadace within the body of medieval literature treating the macabre, see Rooney, Mortality and Imagination: The Life of the Dead in Medieval English Literature, 90–98. 37 ‘Suche a stinke as I had thare, / Sertis thenne had I nevyr are / Noquere in so stid. / For this palfray that I on ryde, / Ther myghte I no lengur abide; / I traue I have keghte my dede.’ Edward E. Foster, ed., Amis and Amiloun, Robert of Cisyle, and Sir Amadace, 2nd ed. (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), lines 91–96. See also lines 71–72, 103–4. 38 Foster, Amis and Amiloun, lines 136–38.

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the body. This is a powerful tactic. The failure of the widow’s husband to keep his bond results in social ostracism that is enacted through non-burial. This action binds the debtor to the creditor as the continued exposure of the corpse jeopardizes the soul of the deceased and the lives of the living. In addition to the spiritual perils it occasioned then, the denial of burial was also a very public punishment that shamed the memory of the deceased and his unhappy relations. The creditor, unable to avenge himself on the debtor-husband who had moved beyond his reach, instead visits his reprisals through desecration of the corpse. This corpse is still somewhat intact, fleshy, and as such, the identity of the merchant remains with the body, making it a fitting site of punishment. The creditor’s actions are profoundly at odds with the actions of the St. Mary-at-Hill parishioners carefully collecting alms for the burial of the poor and other ‘dedes of charite’. When Sir Amadace decides to settle the debt and provides funds for the burial of the corpse, complete with bells, a trental of masses, offerings, and funeral meal, he performs the act of mercy that enables the body to finally be interred and in doing so restores the dead merchant (and his wife) to the community. While poverty could result in an unattended corpse, social and religious expectation militated against this.39 More often, as in the tale of Sir Amadace, exposing the corpse was an active form of punishment. The most spectacularly visible corpses were those of criminals and traitors for whom punishment included publicly dishonouring the body. The exposure of the corpse in this context was indicative of its ‘outsider’ status in the community. The ‘judicial spectatorship’ of medieval penal practice, in which the condemnation and punishment of the criminal body was staged for and witnessed by the community, also involved the community in the maintenance of the status quo.40 Punishment for particularly pernicious crimes nearly always included some aspect of bodily desecration, from decapitation and evisceration to being drawn and quartered.41 These practices included non-burial as a last stage, where the corpse was ‘given over to the birds in the air and taken away from the earth so that … others shall witness his punishment as a fright 39 When the ghost of the dead merchant returns at the end of the tale to thank Sir Amadace for burying him ‘as a brother’, he is perhaps referencing the charitable intervention of confraternities who undertook to care for the impoverished dead. This falls into a medieval genre of ‘Grateful Dead’ stories in which acts of charity for the deceased are later rewarded by those same (dead) individuals. On illustrations of the ‘Grateful Dead’ genre, see Klara Broekhuiksen, ‘The Legend of the Grateful Dead: A Misinterpreted Miniature in the Tres RIches Heures of Jean de Berry’, in Liber Amiconum in Memory of Dr. Maurits Smeyers, ed. Bert Cardon, Jan Van der Stock, and Dominique Vanwijnsberghe (Paris: Uitgeverij Peeters, 2002), 213–30. 40 Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 128–29. 41 Finucane, ‘Sacred Corpse. Profane Carrion’, 50–51.

Repellent Death: Time, Rot, and the Death of the Body 

and a warning’. 42 The body was thus both representative of the judicial process of expunging a sin/sinner and was the sin/sinner him or herself. 43 In the context of these social and religious structures, the sight of the exposed corpse carried strong connotations, the most powerful of which were its function as a sign of transgression, sin, and punishment. These associations were not restricted to those who broke the rules of society and were, by that action, prevented in death from participating in the norms of commemorative and burial practice. The medieval church considered everyone as a potential transgressor in view of the inherently sinful nature of humankind. Only the saints regularly overcame the draw to sinful behaviours. The fate of the soul was intimately connected to the fate of the body such that the displayed corruption of the body became a public sign of the corruption of the soul, just as its opposite, the prepared corpse, was indicative that the deceased rested in the soul-saving embrace of the church. The corpse, like the dead merchant in the tale of Sir Amadace, is inert and incapable of taking action itself to absolve or redeem guilt or make amends in the community. The exposed dead are the objects of disgust about which they can do nothing. The tale of Sir Amadace makes narrative use of contemporary responses to the sight of the exposed corpse: shock, disruption, shame, social rejection, punishment, compassion, and charity. ‘Repellent’ imagery in the Office of the Dead would have evoked similar responses, stimulating the reader to consider the physical corruptibility of the body in tandem with the spiritual corruptibility of the soul. Through imaginative engagement, the image of the dead body gives the reader time to consider the social and spiritual meaning of physical decay for the purposes of greater self-knowledge and spiritual improvement. The Corpse as a Shameful Sight The medieval body was problematic in life and revolting in death. While celebrated for strength or beauty on one hand, it was scorned as a site of sin on the other. At no time was the naked body laudable in life or in death. 44 Biblical references to the exposed body occur in the context of sin (Adam and Eve after the fall or David’s 42 From a traditional sentencing formula from southern Germany and Switzerland. Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel, 126–57, esp. 139. 43 On the ‘amputation’ of the criminals from the social body, see Danielle M. Westerhof, ‘Amputating the Traitor: Healing the Social Body in Public Executions for Treason in Late Medieval England’, in The Ends of the Body: Identity and Community in Medieval Culture, ed. Jill Ross and Suzanna Conklin Akbari (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 177–92. 44 Suzanne Lewis, ‘Medieval Bodies Then and Now: Negotiating Problems of Ambivalence and Paradox’, in Naked before God: Uncovering the Body in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Benjamin C. Wither and Jonathan Wilcox (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2003), 15–21.

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lust for Bathsheba) and punishment (the exiled Israelites experiencing ‘hunger and thirst and nakedness, and every kind of want’). 45 From the early church, Christian writers had been at best ambivalent and at worst horrified by the putrefaction of the body and understood decay as a direct reflection of sin. Passages such as the punishing Isaiah 47:3, ‘Thou shalt be exposed to shame, thy naked form uncovered’, makes the connection between the exposure of the body and shame as punishment especially clear.46 While not held to be intrinsically sinful, the body’s flesh became a metonymic articulation in text and image of the corruption of sin in the soul. These associations were extended to include the exposed dead body unclothed by earth, as seen in the tale of Sir Amadace, so that to view the exposed corpse was to bear witness to the frailty of the human condition in spirit and in body. The apparent visibility of sin in the decaying corpse was physically and socially repellent, both unpleasant and shameful to witness.47 Shame, however, could bear spiritual fruit, and some experience of shame was recommended by medieval writers as a form of emotional discomfort that could bring about spiritual gain. 48 Thomas Aquinas debates the value of shame as a tool of spiritual perfection in the Summa Theologica, and while he falls short of considering it a virtue, he does outline the various benefits that shame can imbue: it helps establish virtuous habits, it fosters honesty, it encourages temperate behaviours. 49 Aquinas notes that we are just as ashamed of things that are considered social defects – poverty, servitude, disrepute – as we are by genuinely sinful behaviours. In the image of the exposed cadaver, spiritual and social lowliness are on view, and the visible rot of the body becomes both cause and sign of these inadequacies. As such, the vision of the exposed corpse at the Office of the Dead could be an uncomfortable one, bringing the reader-viewer into the orbit of an object carrying strong connotations of social and physical shame. Filtered through the imaged body, readers could imaginatively experience the shame associated with an exposed cadaver and gain a deeper knowledge of how physical death would condition responses to their own dead body. While the expectation (and hope) of the reader was that their own body would not be publicly exposed in this way, the opportunity to gaze on the exposed 45 Gen. 4:7; 2 Sam. 11:1–5; Deut. 28:48. 46 Gregory of Nyssa went so far as to compare seeing his parents’ corpses with a form of incest, with references to the passages in Leviticus prohibiting ‘revealing the nakedness’ of family members. Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, 84. Lev. 18:6–18. 47 Camille, Master of Death, 176; Christina Welch, ‘Late Medieval Carved Cadaver Memorials in England and Wales’, in Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: The Material and Spiritual Conditions of the Culture of Death, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2016), 380. 48 Rebecca Krug, Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), 96. 49 Aquinas notes (quoting St Ambrose) that shame ‘“lays the first foundation of temperance” by inspiring man with the horror of whatever is disgraceful’. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II–II, Q144, Article 1–4, esp. Article 4, reply to Objection 4, accessed April 1. www.newadvent.org/summa/index.html.

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corpse was a reminder that the horror of physical decay with all its connotations might be hidden by a shroud, but it was not gone. The Body and Book as Mirror Medieval responses to the body were conflicted: bodily partition, for example, was acceptable and offensive, and the body was ‘both a locus of putrefaction and a locus of self’.50 It is the ‘and’ that is important. However repellent the sight of the naked corpse, it was still a fleshy marker of personhood and for the reader-viewer a potential imagined self. The experiential abstraction that is the corpse could be imaginatively absorbed by the reader as they gazed upon it. In this way, it transitions away from the merely gross (though its repellent aspect is not ignored) to become an organic mirror. The preacher John Mirk opens his funeral sermon with this familiar analogy: ‘Gode men, as ye alle se, here is a myrroure to us alle: a corse browth to the chyrch’,51 and a similar phrase is uttered by Lazarus, the living corpse, about himself as he emerges from the tomb in the Towneley Lazarus play.52 The corpse as mirror trope was an old and familiar one to medieval audiences, and it found expression in text and images.53 While the mirror itself became associated with vice and an inability to see oneself clearly, the corpse was understood as a ‘true’ reflection of the inner self, with the state of the body revealing the state of the soul.54 The ability of the corpse to function in this way was predicated on the understanding that body and soul were profoundly intertwined and that what was true of the soul could be found written on the body, an idea expressed in theological discussion and in popular belief.55 The Speculum Sacerdotale, a fifteenth-century collection of sermons, ritualizes the connection in the chapter on All Souls Days, which outlines various aspects of commemorative practice, including prayers for the dead, alms, places, and types of burial. Washing the corpse is described as expressive of confession, with the cleansing of the corpse mirroring the cleansing of the soul.56 50 Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, 205–6, my italics. 51 Mirk, Mirk’s Festial, 294. 52 ‘Youre myrroure here ye loke.’ Stevens and Cawley, The Towneley Plays, vol. 1, 428, lines 120–22. 53 Stephen Perkinson, ‘The Ivory Mirror’, in The Ivory Mirror: The Art of Mortality in Renaissance Europe, ed. Stephen Perkinson (New Haven/London: Bowdoin College Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2017), 22–26. 54 Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History, trans. Katherine H. Jewett (New York: Routledge, 2001), esp. ch. 7 ‘The Devil’s Distorted Faces’, 187–222. 55 As expressed, for example, in the fourteenth-century debate on role of body in the visio dei. Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, 276–317. 56 ‘the bodies oweþ to be waschen in tokenynge that ȝif the sowle be clenside by confession, then bothe the body and the sowle to-gedre schal ioye at the day of dome’. Edward H. Weatherly, ed., Speculum

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Fig. 3-5. MS 507, Hours, France (Paris), c. 1500, fol. 113. Paris: Bibliothèque Mazarine.

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The body as ‘soul-mirror’ found direct expression in the visual motif of a corpse with a mirror, which appears from the fifteenth century in Books of Hours from around Europe. In a late fifteenth-century French example, MS 507 (now in the Bibliothèque Mazarine), a handsome young man dressed in crimson hose and a matching orange cap and doublet gazes into a large oval mirror, apparently captivated by his own reflection (Fig. 3-5).57 The mirror is obligingly held for him by a cadaver with bones bursting through desiccated skin and draped in a pale pink winding cloth. The two figures are in close proximity and are the same height. The viewer of the image would understand that the cadaver and not the mirror provides the more accurate visual counterpart to the elegant young man: the cadaver is ‘true’, revealing a spiritual reality expressed in physical decay, a visible embodiment of the sinful state of the human soul. It is also ‘true’ in the sense that it is a future fate that the youth will inevitably meet. This is the truth of a mortal life in a frail body. MS 507 presents the viewer with layers of reflection and two types of mirrors. The young man’s living body is reflected in the mirror into which he gazes and in the visual echo provided by the cadaver holding the mirror. Additionally, in the living body of the young man, the reader sees someone similar to themselves. While it has been suggested that images like the MS 507 should be interpreted as a moment from the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead, the insertion of the mirror between them changes the nature of this encounter between living and dead, emphasizing slow self-reflection rather than the dramatic and uncanny shock of the Legend.58 Unlike the Legend, here the stylish gentleman appears unaware of his dead companion, his focus entirely on his own reflection. But he makes an unusual gesture, crossing his arms over his chest just like a corpse being prepared for burial. Perhaps he, like the reader, is engaged in contemplating bodily death and sees in his reflection the truth behind the pleasant image, here made manifest in the rotting body. The line of sight between the young man and the corpse passes directly through the mirror; he is literally ‘seeing past’ the illusion of his handsome living face to the skull below. Writing about behaviour in civil society, Kristie Fleckenstein notes that the two mirrors in operation here, the ‘textual-spiritual’ (book-text) and the ‘technological-material’ (mirror-object), work in tandem to reveal spiritual truths by confronting the viewer with the material truth of their reflection, thus encouraging behavioural self-reform. The didactic functionality of the mirror lies in its ability to prompt the viewer to ‘transform the “is” of the mirror image into the “should be” or the “ought” of Sacerdotale Edited from British Museum MS Additional 36791, Early English Text Society (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), 231. 57 MS 507, Hours, France (Paris), c. 1500, fol. 113. Paris: Bibliothèque Mazarine. See also Perkinson, ‘The Ivory Mirror’, figs. 10–11. 58 Perkinson, ‘The Ivory Mirror’, 24–25.

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spiritual purity’.59 Similarly, the MS 507 image engages the reader in a process of self-scrutiny, encouraging them to look at their own reflection in a similar manner to the youth and to respond by transforming their current ‘is’ into a more spiritually wholesome state. This self-awareness is not only encouraged through the prompt of the image but also through the accompanying textual-spiritual mirror, the Office texts, which offers the reader a ‘true’ spiritual vision of what he should be.60 The Office texts function in this way for medieval death by refracting the spiritual and physical truths of bodily death through the liturgical structures of the Off ice. The texts provide a true vision of Christian death, all the while implying the corpse that underpins the need for this liturgical rite – the corpse that holds up this textual ‘mirror’. The medieval transi tomb is a clear response to this sense that there are both spiritual and material truths that can be expressed via the mirroring of the body. These tombs monumentalize the uncanny doubling that occurs through the pairing of the live (or at least recently live) and dead bodies. Though in a different format and on a less public scale, the Mazarine illustration functions in a similar manner. Within the pages of the book, the MS 507 illustration, like the tombs, gives the viewer both the figure au vif and his cadaverous peer. The viewer stands in the customary relationship to the transi pair: the reader is like the elegant youth, gazing at and through death’s mirror to corpse as a counterpart, but the reader is not the youth. When the viewer sees the youth and sees the corpse, he knows that they are relevant to his situation, but they also remain ‘other’ than himself. The pair in the image are complete without the reader, but the composition implies the presence of a spectator by tilting the mirror, youth and corpse out toward them. The tacit compositional acknowledgement of a third party manifests the ‘ternary model’ which Paul Binski argues is an essential part of how macabre imagery functions.61 In the manuscript context, the confrontation and conflation of the transi’s living and dead image can be potently enhanced by a full-scale embrace of the ternary body of the reader so that it is not merely implicated but becomes constituent of the image’s relational construction rather than witness to it. The medieval reader who was imaginatively immersed in looking and reading actively sought to place themselves ‘in’ the image, whether visual or textual. In exposed corpse imagery, the reader-viewer’s own body becomes an active element 59 Kristie S. Fleckenstein, ‘Decorous Spectacle: Mirrors, Manners, and Ars Dictaminis in Late Medieval Civic Engagement’, Rhetoric Review 28, no. 2 (2009): 115–16. 60 Fleckenstein, ‘Decorous Spectacle’, 116; Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History, 109–10. On medieval writing as mirror see Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History, 111–15. 61 Binski, Medieval Death, 138.

Repellent Death: Time, Rot, and the Death of the Body 

Fig. 3-6. Yates Thompson MS 7, ‘The Hours of Dionora of Urbino’, Hours, Italy (Florence or Mantua), c. 1480, historiated initials added c. 1510–15, fol. 174. London: British Library. © The British Library Board.

in the life-death dialogue as they take on the role of its living counterpart.62 The image in Harley MS 2934 (above, Fig. 3-4), for example, presents the corpse to the viewer, alone and without distraction. As they gaze at the corpse, their own body becomes its partner and opposite. The reader themselves takes on the role played by the elegant youth in MS 507, with the book they hold performing as the mirror through which the reader gains access to the material truth of their own decaying body via the devotional gaze. 62 On the involvement of the reader’s body in constructing meaning in the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead see further below and Suzanna Greer Fein, ‘Life and Death, Reader and Page: Mirrors of Mortality in English Manuscripts’, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 35, no. 1 (2002): 72.

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The Office of the Dead in Yates Thompson MS 7 (fol. 174; Fig. 3-6) renders the mirror metaphor in a literal sense. The Office is illustrated with an emphatically gendered skeleton, fully dressed in a fashionable red gown and blue shawl with a delicate white headdress set on an incongruously blond head. The skull’s bald grin is directed at a hand mirror into which she gazes placidly.63 The blonde skeleton’s vain admiration of her somewhat dubious beauty highlights for the reader the foolishness of attaching value to the physical appearance of the living body, but it is also an illustration of the goal of the devotional gaze directed at the corpse. The mirror in this image is no longer a metaphor for self-knowledge, and the corpse is not hidden behind it. In Yates Thompson MS 7, our nature as corpse-in-waiting is made visible in the body of the woman and is truly reflected in the mirror.64 The reader is similarly invited to see their own bony face gazing back at them from the mirror of the exposed corpse image. The personal enfolding of viewer into the viewed is expressed in the traditional contemptus mundi phrase sum quod eris (I am what you will be), which appears on transi tombs and tomb brasses throughout Europe in various guises and languages and also serves as the warning of the dead in the popular medieval Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead.65 The phrase linguistically insists on the relationship between the living reader and the ‘dead’ image by addressing the viewer directly.66 This is particularly apposite to corpse images in the Office of the Dead because of the intrinsically personal nature of the encounter within the pages of a prayerbook. Where the transi tomb monumentalizes, the manuscript illumination miniaturizes. In doing so, the contemplative space of the transi becomes more intimate, narrowing the viewing relationship to one of ‘you and me’, image and reader, rather than the monumental transi’s broader address to a general living public. The corpse is provided by the book, and the reader supplies the living body: a textual mort and a reading vif. In the contained space between book and reader, meaning is created by the ineluctable relationship between them. The power of corpse imagery is in the inherently relational nature of our perception of it. The image of the human cadaver is never ‘simply’ or ‘only’ someone else; 63 Yates Thompson MS 7, ‘The Hours of Dionora of Urbino’, Hours, Italy (Florence or Mantua), c. 1480, historiated initials added c. 1510–15, fol. 174. London: British Library. 64 A similar example is discussed by Morrison, ‘The Light at the End of the Tunnel: Manuscript Illumination and the Concept of Death’, 89–90. 65 Jerome Bertram, ‘Inscriptions on Late Medieval Brasses and Monuments’, in Roman, Runes and Ogham: Medieval Inscriptions in the Insular World and on the Continent, ed. John Higgit, Katherine Forsyth, and David N. Parsons (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2001), 194–95. See below on the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead. 66 This is informed by Ðorđević’s discussion of the relational nature of sum quod eris in the context of transi tombs. Jakov Ðorđević, ‘Made in the Skull’s Likeness: Of Transi Tombs, Identity and Memento Mori’, Journal of Art Historiography 17 (2017): 15–18.

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Fig. 3-7. Additional MS 25695, Hours, France, late 15th century, fol. 165. London: British Library. © The British Library Board.

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it is them and it is me. It is the embodied potential for death contained within the living. The viewed corpse becomes alive in the reader, but by the same token, the reader decays with the corpse, and it is this fluid back-and-forth engagement that provides both familiarity and warning in corpse imagery. Caesura Exposed corpse images are images of disruption; they create a visual caesura. They interrupt time, and they puncture reality. One function of the exposed corpse imagery was to create an opportunity to linger over the decaying body, something which is usually hidden from sight.67 By capturing a moment, the image sets the viewer momentarily outside the ritual time of the ‘death-tide’. Additional MS 25695 fol. 165 (Fig. 3-7) emphasizes the transitory nature of the moment.68 A body is stretched out next to an open grave while two women kneeling beside him prepare to sew the corpse into a shroud. The actions that surround care and preparation of the dead, while still clearly visible, have been paused at a dramatically powerful moment. The still image affords the reader space to visually dwell on a sight which is usually only seen in passing, but the implications of the scene retain the quality of the momentary glimpse of the corpse, which will soon be hidden from our view. As the focus of these images, the compositional structure often works to force the eye toward the exposed corpse. The graveyard scene in MS Lewis E 92 fol. 90v (Fig. 3-8) presents a corpse resting on the earth, un-coffined and un-shrouded, exposed to the reader and to the figures in the scene.69 There is nothing between the emaciated form and the viewer. In this example, colour is also used to convey the importance of the dead body over the living body: the living figures in the image are painted in delicate shades of grey while the corpse is in full colour. The contrast of the grisaille figures with the vivid corpse subverts the viewer’s typical expectation. In this image the corpse is artistically ‘alive’ while the figure at his side fades away. The result is that the reader’s eye is automatically drawn to the visually dominant corpse and away from the pallid actions of the living figures, just as the reader’s mind is encouraged through this active looking to be drawn toward contemplation of mortality and away from the things of this world. By situating the corpse in the churchyard, as in both Additional MS 25695 and MS Lewis E 92, the prominent body is set within the customary context of the 67 Camille, Master of Death, 175. 68 Additional MS 25695, Hours, France, late 15th century, fol. 165. London: British Library. 69 MS Lewis E 92, Hours, France (Paris?), 1440–60, fol. 90v. Philadelphia: Rare Book Department, Free Library of Philadelphia.

Repellent Death: Time, Rot, and the Death of the Body 

Fig. 3-8. MS Lewis E 92, Hours, France (Paris?), 1440–60, fol. 90v. Philadelphia: Rare Book Department, Free Library of Philadelphia. Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia, Rare Book Department.

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death-tide, and this visual frame of reference emphasizes both the place of the body in time and the fact that, through the image, the viewer has momentarily paused time. However, the disruption in the usual order represented by the exposed corpse can be expressed in other ways. In MS Lewis E 92, the actions relevant to the corpse are ambiguous. There is a woman at its side – a mourner. Unlike the women in Additional MS 25695, she makes no motion toward preparing the body for burial. She is alone, without mourning companions or clergy. There is no grave and no grave digger attending to this corpse. It is not a formal burial. How is the viewer to make sense of this peculiar scene? Is the corpse really there? The churchyard setting lends it some reality, but the vibrancy of the corpse contrasted with the grey, quiet woman, her isolation and posture, and the unusual situation of the body unprepared for burial and lying baldly on the earth suggest that this may be better understood as vision of death inspired by the churchyard setting in which other active burials are taking place. Whether or not the corpse is physically present with the woman, her deportment expresses a quietude (head bent, hands raised, eyes cast down) that the reader might find themselves physically echoing as they gaze at the book in their hands. The viewer is witness to and shares in the devotional imaginings of another, the pictured grey woman. It is not only time that is disrupted here but ordinary perceptions of reality. As the woman thoughtfully contemplates the corpse, she becomes an echo of the reader, a grisaille shadow the reader casts on the page. The caesura implied by these images is eloquently visible in those images in which there is no pretense to the usual rituals and spaces of the death-tide, where the body alone is presented to the viewer’s eye. Harley MS 2934 (Fig. 3-4) is one such image in which the ostensible reality of the churchyard is dispensed with, creating a wholly visionary image. The body is presented icon-like, without the time and space usually framing death. The image of death has been distilled to a solitary, exposed corpse, shorn of the comforts and dignities of ritual. But it is not a macabre image, for while the deadness of the human body is indisputably emphasized, the promise of salvation in the golden beams that stream toward the body from above express hopes for the continuing life of the soul. We have already seen the relevance of a liturgical ‘anytime’ as an entry point for the reader who is imaginatively engaged with images. Here we might speak of a liturgical ‘no-time’, an atemporal symbolic rendering of the nature of Christian death in which all bodies rot away and all souls seek salvation. In a world in which measured time was much less present, texts like the Office of the Dead which echoed the religious hours of the monastic life and the structured events of death-tide were themselves ways to mark the passage of time. The Office of the Dead texts evoke the temporal limits of death by being the real words read or said over a real body. However, outside that context, where images of the cadaver

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stand in for the presence of death, the fixed temporalities of death become flexible. Images of the exposed corpse in prayerbooks allowed for the temporary halt of forward motion, eroding the ‘imposed, event- and space-orchestrated temporal constraints’ of death and offering readers instead an opportunity to see and imagine bodily death in a way that a real body does not permit.70 Images like Additional MS 25695, Lewis E 92, and Harley MS 2934 give the reader the ability to remain outside the insistent constraints of the death-tide for a period of reflection before restarting the clock by a resumption of the text. The ability to be ‘outside’ ordinary time or place is a regular feature of the medieval contemplative tradition. From the formal seclusion of monastic houses to the more informal anchorite, effort was made to create space and time separate from society. Through the still image of the exposed corpse, it was possible to offer the reader-viewer a similar experience outside time in which to see and contemplate that which they will become. By altering the medium in which body is viewed, the reader can extend or shorten their exposure to, and contemplation of, physical death according to their own wishes.71 Meanwhile, the Office of the Dead texts themselves represent the rich fabric of liturgical time surrounding the image of death. In this way, the images provide a visual caesura in the ritual cadences that ordinarily enveloped death and the dead. The corpse is a leftover, a remnant of the bodily life cast aside and secreted in earth. It reminds the viewer of his origins in clay and dirt, of the inescapable ‘deadness’ of this matter. The language of the death lyric quoted above is that of obfuscation (misten, sissen), immobility (coldet, foldet, slaket, stivien), and the involuntary (slaket, grennet, rennet, griset). These words emphasize the inability of the corpse to perceive, to move, or to control its actions; it is rendered ineffective, inactive. As in Sir Amadace’s encounter with the dead merchant, the uselessness of the body, its lack of agency, was emphasized in didactic and sermon literature as a warning to parishioners that they should prepare their soul in life, for in death they could do nothing.72 Consideration of the corpse called on the reader to reflect on all Christian dead, as preparation for themselves, as intercession for others, and for remembrance of the Christian community. Their encounter with the inert cadaver in the Office is at a moment when they are already spiritually prepared to take up the warning of the corpse and act for the future. Although this imagery is viscerally focused on the body as an object of sin and decay, the corpse image is ultimately not about the death of the body nor death in the community. Rather, the central themes of corpse imagery (identity loss, sin, and time) are presented to the reader in the spirit of a hopeful memento mori: the corpse says to the reader ‘remember you 70 Blatt, Participatory Reading in Late-Medieval England, 174. 71 Blatt, Participatory Reading in Late-Medieval England, 174. 72 Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, 280–81.

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will die soon, but not just yet.’ In this way, the exposed corpse confronts the reader with bodily decay and all its uncomfortable associations of social and spiritual humility but also encourages modifying behaviours accessible to the living but no longer accessible to the dead. It challenges the reader to take responsibility for the soul by causing them to reflect on the temporary nature of bodily life in the face of the eternal nature of spiritual life. Perhaps the man in Harley MS 2934 heeded this challenge: his body may lie exposed and decaying on the bald earth, but the light of heaven shines down from above, expressing hopes for life after death.

Disruption: The Lively Corpse The lively corpse should not exist within the theological belief system of the medieval Church. After the soul departed the body, it should have remained inert, and when the soul was returned to the body at the last day, the body should have been restored to life and physical perfection. Grinning skulls and putrefying f lesh were not part of the heavenly plan. Nevertheless, medieval literature and art is liberally sprinkled with stories and visions of the lively dead engaging with the living. Accounts of these active corpses ranged from tales of terror at midnight crossroads to visions and dreams in which the dead reveal events to come.73 Often, the expressed purpose of the corpse is to communicate to the living what it is like to be dead, breaking the barrier of silence between life and death by offering knowledge, warning, and counsel. Caesarius of Heisterbach’s thirteenth-century Dialogue on Miracles recounts tales such as the death of Gozbert, ‘who coming to life again recounted what he had seen’, or that of Rudinger, who was foretold his own end. Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, likewise included visionary and dream accounts of the dead in his De miraculis.74 The dead in these stories and visions actively engage with the living, and the images are similarly animated. While all the images discussed here have communicative power, in the ‘lively corpse’ imagery, the dead body speaks with more than its presence alone, giving agency and voice to the bodies of the dead. This topos reflects the permeability 73 On the dangerous dead see Stephen Gordon, ‘Dealing with the Undead in the Later Middle Ages’, in Dealing with the Dead : Mortality and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Thea Tomaini, Explorations in Medieval Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 97–129; Caciola, Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages, passim, esp. 109–254. 74 Caesarius of Heisterbach, The Dialogue on Miracles, trans. H. Von E. Scott and C. C. Swinton Bland (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929), 231–89, esp. 247, 250; Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 72.

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of boundaries between life and death in the medieval imagination and the active nature of that border as a site of mediation. The dominant themes of ‘repellent’ death imagery, identity, agency, disruption, and time, are all present in lively corpse imagery such as the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead, one of the most commonly occurring expressions of the lively corpse theme. The Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead is a morality poem that became popular in the thirteenth century.75 There were many versions of the Legend, some more elaborate than others, but in each the dead urge the living to redeem themselves through worthy action since ‘at the hour of death good works only will avail you.’76 The tale had a broad currency in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe. The appeal and widespread interest in the Legend is illustrated by its frequent occurrence in various media and its adaptability to diverse situations and audiences, from the monumental fresco images at Pisa to the many examples found in parish churches and devotional books.77 The Legend is an eminently suitable subject for the Office of the Dead and appears frequently in fifteenth-century French and Flemish examples, both as the primary illustration and in marginal situations.78 Indeed, the expressed message of the Legend was so suitable that the

75 The basic story runs thus: three nobles, variously represented as princes or prelates of disparate rank, meet three dead in the forest. The living are shocked and recoil from the dead. The dead confront the living with their mortality, saying, ‘What you are, we once were. What we are, you will be.’ This articulation of the theme may have originated in France in the thirteenth century and been popularized through the writings of poets such as Nicholas de Margival and Baudouin de Condé, but stories along the same lines as the Three Living and the Three Dead were already known in the third century. Edelgard E. DuBruck and Barbara Gusick, Death and Dying in the Middle Ages (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1999), 25; Philippa Tristram, Figures of Life and Death in Medieval English Literature (London: Elek Books Ltd., 1976), 162; Binski, Medieval Death, 134–38. 76 Gertsman, ‘The Gap of Death’, 87–88; Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England, 1066–1550, 70. 77 Ashby Kinch, ‘Image, Ideology and Form: The Middle English Three Dead Kings in Its Iconographic Context’, The Chaucer Review 43, no. 1 (2008): 51–52; Lorenzo Carletti and Francesca Polacci, ‘Transition between Life and Afterlife: Analyzing The Triumph of Death in the Camposanto of Pisa’, Signs and Society 2 (2014): S90–95. While the story was often found in interior murals, it does not seem to have been as popular as an external or sculptural decoration. Only one significant instance of this theme in sculpture is recorded, commissioned by the Duke of Berry in 1408 for the façade of the famous Cemetery of the Innocents in Paris. Boase, Death in the Middle Ages: Mortality, Judgement and Remembrance, 104; James M. Clark, The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Glasgow: Jackson, Son, & Company, 1950), 22; Binski, Medieval Death, 135. 78 There are only f ive English manuscripts that contain illustrations of the Legend. Sandler, Gothic Manuscript 1285–1385, II, n. 18, n. 101, n. 111–12. For descriptions and illustrations of the Legend images from these manuscripts see Fein, ‘Life and Death, Reader and Page: Mirrors of Mortality in English Manuscripts’; Willy F. Storck, ‘Aspects of Death in English Art and Poetry-I’, The Burlington Magazine 21, no. 113 (1912): 249–56.

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Fig. 3-9. MS Lewis E 212, Hours, France, c. 1475–1500, fol. 151r. Philadelphia: Rare Book Department, Free Library of Philadelphia. Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia, Rare Book Department

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poem itself was sometimes also included in devotional books, as in the De Lisle Psalter or the Prayerbook of Bonne of Luxembourg.79 In manuscript painting the Legend imagery generally appears in either the ‘mirror’ or ‘chase’ form. In the mirror form, the dead are cast as macabre echoes of the living in stance, gaze, and gesture. The spatial arrangement in the mirrorform images separates the living and the dead using visual framing devices that emphasize what Susanna Greer Fein calls the ‘mirror-point’ where the separate spheres of life and death meet.80 The mirror-form composition is the dominant one in earlier manuscripts and is also the one most often encountered in church wall painting. In later fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century manuscripts, another potent representation of the Legend dominated, featuring a chase scene in which the corpses are energetic and dangerous.81 Instead of the static tableau of the mirror form, in the later variation, lively corpses ride, stride, and otherwise close in on the spaces of the living. In a late fifteenth-century French manuscript now in Philadelphia, MS Lewis E 212 fol. 151r (Fig. 3-9), three richly dressed young men on horseback encounter the three corpses.82 The men rear back from the sight before them, hands drawn up in surprise. The dead, meanwhile, are already amongst them, each armed with a spear and arms raised to attack. In the mirror form of the Legend, the dead are aware but passive. The corpses stand calmly, embodying in themselves the message they bear to the living. In the later chase form, they are active, and the encounter becomes combative in nature. Both versions of the Legend evoke the fear of physical death experienced by and in the body of the reader-viewer. In the mirror-form and chase-form Legend, the visible boundary between life and death has a vital role in the image because it is this violation of natural law that underpins the shocking nature of the encounter and the fear that it inspired. In the mirror-form compositions, the barrier is made present by an imposed extranarrative visual structure such as a border or frame (as in the Prayerbook of Bonne of Luxembourg), or by what Elina Gertsman calls ‘the gap of death’, a visual lacuna or void between the two parties.83 In the Taymouth Hours, both barrier and void 79 Arundel MS 83 II ‘The De Lisle Psalter’, Psalter, England (London?), c. 1308–10, fol. 127. London: British Library. The Cloisters Collection 1969 (69.86) ‘The Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg, Duchess of Normandy’, Hours, France (Paris), before 1349, fols. 321v–322. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 80 Fein, ‘Life and Death, Reader and Page: Mirrors of Mortality in English Manuscripts’, 70. 81 Christine Kralik, ‘Dialogue and Violence in Medieval Illuminations of the Three Living and the Three Dead’, in Mixed Metaphors: The Danse Macabre in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Sophie Oosterwijk and Stephanie Knoll (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), 144. 82 MS Lewis E 212, Hours, France, c. 1475–1500, fol. 151r. Philadelphia: Rare Book Department, Free Library of Philadelphia. 83 Gertsman, ‘The Gap of Death’, 86.

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Fig. 3-10. Yates Thompson MS 13 ‘The Taymouth Hours’, Hours, England, c. 1325–40, fols. 179v–180. London: British Library. © The British Library Board.

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are evoked by the furrow of the book spine (Fig. 3-10).84 The living perform their horror at the sight of the decaying bodies before them, but the framing of the image mitigates against any immediate fear for destruction of the living body by, or because of, the interloping dead. However, the ‘dichotomized worlds’ of each side are brought together by the engagement of the reader.85 The fear of bodily corruption on display comes via the imagination, as both the living within the image and the reader outside it imaginatively breach the boundary to place themselves in the bodies of repellent and regretful dead. Both Suzanna Greer Fein and Elina Gertsman emphasize the separation of worlds the visual break represents in the mirror-form Legend: it becomes the ‘symbolic point of juncture between natural and supernatural realms’, one that ‘emphatically divides the realm of death from the realm of life’,86 and the perception of separation is essential for the transgressive nature of the tale. However, the structure of the mirror-form composition also sets up the living and the dead as counterparts, two halves of a whole – sequential aspects of one living-dying body eerily separated and presented simultaneously. The image is a visual echo of the body-soul debate literature of the medieval period, in which a single self is divided into two opposing entities. The tension in the visionary space of the encounter is maintained by the reader, who through looking arrests the opposing bodily states in this moment. The viewer occupies the space between the living and the dead, and it is they to whom each side ultimately addresses their testimony. Both parties express horror at death: Among the living this is articulated in their revulsion at the sight of the decayed body, which is both spoken and in some instances performed in the figures that recoil from the dead. Among the dead this is expressed as a posthumous self-loathing that laments the fripperies, vanities, and sins of their living selves. The mirror-form Legend creates a space for self-reflective engagement with both bodies. Like a vision in a shattered mirror, the reader is looking at a fragmented version of themselves: the living body with which they identify and experience the world and the dead body, a yet unexpressed potential contained within themselves. The reader becomes a composite of the living and dead bodies in the image, drawing the two halves back together in their own body through a devotional reading practice intended to both mollify fear of physical death and mitigate the spiritual fear of death. The act of reading the Office of the Dead addresses both the aversion of the living and the regret of the dead in the Legend image by responding to the warning 84 Yates Thompson MS 13 ‘The Taymouth Hours’, Hours, England, c. 1325–40, fols. 179v–180. London: British Library. Sandler, Gothic Manuscript 1285–1385, II, 107–9, n. 98; Kathryn A. Smith, The Taymouth Hours: Stories and the Construction of the Self in Late Medieval England (London: British Library, 2012), 254–58. 85 Gertsman, ‘The Gap of Death’, 99. 86 Fein, ‘Life and Death, Reader and Page: Mirrors of Mortality in English Manuscripts’, 91; Gertsman, ‘The Gap of Death’, 98.

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brought from beyond the grave by the lively dead and by soothing the frightened living through the familiar patterns of church ritual. In the chase form, the structured encounter framed and restrained in the mirror-form image is replaced by one in which the dead actively encroach on the living, vigorously disrupting any assumption that the living and dead occupy separate realms. Although living and dead are now intermingled within a shared visual space, the presence of the boundary between life and death remains within the image, reminding the viewer of the unnatural circumstances. A recurring visual reference to it is found in the raised cross over which the living and the dead often meet. These crosses are of the type used to mark junction points in medieval society, including burial grounds and crossroads, both liminal spaces marking transition from one state or place to another. Crossroads and parish boundaries were frequently used as locations for judicial executions and were sites associated with the unrestful dead and with the exposed corpse. 87 The inclusion of the cross here would thus recall for the reader their own encounters with the rotting bodies of the dead, providing an added dimension of reality to the imaged scene. The mirror-form image contains a represented discursive moment between the living and the dead and involves the reader as a third body in the discourse. In contrast, the chase-form Legend is confrontational rather than discursive and maintains a distance between the reader and the image. In the chase-form Legend, the living are not accorded a vision of a bodily death that will come to them in the future; they are pursued by it in the present. The corpses in this format are more than a startling vision. They are unnatural intruders crossing the boundary separating life and death that is so rigorously maintained in the mirror-form images. By transgressing this boundary, the corpses literalize the presence of death in the midst of life; they are shown traipsing into the spaces of their living counterparts. These figures do not merely represent the fact of eventual bodily death, but they also articulate the current and pervasive presence of death in the world. The fleeing hunting party become the hunted, pursed by the spectre of physical demise and by their own sinful natures. This is a death which they and the reader carry within themselves and which must be overcome through pursuit of spiritual good. The images are full of an urgency that is not as present in other forms of corpse imagery. The encounter between the living and the dead, whether the sober mirror 87 Caciola, Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages, 65; Joris Coolen, ‘Place of Justice and Awe: The Topography of Gibbets and Gallows in Medieval and Early Modern North-Western and Central Europe’, World Archaeology 45, no. 5 (2014): 763; James Davis, ‘Spectacular Death: Capital Punishment in Medieval English Towns’, in Death in Medieval Europe: Death Scripted and Death Choreographed, ed. Joëlle Rollo-Koster (London: Routledge, 2017), 142.

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form or the active chase form, is shocking because it is sudden. Medieval people dreaded the ‘bad’ death, which was often associated with violence, accident, and pestilence. It was characterized by unpreparedness. The fifteenth-century instructional ars moriendi text describes such a death as ‘wonderfully hard and perilous, and also right fearful and horrible’.88 It stood in contrast to the ‘good’ death supported by family and the rites of the church. The bad death was not reserved for ‘bad’ people but rather was something that all good Christians were aware of as a possibility.89 Arguably, for he who faces it, death is always sudden. The very nature of death is sudden; there is life and then there is death, but there is no ‘mostly dead’ or ‘slightly alive’.90 The aristocratic men and women of the Legend did not anticipate their encounter with the lively dead. It came to them as death does, without warning. The reader, by contrast, can exercise control over when and how she engages with the shocking encounter. Like someone today watching a scary film from a comfortable sofa, the reader can vicariously experience the terror and revulsion along with the illustrated living while always remaining safely within the structured spaces of the devotional book. The seventh lesson of the Matins of the Dead says, ‘It is upon such an one as myself, who doth sin often and repent seldom, and then but little, that the fear of death befalleth.’ Like the living and the dead in the Legend, the reader ‘sins often and repents but seldom’ and recognizes in themselves the fearful response of both those illuminated f igures. Whether passive or active, the unnatural presence of the animated corpse in the company of the living calls attention to the experiential chasm between these two states. In their lament the dead in the poem verbally confirm the fears of the living regarding death, while their decaying bodies visibly express the physical horrors to come. The Legend crossroads are symbolic of the spiritual crossroads at which the living find themselves, as they must choose to heed the warning of these cadaverous visitors or later realize the dire consequences. In the Hours of Joanna of Castile, Additional MS 35313, 88 Frances Comper, The Book of the Craft of Dying and Other Early English Tracts Concerning Death, Literature of Death and Dying (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1917), 3. On this genre, see also O’Connor, The Art of Dying Well: The Development of the Ars Moriendi; Donald F. Duclow, ‘Dying Well: The Ars Moriendi and the Dormition of the Virgin’, in Death and Dying in the Middle Ages, ed. Edelgard E. Debruck and Barbara I. Guisick (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1999), 379–429. 89 The anxiety and discomfort caused by the ‘bad death’ is evidenced in the treatment of Henry Suso’s Horologium Sapientiae, whose second chapter circulated as an influential ‘death’ text. Ashby Kinch has found a consistent desire among illustrators and translators to soften the warnings of the original, shifting the visual emphasis at least away from the ‘bad’ death the text describes toward a ‘good’ death. Kinch, Imago Mortis, ch. 1, 35–68, esp. 36. 90 This phrase used by Miracle Max in William Golding’s The Princess Bride, from the film released 1987. ‘It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.’

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the living flee on horseback while the corpses pursue them on foot, armed with spears.91 On the facing page, with the opening texts of the Off ice of the Dead, is a funeral service (fols. 158v–159). Is this the funeral of one of those fleeing riders? Did he or she choose to heed the warning? What awaits their soul? Like the mirrored forms of the living and dead body, the pairing of the Legend with the funeral image confronts the reader with an image of the present and future and, by implying a direct relationship between them, intensif ies the reader’s perception of urgency as they identify with the fleeing riders of the Legend image. Christine Kralik identifies a similar process at work through the pairing of the Legend with the image of the decaying corpse in the Hours of Mary of Burgundy and Maximilian I.92 While the inclusion of the funeral scene with its implied (but visually absent) corpse permits the viewer some space for contemplative imagining about the fate of the body, the visibly decaying corpse does not. In both instances this iteration of the lively corpse imagery prompts the viewer to take action while they retain agency to act in their own salvific cause. The riders accosted by animate corpses in Additional MS 35313 or MS Lewis E 212 must decide how to live in the full knowledge that death pursues them. Imaginatively present at the crossroads in the image, the same decision confronts the reader of the Office of the Dead. As a visual preface to the Office of the Dead, the Legend functioned particularly well for readers who most closely resembled the Living of the story. Alongside the shock tactics and earnest entreaty to spiritual reform, the Legend images introduce a satirical element that parodies the modes of behaviour and address that operated among the medieval elite. There is a strong opposition between the social status of the living and the physical state of the dead. Whether or not the living and the dead are identifiable as princes or clerics, the living are always richly dressed and fashionable. The living in the Taymouth Hours (fol. 179v) display their high status by their elegant dress and engagement in the noble pursuit of hunting. On the other hand, the dead are, as Nigel Llewellyn puts it, ‘subversive, transexual, and no respecters of the niceties of social discourse’.93 Observing the ‘niceties’ in medieval society was important for anyone with a claim to elevated status. Social interactions were governed by the established rules of decorum, and status was visible in the performed adherence to these proprieties. Indecorous behaviour undermined a claim to rank. Much of the courtesy literature of the period emphasizes 91 Additional MS 35313 ‘The Hours of Joanna I of Castile’, Hours, Flanders, c. 1500, fol. 158v–159. London: British Library. 92 Kralik, ‘Death Is Not the End: The Encounter of the Three Living and the Three Dead in the Berlin Hours of Mary of Burgundy and Maximilian I’, 78. 93 Nigel Llewellyn, The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual c.1500–c.1800 (London: Reaktion and Victoria and Albert Museum, 1991), 22.

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moderation and restraint in all things and especially the importance of avoiding violent, threatening, or mocking behaviours. The fifteenth-century Boke of Curtasye warns readers, ‘Ne telle þou neuer at borde no tale / To harme or shame þy felawe in sale; For if he then withholde his methe / Eftsons he wylle forcast þi dethe.’94 The corpses of the Legend appear like three bad-mannered relatives crashing the (hunting) party. Freed by death from the constraints of polite discourse, they give rein to violent and contemptuous behaviours that were circumscribed in life. In the chase-form Legend, the latent violence suppressed by norms of courtly interaction becomes manifest, violating patterns of behaviour intended to control socially dangerous impulses. The juxtaposition of the elegant living body with the putrid dead body underscores the futility and counter-productive nature of the worldly pursuits of the living. In the mirror-form Legend, the physical mimicry of the living in the postures and gestures of the corpses also lampoons the mannerisms and regalia of aristocratic privilege. In the Taymouth Hours, for example, the centre corpse holds a fold of his shroud casually over his arm, echoing the elegant gestures of his stylishly garbed counterpart among the living. For the reader who belonged (or aspired to belong) to the upper echelons of society and thus understood the essential role of a performative politesse, the defiant disregard for decorum on display among the lively dead is perhaps as shocking as their decayed state. These corpses are irrefutably beyond the bounds of society. Their mannerisms and behaviours are a visual reminder to the privileged reader of the very ephemeral nature of physical beauty, social status, and earthly power. The fluidity of time is an important didactic element of the Legend images which show the reader past, present, and future. Suzanna Greer Fein notes that the split image of the mirror-form Legend requires that we look ‘two ways at once, at now and at then’, explaining that when read from the perspective of the living, left to right, the reader moves from the present into the future, but when read from the perspective of the dead, right to left, they move from present to past.95 These past-present-future shifts also involve the reader: the reader as well as the living are fixed in the present; the dead, on the other hand, are representative of both the past and the future. Although they now appear before the reader, returned unnaturally from death, the corpses lived and died in the past, and their current state is the result of those past actions. They are also a vision of the future, as they themselves emphasize; for the living and for the reader, the dead of the Legend are 94 The Boke of Curtasye in Frederick J. Furnivall, ed., Early English Meals and Manners (London: Early English Text Society by Oxford University Press, 1868), 180; John Gillingham, ‘From Civilitas to Civility: Codes of Manners in Medieval and Early Modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 12 (2002): 277. 95 Fein, ‘Life and Death, Reader and Page: Mirrors of Mortality in English Manuscripts’, 73, 83.

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a projection, a vision of what they must inevitably become.96 Whether in mirror or chase form, the dead are time-trapped. The dead may be the livings’ future selves stalking them through time, but they can offer no help to the living beyond the fearful stimulant of their own decaying forms. In narrative terms the image enfolds both the cyclical and soteriological time structures of the medieval world in miniature. On one level, the image is a visual epilogue. The corpses exemplify the natural and inevitable arc of time: their Godordained span on earth is concluded, they have lived and died. In the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead the reader (and the living) are witness to a narrative ‘afterlife’, accomplished by an unnatural rending of linear soteriological time. The image pauses the narrative at the moment of psychological crisis when the reader and the living are confronted with the moment of choice: Will the reader heed the warning of the dead?97 As the true protagonist implied by the image, it is the reader’s struggle toward proper thought and action that is in the balance. Into this moment of crisis, the Office texts introduce liturgical time as a means of mitigating the reader’s crisis moment. Liturgical time is cyclical, presenting a spiritual natural time akin to the earthly natural time of seasonal change. The familiarity of the Office texts acquired through repetition introduces an element of comfort and control to the reader’s entanglement with bodily death, which comes just as constantly as the liturgical seasons but much less predictability, as the dead of the Legend can attest. As the reader-viewer sits on the cusp of a reading practice that encourages a spiritual reorientation away from bodily and toward heavenly realities, the image of the Legend presents a condensed model of the overlapping conceptions of time that structured medieval engagement with mortality. The Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead began in a literary form, not a visual one. In illustrating the Office of the Dead, it was divorced from its primary textual situation and propelled into a secondary one. Its use in this way suggests that by the fifteenth century, the poem was so widely known that the image alone was sufficient to evoke for most viewers the larger narrative encompassed therein. It also suggests that this narrative, with its themes of fear and disruption, was considered usefully appropriate to the Office texts. The sight of the post-mortem self is necessarily visionary. Though it has a reality and a truth within the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead, it is not the truth of visible perception so much 96 Edelgard E. DuBruck, ‘Death: Poetic Perception and Imagination (Continental Europe)’, in Death and Dying in the Middle Ages, ed. Edelgard E. DuBruck and Barbara Gusick (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1999), 299. 97 Donald Maddox discusses the shift toward a ‘psychology of crisis’ which is experienced by the protagonist of medieval chanson-de-geste as a struggle to ‘achieve a proper conceptualization of thought and actions within the context of an open personal future.’ Donald Maddox, ‘The Semiosis of Assimilatio in Medieval Models of Time’, Style 20, no. 2 (1986): 255.

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as a truth of spiritual perception. The image asks the reader to self-identify not with the living or the dead figures but with the living and the dead, here presented in a way that emphasizes bodily form. This imagery represents a disruption to the clear theological path for body and soul. The lively corpse is out of place and thus shocking. It uses this outsider status to viscerally present a future the viewer cannot hope to avoid. The reader sees in the visionary moment the present, past, and future of the body displayed at once, a kind of diagram laying out the fate of the material form while calling attention to the fate of the reader’s eternal soul. The Legend’s disruptive moment echoes the disruptive moment of death. In both there is a rupture, fundamentally dividing the ‘before’ and ‘after’. While those on the wrong side of death’s disruption are rendered powerless, the living witnesses to the ghastly vision of death in the Legend are changed but retain their ability to act, to abandon sin, and to embrace virtue in this life. The horror of bodily death is at least in part a fear of the loss of agency, which is presented here to the reader in these visions of a future rotted form tragically unable to help itself. In this confrontation readers are spurred to avoid the regret of the unprepared while acknowledging that there is no avoiding the inevitable decay to come.

Dry Bones: Death in Life Arguably the least off-putting of the ‘repellent’ death imageries is the skeleton. The re-emergence from the ground of the ‘dry’ bones of the fully decomposed corpse represent a final stage in the biological processes that afflict the mortal form and in the erasure of bodily identity. The unsightly bodies of the dead, carefully shrouded and buried when fresh, are exposed anew to the sight of the world, not as ‘Alice’ or ‘Bertrand’ but as ‘clean’ bones. The iconography of memento mori imagery has for this reason frequently employed the skeleton as a universally applicable image of death. Gender and age are erased for the inexpert viewer, and the dry bones ‘speak’ to all: a skeleton is everyone and no one.98 These images are devoid of the inherent violence of the wet corpse images: they do not represent a disruption to the usual ordering of time and space as the rotting body did, and they are not a challenge to the social order as the exposed and lively corpse could be. Rather, they came back into public view ‘cleansed’ of their repellent fleshy aspects. Bones were considered fully inert and thus less dangerous to living viewers, and they were a common and acceptable sight, used 98 On the theme in the homiletic tradition see J. E. Cross, ‘“Dry Bones Speak”: A Theme in Some Old English Homilies’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 56, no. 3 (1957): 434–39.

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Fig. 3-11. MS Lewis E 108, Hours, Flanders (Bruges), 1485–1500, fols. 109v–110, Belgium, Bruges, 1485–1500. Philadelphia: Rare Book Department, Free Library of Philadelphia. Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia, Rare Book Department.

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as props by energetic preachers and displayed in open charnel houses or galleries surrounding the churchyard. The absence of the fearful connotations of the ‘wet’ body meant the dry skeleton image provoked a contemplation of death that was less concerned with the spiritual and existential horrors of bodily death and decay and instead situated death as the necessary and natural counterpart to life and a part of God’s natural order. The border images of late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth century manuscripts frequently emphasize the death-in-life theme by direct representation of it. In MS Lewis E 108 (fols. 109v–110) and MS Q Med. 88 (fol. 110; Figs. 3-11, 3-13),99 for example, the fashionable borders of the period with naturalistically rendered still-life elements illustrate insects and flowers interspersed with human skulls. Life and death are contrasted with one another, but they are also occupying the same spaces. In MS Lewis E 108, the six skulls lined up along the bottom borders have been given particular attention with each rendered from a slightly different perspective, presenting death from every angle. Four golden ribbons scroll through the border-space around them, each inscribed with the text ‘memento mori’. The Off ice of the Dead in Houghton MS Typ 180 has border illustrations that are teeming with life (fol. 1; Fig. 3-12).100 Naturalistic dogs, rodents, rabbits, oxen, deer, bears, birds, and even a monkey tumble and turn, some playfully, some aggressively. The objects they tilt with are bones. A bird carries a skull by the eye socket in the centre top; a mouse and a dog chew on skulls in the centre and bottom right-side border. The contrast between life and death is reflected in the contrast between the rich colour and movement of the creatures and the stark stillness of the skeleton and its dry bones, but the living creatures are also directly interacting with the bones, with a freedom and irreverence that nullif ies any lingering fear of these remnants of the dead body. The dry bones in these images are a far cry from the dangerous rotting corpse encountered by Sir Amadace. A grinning skeleton in MS Lewis E 120 (fol. 53) holds a scroll with the text ‘memento homo’.101 The text added to the image may simply be a reminder of the mortal state, ‘remember you are man’, and would encourage the reader of the Office of the Dead to focus their thoughts toward this knowledge as they begin reading. It may also be an abbreviated reference to a common memento mori phrase ‘Memento homo quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris’ (Remember man, dust 99 Philadelphia, Free Library of Philadelphia, MS Lewis E 108, Hours, Flanders (Bruges), 1485–1500; Boston, Boston Public Library, MS Q Med. 88, Hours, Flanders, late 15th century. 100 Cambridge, MA, Houghton Library, MS Typ 180, Hours (frag.), Italy (Venice), early fifteenth century, fols. 1 and 61. 101 Philadelphia, Free Library of Philadelphia, Lewis E 120, Hours, Italy (Naples), c. 1490, fol. 53 (digital image available at digital.scriptorium.org)

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Fig. 3-12. MS Typ 180, Hours (frag.), Italy (Venice), early 15th century, fol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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thou art, and into dust thou shalt return).102 The phrase was used in the liturgy of the Lenten season and in the burial service, as well as appearing on tombs and monuments. For the reader of the Office who was familiar with this funereal text, the phrase would also evoke the voice of Job in the third lesson of the Matins of the Dead, ‘Memento, quaeso, quod sicut lutum feceris me, et in pulverem reduces me’ (Remember, I beseech thee, that thou hast made me as the clay, and thou wilt bring me into dust again).103 The skeleton and text work together to position the reader as a body-that-dies and to remind them that this state is part of God’s ordered world: it is God that shaped their clay and God that will bring them to dust in due course. Devotional reading of the Office of the Dead addressed death as ever-present in life. The texts and images of manuscripts like MS Lewis E 108, MS Lewis E 120, and MS Typ 180 use memento mori images and phrases to mentally position the reader to acknowledge this fact through a poetic contrast between life and death. To acknowledge death as a part of life was to accept the inevitability of one’s own physical demise, and for the devout reader, this was not a passive endeavor. MS Q Med 88 includes two inscriptions on scrolls that wind around other elements of the border illustrations. In the lower border, a pink ribbon inscribed ‘memento morieris’ winds around and through the central skull, while at the top right, another scroll wraps around the faux architectural borders with the inscription ‘Requiescant in pace aeternam’. In the change from ‘memento mori’ (remember death) to ‘memento morieris’ (remember to die), the injunction to remember has moved from the passive to the active. The reader is asked not only to remember that death will occur (sometime) but also not to forget to do it themselves. The reader cannot avoid dying. What is being encouraged here is an active engagement with the process of dying embodied in the traditions of the ars moriendi. The phrase may have been extended to say, ‘Remember to die well’. The other inscription in the image refers the reader to words they would be liturgically familiar with, ‘Requiescant in pace aeternam’, a well-known variant on the final phrase of the Office of the Dead. Read together, the texts encourage the reader to ‘remember to die well’ so that they might rest in eternal peace. The texts perform like preface and postscript, holding between them the prayer and devotional practices undertaken in life that would support this ideal outcome in death, such as reading the Office of the Dead. The images, a combination of skull and flowers, seem to echo this evocation of action and rest: growing flowers contrasted with inert bones. The combination of image and phrase work together in examples like MS Q Med. 88 to enjoin the reader of the Office not just to wait for death but to do death. Devotional actions, such as reading the 102 Gen. 3:19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es : quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. 103 Job 10:9.

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Fig. 3-13. MS Q Med. 88, Hours, Flanders, late 15th century, fol. 110. Boston: Boston Public Library.

Office of the Dead, prepared the reader for the arrival of death, but, like an exercise regime, it also strengthened the spiritual muscles so that when death came, the reader would be spiritually robust enough to actively engage in the process. In these examples, the memento mori texts work together with the images to augment the meaning and function of the Office texts. In many of these examples, the deliberate reiteration of the word memento itself functions as a mnemonic

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device. The skeleton clutching his banderole and the skulls adorned with speaking ribbons call the reader to remember their mortal state as a kind of visual and textual invitatory to the reading of the Office and also presage the text to come. Via the skeletal image, the reader is spiritually prepared for and engaged in the encounter with death in the immediate future (through reading the Office of the Dead) and in the more distant and inevitable future (one’s own death). With the dissolution of the body came the dissolution of the physical self, and as the flesh of the body melted away, so too did individuality, until all that remained was the anonymous, skeletal dead.104 It is significant that the skeletal remains of choice for memento mori imagery is the skull.105 This is the only part of the ‘clean’ corpse that, disinterred and disassembled, still retains some evident humanity. This limited recognition factor makes it an effective choice as a prompt for mortal reflection.106 Gazing at the skull, readers see a reference to the dead generally (recognizable from churchyards, charnel houses, and even pulpits), but they are also invited to visualize the particular dead, themselves dead. However, the work of imaginative engagement with the dry, bald bones of these images requires a different approach than other forms of corpse imagery. Bones, disassembled and unadorned by flesh or face, are the least like us; they are a recognized sign of our mortality, but they do not much resemble us. This distance changes the reader’s imaginative engagement with the dry bones image. Rather than provoking a meditation on the immediate corruptibility of the body and by analogy of the soul as expressed in the foulness of physical decay, bones evoke death in the longue durée. In dry bones the repellent processes of physical death, rot, and dissolution have ended. Bones are unchangeable, inert, stable, and static. As the reader imagines these bones as their own, they imagine themselves into a stable future state, one of the many Christian dead who have gone before and with whom their physical remains will mingle in churchyards and charnel houses.107 Their individual deadness is subsumed to a universal and natural teleological death. Memento mori images are, by necessity, imaginative images. They ask viewers to ‘remember’ the abstract concept that is bodily death, something they have only indirect experience of. They ask the viewer to ‘remember’ their own death – an event that has not yet occurred. The efficacy of the memento mori is located in the 104 Park, ‘The Sensitive Corpse: Body and Self in Renaissance Medicine’, 78; Camille, Master of Death, 172. See also this chapter, ‘Identity Loss’. 105 Mss Q Med. 88, Lewis E 108, and Houghton Typ 180 discussed above all focus on the human skull. See also Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, MS Ludwig IX 13 (83.ML.109), Hours, Italy, c. 1469, fol. 106. On the skull as a prop for preachers see Rooney, Mortality and Imagination: The Life of the Dead in Medieval English Literature, 47. 106 Rooney, Mortality and Imagination: The Life of the Dead in Medieval English Literature, 47, 233. 107 Bynum notes that these collections of human remains were sometimes located inside the church so that the bones of the Christian dead would be able to ‘see’ the performance of the liturgy. Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, 204.

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relationship between the viewer and the image, in the ability of the reader to fill these experiential gaps with imagined realities. As they do so, the anonymous bones ‘speak’ truths of bodily death and promote personal responsibility to be prepared for what is to come, urging the reader to ‘remember death’ by imaginative engagement with it. *** The ‘repellent’ death images in the Office of the Dead emphasize the body’s role and meaning in death. The lingering relic of a social death, memory, was sought after by the deceased and incorporated by the surviving community, but the relic of bodily death, the corpse, was not so desirable. Corpse imagery, however, was useful. It provided a dire warning that prompted viewers to spiritual improvement, but it was also an invitation to experience this form of death, to imaginatively rot along with the painted corpses in the pages of their book. These images enabled readers of the Office not only to confront fears associated with bodily death but to vicariously experience them within the safety of the Office devotions. Lazarus’s call as he rises from the dead at Christ’s summons in the Towneley Lazarus mystery play to ‘let him be our book’ draws on the rhetorical power of the newly dead body. His long exposition on the frailty of the body exhorts the audience to prepare in life for death to come as he performs the role of the recovered dead. However, his invitation is not just to bear witness to his miraculous body but to consider that body as a rich resource of learning – a book. ‘Repellent’ death images are a large and heterogenous group, but many of them engage with recurring anxieties associated with the death of the body: the action of time, the loss of identity and agency, and the disruption that death represents. This chapter began with death-tide images that engaged readers in the mental process of moving the body from one state to another (from alive to dead, from whole to fragmented), and it ended with the denuded bones of the memento mori image. Between these two ends, the body rots. By drawing attention to the ritual movement of the corpse, the illustrations also draw attention to the action of time on the lifeless body. Along with physical dissolution, a dissolution of identity was also occurring as the familiar and recognizable body of the deceased was slowly consumed by natural processes. As time erodes and dissolves form and identity, the body is rendered anonymous. We become bones among many bones. Our agency in the world also goes. The body becomes a shameful, polluting sight, an object of revulsion to be hidden and avoided. The corpse no longer acts for itself. Part of the horror of bodily death is this inaction, the ‘thing-ness’ of the dead body, the clear and unmistakable gulf between ‘alive’ and ‘dead’.

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However, as Jean-Claude Schmitt wrote, ‘in Christian society a dead person could provide no greater service than to invite a living person to prepare for death.’108 Corpse imagery was not just about enabling a viewer to relish in the lowliness of the human cadaver but was used as an avenue to deeper understanding of bodily death for the improvement of spiritual life. The disruption in the natural order manifest in the lively corpse imagery shocked the viewer into a reassessment of the world as they know it and of the current state of their soul. The self-evidently impossible nature of the lively dead subverts and mocks the expectation that death renders the body inert and powerless. These antic corpses barge into the spaces of the living. Nonetheless, while lively, the corpses can only warn the living to repair their ways before it is too late. Part of the potency of the corpse as a visual motivation to this end is located in its contradictory nature as both extremely familiar and fundamentally unknowable. A contemporary viewer today might find it easier to see cadaver images as ‘foreign’ to life. Writing about Alice Chaucer’s transi tomb, Katherine Fowler reflects on her inclination to describe the representation of Chaucer’s living form as ‘she’ and ‘her’, while slipping easily into a non-gendered distancing ‘it’ when describing her cadaver.109 A medieval viewer in this context would not have had this modern discomfort with the potential person-ness of the dead body. The devotional literature, images, and homilies of the period encouraged them to think ‘me’ rather than ‘it’ in an encounter with the dead and to personalize the abstract or anonymous dead. For the medieval viewer of Chaucer’s tomb or of ‘repellent’ imagery at the Office of the Dead, the paired images form a kind of ‘soul-dimensional’ portrait, which together present the full human image: life and death, body and soul.110 The ‘repellent’ death image retained its communicative power because of the medieval viewer’s ability to see any corpse as a potential ‘me’, the other half of their living bodies. New York Public Library MS MA 118 opens the Office of the Dead with a full-page illustration of a ghostly white body of a man stretched out on a grassy field (fol. 188v).111 Just below the surface of the grass lurk the fires and demons of hell, while at the very top of the image the golden sphere of heaven just dips into the frame. Immediately above the recumbent body is a tiny-nimbed soul, flanked by an angel and demon. The body and soul are caught both vertically and laterally between the hope for heaven and the threat of hell. The regular confrontation with physical 108 Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 75. 109 Elizabeth Fowler, ‘The Duchess and the Cadaver: Doubling and Microarchitecture in Late Medieval Art (with Alice Chaucer and John Lydgate)’, in Personification: Embodying Meaning and Emotion, ed. Walter Melion and Bart Ramakers (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 583. 110 Examples of this type of portrait are sometimes also found in panel paintings. DeLuca, ‘Bonum est mortis meditari: Meaning and Functions of the Medieval Double Macabre Portrait’, 239–61. 111 New York, New York Public Library, MS MA 118, Hours, Flanders, 1490–1510, fols. 188v–189.

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death that the reader experienced through images like MA 118 in conjunction with the texts of the Office of the Dead asked the reader to reflect on the mortal nature of human life and the deep connection between the spiritual health of the body and the soul. They provide a visual ‘submersion’ in images of flesh as a part of the path to salvation.112 The image of the dead body, whether shrouded or exposed, lively or inert, highlights the paths of thought that medieval people trod (and were encouraged to tread) when considering their own physical end. Meditations on the fate of the physical body nearly always ended up in the same intellectual place. Ultimately, these images transcend fear of putrefaction, disease, disgust, or decay. While the corpse is the visual focus, this most corporeal of imagery is, in the end, about the least corporeal aspect of God’s human creation, the soul. The medieval grave, after all, was not a place of rest; it was a place of waiting. People waited for the flesh to rot away, and they waited for the coming of the last day. They waited with confident hope in the redemptive nature of death and the reunification of body with soul, the topic of the next chapter. Bibliography Alexander, J. J. G., and Paul Binski. Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England, 1200–1400. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1987. Alexandre-Bidon, Danièle. ‘Le corps et son linceul’. In A Réveiller les morts: La mort au quotidien dans l’Occident médiéval, edited by Danièle Alexandre-Bidon and Cécile Treffort, 183–206. Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1993. Aquinas, Thomas. The Summa Theologiae of St Thomas Aquinas. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Second Revised Edition. In New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia, 1920. Accessed April 1, 2023. http://www.newadvent.org/summa/index.html. Backhouse, Janet, and British Library. Books of Hours. London: British Library, 1985. Bertram, Jerome. ‘Inscriptions on Late Medieval Brasses and Monuments’. In Roman, Runes and Ogham: Medieval Inscriptions in the Insular World and on the Continent, edited by John Higgit, Katherine Forsyth, and David N. Parsons, 190–201. Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2001. Binski, Paul. Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation. London: British Museum Press, 1996. Blatt, Heather. Participatory Reading in Late-Medieval England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Boase, Thomas S. Ross. Death in the Middle Ages: Mortality, Judgement and Remembrance. London: Thames and Hudson, 1972. Broekhuiksen, Klara. ‘The Legend of the Grateful Dead: A Misinterpreted Miniature in the Tres RIches Heures of Jean de Berry’. In Liber Amiconum in 112 Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective’, Critical Inquiry 22, no. 1 (1995): 14–15.

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Kinch, Ashby. ‘Image, Ideology and Form: The Middle English Three Dead Kings in Its Iconographic Context’. The Chaucer Review 43, no. 1 (2008): 49–82. Kinch, Ashby. Imago Mortis : Mediating Images of Death in Late Medieval Culture. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Kralik, Christine. ‘Death Is Not the End: The Encounter of the Three Living and the Three Dead in the Berlin Hours of Mary of Burgundy and Maximilian I’. In The Ends of the Body: Identity and Community in Medieval Culture, edited by Suzanna Conklin Akbari and Jill Ross, 61–85. University of Toronto Press, 2012. Kralik, Christine. ‘Dialogue and Violence in Medieval Illuminations of the Three Living and the Three Dead’. In Mixed Metaphors: The Danse Macabre in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Sophie Oosterwijk and Stephanie Knoll, 133–54. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011. Krug, Rebecca. Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017. Lewis, Suzanne. ‘Medieval Bodies Then and Now: Negotiating Problems of Ambivalence and Paradox’. In Naked before God: Uncovering the Body in Anglo-Saxon England, edited by Benjamin C. Wither and Jonathan Wilcox, 15–28. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2003. Littlehales, Henry. The Medieval Records of a London City Church (St. Mary at Hill) AD. 1420–1559. Early English Text Society Original Series 125, 128. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1904. Llewellyn, Nigel. The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual c.1500–c.1800. London: Reaktion and Victoria and Albert Museum, 1991. Maddox, Donald. ‘The Semiosis of Assimilatio in Medieval Models of Time’. Style 20, no. 2 (1986): 252–71. Marchant, Alicia. ‘Narratives of Death and Emotional Affect in Late Medieval Chronicles’. Parergon 31, no. 2 (2014): 81–98. McCulloch, Florence. ‘The Funeral of Renart the Fox in a Walters Book of Hours’. Journal of the Walters Art Gallery (1962): 8–27. Melchior-Bonnet, Sabine. The Mirror: A History. Translated by Katherine H. Jewett. New York: Routledge, 2001. Merback, Mitchell B. The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. London: Reaktion Books, 2001. Mirk, John. Instructions for Parish Priests. Edited by Edward Peacock. Early English Text Society. Original Series 31. London: Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1868. Mirk, John. Mirk’s Festial: A Collection of Homilies by Johannes Mirkus (John Mirk). Edited by Theodor Erbe. Early English Text Society Original Series 1. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1905. Morrison, Elizabeth. ‘The Light at the End of the Tunnel: Manuscript Illumination and the Concept of Death’. In The Ivory Mirror: The Art of Mortality in Renaissance Europe,

Repellent Death: Time, Rot, and the Death of the Body 

edited by Stephen Perkinson, 83–106. New Haven/London: Bowdoin College Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2017. O’Connor, Mary Catherine. The Art of Dying Well: The Development of the Ars Moriendi. New York: AMS Press, 1966. Owst, G. R. Preaching in Medieval England: An Introduction to Sermon Manuscript of the Period c. 1350–1450. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926. Park, Katharine. ‘The Life of the Corpse: Division and Dissection in Late Medieval Europe’. The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 50 (1995): 111–32. Park, Katharine. ‘The Sensitive Corpse: Body and Self in Renaissance Medicine’. Fenway Court. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum 1990–1991: Imaging the Self in Renaissance Italy (1992): 77–87. Perkinson, Stephen. ‘The Ivory Mirror’. In The Ivory Mirror: The Art of Mortality in Renaissance Europe, edited by Stephen Perkinson, 13–82. New Haven/London: Bowdoin College Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2017. Rooney, Kenneth. Mortality and Imagination: The Life of the Dead in Medieval English Literature. Disputatio. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile, or On Education. Translated by Allan Bloom. London: Basic Books, 1979. Sandler, Lucy Freeman. Gothic Manuscript 1285–1385. London: Harvey Miller, 1986. Schmitt, Jean-Claude. Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society. Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Scott, Kathleen L. Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390–1490. A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles. London: H. Miller, 1996. Smith, Kathryn A. The Taymouth Hours: Stories and the Construction of the Self in Late Medieval England. London: British Library, 2012. Stanford, Charlotte A. ‘The Body at the Funeral: Image and Commemoration at Notre Dame, Paris, about 1304–18’. The Art Bulletin 89 (2007): 657–73. Stevens, Martin, and A. C. Cawley, eds. The Towneley Plays. 2 vols. Oxford: Early English Text Society by Oxford University Press, 1994. Storck, Willy F. ‘Aspects of Death in English Art and Poetry-I’. The Burlington Magazine 21, no. 113 (1912): 249–56. Tristram, Philippa. Figures of Life and Death in Medieval English Literature. London: Elek Books Ltd., 1976. Weatherly, Edward H., ed. Speculum Sacerdotale Edited from British Museum MS Additional 36791. Early English Text Society. London: Oxford University Press, 1936. Welch, Christina. ‘Late Medieval Carved Cadaver Memorials in England and Wales’. In Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: The Material and Spiritual Conditions of the Culture of Death, edited by Albrecht Classen, 373–410. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2016. Wenzel, Siegfried, ed. Fasciculus Morum: A Fourteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook. Translated by Siegfried Wenzel. London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989.

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Wenzel, Siegfried. Verses in Sermons: Fasciculus Morum and Its Middle English Poems. Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1978. Westerhof, Danielle M. ‘Amputating the Traitor: Healing the Social Body in Public Executions for Treason in Late Medieval England’. In The Ends of the Body: Identity and Community in Medieval Culture, edited by Jill Ross and Suzanna Conklin Akbari, 177–92. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Woolf, Rosemary. The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968.

4. The Redemptive Death: Job, Lazarus, and Death Undone Abstract: This chapter is concerned with themes of Christian redemption and survival beyond death in images of Job and Lazarus. It was in death that the Christian faithful hoped to be restored to the community and to their own healthful body via the promise of the resurrection. Images of ‘redemptive’ death are thus involved with the social and material conceptions of death and the promise of salvation. Job and Lazarus are discussed in relationship with the Office of the Dead texts and the narrative congruences that gave these images power. Job and Lazarus offered the reader exemplars of good behaviour in the face of death and of mourning both the social and physical bodies. Keywords: Job, Lazarus, redemption, mourning, salvation

The ‘regular’ and ‘repellent’ deaths are primarily (although not exclusively) concerned with the social and physical bodies, respectively. The ‘redemptive’ death is concerned with both. Redemption through death is fundamental to the Christian story, and this hope was implicit in ‘regular’ and ‘repellent’ images of death. For medieval Christians, death was emphatically not the end; it was a ‘non-death’. It was through death and the Redeemer Christ that the sick and dying hoped to be restored at some time in the future to the community of the blessed and to their own healthful body. ‘Redemptive’ death is thus involved in both the social and material conceptions of death and provides a counterpoint to the fears associated with those deaths. In the images that accompany the Office of the Dead, this hope for, and belief in, the redemptive nature of death is directly expressed through the images of Lazarus and Job, whose stories emphasize the ‘not’ nature of Christian death. Job and Lazarus die, but they both die unconventional ‘non-deaths’. Job’s sufferings are those of a social death expressed in the physical body. His material losses reveal the fragile nature of social position, and his wounds and sickness reveal the mortality of the body. Both cause him to be alienated by his community. His redemption is expressed in his restoration to social ‘life’, to God, and to his

Schell, S., Image and the Office of the Dead in Late Medieval Europe: Regular, Repellent, and Redemptive Death. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463722117_ch04

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community. Lazarus, on the other hand, miraculously crosses and recrosses the boundary between life and death. He dies a physical death and is restored to physical life. His resurrection demonstrates the possibility of the resurrection of the body and is thus illustrative of the promise made to all the Christian faithful. Just as the body plays a role in Job’s social death, the social plays a role in Lazarus’ physical death. The intervention of his community echoes the role of the church and the reader, as they pray (and read) for those who have predeceased them, supplicants for Christ’s mercy so that they, like Lazarus, will someday be restored to God’s presence. These are biblical figures with extraordinary tales, but they are presented in the Bible and elsewhere as remarkably devout but essentially ‘ordinary’ men. As such, their experiences of overcoming death provided the reader of the Office with not only an aspirational image but a model that might be possible to emulate in some way. The presence of these figures with the text of the Office of the Dead gives the reader-viewer exemplars on which to pattern themselves: in the face of death to remain as faithful as Job, and to hope for bodily resurrection like Lazarus. They are also highly emotionally charged narratives providing an ideal entry point for the imaginative reader. In these tales the reader is exposed to a full range of emotional responses to death from the perspectives of those who die (Job), those who live (Lazarus), and those who mourn (the community). The reader can practice mourning both the social and physical bodies, secure in the foreknowledge that for Job and Lazarus – and hopefully the reader, too – the tale ends with redemption.

Living Death: Job as the Social Body Job is the principal biblical character in the Office of the Dead texts and the central figure of Matins, the longest of the three Hours in the Office. Job’s story, the biblical texts, and his medieval character are frequently at odds with one another. While early medieval writers cast Job as the embodiment of patience and fortitude, the biblical texts express anger and despair. The conflicting characters assigned to Job each contributed to channeling grief and modelling good behaviour for the medieval mourner. Indeed, his own status as a mourner provided fruitful comparison for the medieval mourner and expressed both the alienation of the mental and physical suffering of grief and its resolution. In Job the reader encounters a death narrative in which the death that occurs is a social death, where the ‘dead’ man is also his own chief mourner, and where death is ultimately undone as Job is reconciled with God and restored to health, wealth, and happiness. The corporeal body, however, is also a participant in this unusual death narrative as it becomes the site of affliction and disease and thus evidence

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of physical frailty and mortality. In Job’s story, conceptions of death pertaining to both the social and physical bodies are viscerally illustrated, but it is his redemption that makes this tale so appropriate to the Office of the Dead liturgy as an aid to the imaginatively engaged reader. The Jobs The Book of Job was a favourite of theological writers and thinkers who expounded on this complex and often obscure text. The best-known exegetical work was St. Gregory’s Moralia in Job, which remained the principal Job commentary until the fourteenth century.1 The popularity of Job and of writings such as Gregory’s had the effect of creating a medieval vision of Job that bore little resemblance to the Job of the Bible. Gregory’s Job is a patient Christian saintly figure, a prefiguration of Christ, and an embodiment of the Christian warrior combating the temptations of Satan with a vigorous, athletic faith, all themes which are prevalent in medieval portrayals of Job.2 This noble and valiant Job is an exemplar of the Christian chivalric ideal in two martially themed early English sermons where he is cast as a Christian knight fighting the good fight against his traditional foe, sin. His quality as ‘a simple and righteous man’ is marked out as rare and desirable (‘under heaven there was none like unto him’, ‘our Lord himself praised him’), and this strength of character is indicative of being armed with the weapons of God (belief, hope, charity, and the Word) in the fight against the ‘old adder’.3 In addition to the Moralia, other Job texts such as the apocryphal Testament of  Job and Prudentius’s Psychomachia contributed to the development of this view of Job and painted the biblical figure respectively as saintly and enduring, or as a faithful warrior. The Testament reshapes Job’s narrative to stress principled patience as his primary virtue, which he himself describes as ‘better than anything’, while in the Psychomachia Job appears as the 1 Lawrence L. Besserman, The Legend of Job in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 73–74. Gregory’s Moralia also provided the basis for later medieval writers on Job such as Odo of Cluny, Bruno of Asti, and Honorius of Autun. Jill Mann, ‘“He Knew Nat Catoun”: Medieval School-Texts and Middle English Literature’, in The Text in the Community: Essays on Medieval Works, Manuscripts, Authors, and Reader, ed. Jill Mann and Maura Nolan (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 380. 2 Ann Astell locates this characterization of Job within the inherited classical tradition of heroic virtue, comparing Job with figures like Odysseus. Ann W. Astell, Job, Boethius, and Epic Truth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 79–80. On the medieval interpretation of Job as one of the ‘righteous men’ of the Old Testament as represented in art, see also Berthold Kress, ‘Noah, Daniel and Job: The Three Righteous Men of Ezekiel 14:14 in Medieval Art’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 68 (2004): 259–67. 3 Richard Morris, ed., Old English Homilies and Homiletic Treatises: Sawles Warde, and Þe Wohunge of Ure Lauerd: Ureisuns of Ure Louerd and of Ure Lefdi, &c. of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Early English Text Society (London: Pub. for the Early English Text Society, by N Trübner & Co, 1868), 150–51, 154, 242–43.

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trusty sidekick of Patientia, supporting her against the antagonist Ira (Wrath). 4 Texts such as the Moralia and Testament also introduced new narrative events and interpretations of events, such as Job being attacked by the devil through his wife, which were subsequently taken up in medieval Job lore and represented in image and on stage.5 The expanded role for women, represented by Job’s wife and daughters, was particularly influential, as they provided a human foil for Job’s superhuman tolerance of the evils thrown his way.6 The emphasis on the events of Job’s trials underlines the virtues of medieval Job for the reader – his patient suffering, vigorous defence of his faith, and, importantly in the context of the Office of the Dead, his stated belief in the resurrection of the body. It is this belief, expressed in Job’s words ‘I know that my redeemer lives’, that was so often placed in the mouths of the medieval dead by its incorporation into monuments and epitaphs.7 Job’s trials were to be viewed as a reflection of one’s 4 Samuel E. Balentine, Have You Considered My Servant Job? : Understanding the Biblical Archetype of Patience (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2015), 22, 33–34. The warrior Job is described as ‘clinging’ close to the side of his mistress, Patientia, in Prudentius’s battle of virtues and vices. Rosemary Burton, ed., Prudentius Psychomachia, Latin Commentaries (Bryn Mawr: Bryn Mawr College, 1989), lines 162–68, Commentary 16–17; Macklin Smith, Prudentius’ Psychomachia: A Reexamination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 178, 181–83, 187. 5 Moralia in Job was one of only two patristic texts to have been regularly illustrated, demonstrating the importance and popularity of this text. C. M. Kauffmann, Biblical Imagery in Medieval England, 700–1550 (London: Harvey Miller, 2003), 102. The influence of St. Gregory’s Morialia in Job begins to wane after the rise of scholasticism in the fourteenth century and the subsequent appearance of other commentaries on Job by scholars such as Albert the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas. Besserman, The Legend of Job in the Middle Ages, 55–56. On the events of the Testament, see James L. Crenshaw, Reading Job: A Literary and Theological Commentary (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2011), 25–29. 6 The role of women in the Testament of Job has been much debated. For contrasting views, see Susan R. Garrett, ‘The “Weaker Sex” in the Testament of Job’, Journal of Biblical Literature 112, no. 1 (1993): 55–70; Robin Waugh, ‘The Testament of Job as an Example of Profeminine Patience Literature’, Journal of Biblical Literature 133, no. 4 (2014): 777–92. On her identity, see Michael C. Legaspi, ‘Job’s Wives in the “Testament of Job”: A Note on the Synthesis of Two Traditions’, Journal of Biblical Literature 127, no. 1 (2008): 71–79. 7 Credo quod Redemptor meus vivit, et in novissimo die de terra surrecturus sum, et rursum circumdabor pelle mea et in carne mea videbo Deum salvatorem meum, quem visurus sum ego ipse et oculi mei conspecturi sunt et non alius, reposita est hec spes mea in sinu meo. This passage, which forms the first responsory and versicle after the first lesson of the Dirige, is found in some form on at least forty-eight English brasses from the fourteenth through the mid-sixteenth century. Jerome Bertram, ‘Meeting Report: First Read the Label’, Monumental Brass Society Bulletin 99 (2005): 791; A. Jefferies Collins, Manuale as Usum Percelebris Ecclesie Sarisburiensis: From the Edition Printed at Rouen in 1543 Compared with Those of 1506 (London), 1516 (Rouen), 1523 (Antwerp), 1526 (Paris), Henry Bradshaw Society (Chichester: Moore and Tillyer, 1960), 137. For an English version, see Henry Littlehales, ed., The Prymer or Lay Folks’ Prayer Book, Early English Text Society Original Series 105 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1895), 59. It is interesting that the wording of this passage on the tombs is drawn from the Dirige responsory rather than from the biblical source of the text, Job 19: 25, which also appears in the Office of the Dead as part of the reading of the eighth lesson of Matins. For other extracts from the Off ice of the Dead that appear on English brasses, see Bertram, ‘Inscriptions on Late Medieval Brasses and Monuments’, 196–97.

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own earthly trials, and his patience and understanding exemplified Christian virtue and the rewards of unwavering devotion. Through these texts Job was re-envisioned as a perfect example of the patient faithful man of God, accepting the trials of life with composure and always articulating an unshaken belief in the justice of his Lord and in a bodily resurrection. The effect of these influential texts was to create a vision of Job that side-stepped the problematic content at the heart of the biblical narrative, which characterizes Job quite differently. The verses in the Office of the Dead contain many of the most plangent and difficult sentiments expressed in the Book of Job. The texts included in the Office do not recount the events that befell Job in the Bible but rather draw from the central dialogic chapters focused on Job’s emotional response to those events.8 In these chapters Job expresses anger, anguish, sadness, and confusion, as well as faith. The established tradition of scholarly and exegetical writing on Job largely did not stress these difficult passages, although they form the heart of the Office texts and are found in other writings based on the Matins verses of the Office of the Dead. The ubiquity of the Office made these portions of the Book of Job the most widely known, and they were expanded in works like the Pety Job, the Story of Holy Job, and other such texts.9 Indeed, the Pety Job, or ‘little Job’, was read as an abbreviated version of the biblical Book of Job, though it contains a limited amount of the biblical text. 8 These chapters also form the bulk of the Book of Job itself. Of the forty-two chapters, only three recount the events of Job’s trials with the remaining thirty-nine recounting Job’s responses to these events. 9 The widespread nature of the interest in Job as part of the late medieval desire for a rich personal devotional life is ref lected in the contemporary mystical and devotional writings on Job, some of which were attributed to well-known authors. In some surviving manuscripts, for example, the Pety Job was ascribed to the fourteenth-century mystic Richard Rolle, whose writings enjoyed a degree of popularity in the f ifteenth century. While this Yorkshire mystic was not the author of the Pety Job, he did write a Job commentary, the Postillae super novem lectiones, which was also based on the texts found in the nine lessons of the Matins of the Dead. Suzanna Greer Fein, Moral Love Songs and Laments (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS by Medieval Institute Publications, 1998), ‘Pety Job’, 292. The Story of Holy Job may have been written by Lydgate or one of his followers. The poem survives in a single copy which might have been accompanied by a series of miniatures, now missing. The format of the texts suggests the emblem poem form, as it frequently begins sections with formulae that seem to call attention to specif ic moments, or images, such as, ‘Here, lo, holy Job…’. San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 140, Collection of prose and poetry, England, 15th century, fols. 93b–96b. G. N. Garmonsway and R. M. Raymo, ‘A Middle English Metrical Life of Job’, in Early English and Norse Studies: Presented to Hugh Smith in Honour of His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Arthur Brown, Peter Godfrey Foote, and A. H. Smith (London: Methuen & Co., 1963), 77–78; H. N. McCracken, ‘Lydgatiana I. The Life of Holy Job’, in Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, ed. Alois Brandl and Heinrich Morf, vol. 126 (Braunschweig: George Westermann, 1911), 365–70. Another text based on Job is the Middle English treatise Dimitte me, domine, preserved in Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2125, fols. 39–50v. See Mayumi Taguchi, ‘A Middle English Penitential Treatise on Job 10:20–22, Dimitte Me, Domine… ’, Mediaeval Studies 67 (2005): 157–217.

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Commentaries and glosses like these expanded verses from the Office of the Dead, elucidating themes relevant to the emotional nature of funeral rites and entwining Job’s experience with the medieval parishioner’s experience of death. The Pety Job, for example, recasts Job as a character in transition between the biblical figure who suffers epic trials and the medieval reader who endures quotidian ones, just as the voice of Job speaks both for himself and for the medieval listener in the Office of the Dead. The Job of the Pety Job asks to be remembered with prayers and by Dirige and Placebo, an intrinsic part of the very structure of medieval devotional life and, paradoxically, the place where Job’s own voice is most frequently heard. At this moment in the text, the narrator is a conflation of Job and the contemporary medieval reader, who exclaims: Reweth on me, reweth on me! My frendes namly, now halpth at nede! For I am there I may nat fle: The hande of God ful sore I drede. And frendes, seeth that I am he Thys other day that on the erth yede. Now helpe, yef that youre wyll be, With prayer, fastyng, and almesdede. For these mowen best gete me mede With Placebo and Dirige.10

This call for pity, based on Job 19:21, combines Job’s call for help and remembrance in the face of his tribulation, as well as expressing the wish of the medieval laity who also asked to be remembered in recitations of Placebo and Dirige in the months and years after their deaths.11 Job couches his cry in the familiar terms of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century commemorative practices: fasting, prayer, and almsgiving, in addition to the all-important offices. Job’s desire to be remembered in this manner would resonate strongly with the powerful contemporary desire for commemoration in these forms. These traditions created two Jobs, each emphasizing different qualities of character and narrative. The combination of these two Jobs resulted in a distinctly medieval version of the character, an oil-and-water mix rather than a homogeneous blend giving this biblical figure a broad range of applications and interpretations which were relevant to the emotional context of the Office of the Dead. The images 10 Fein, Moral Love Songs and Laments, ‘Pety Job’ 328, lines 541–50. 11 Job articulates this cry for remembrance again in Job 19:23, where he requests that his words be recorded so that he might not be forgotten.

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of Job that appear in the Office represent a range of responses to death, from stoic endurance to righteous indignation, and frame those responses in a recognizably medieval Christian mode. Job’s Two Bodies Bodleian MS Auct D. 4.4 and British Library Egerton MS 2019 both contain an extensive cycle of Job images drawn from the first two chapters of the Book of Job, which recount the events of Job’s trials. These trials are directed at both of the two bodies that die, the social and the corporeal body. In the narrative, Satan’s first gambit is to deprive Job of the material comforts that he enjoyed and that visibly expressed his social position in the community, and when that fails, he turns to attacks on Job’s physical person. The structure of the images of MS Auct D. 4.4 reflect this division.12 In the upper left quadrant of fol. 244 (Fig. 4-1), the tale begins with Satan standing before God as he is granted permission to persecute Job as a test of the man’s faith, and so begin Job’s tribulations.13 The following scenes on fol. 244 detail the destruction of Job’s worldly riches: the death of Job’s children crushed in the house of the eldest son (top right), followed by the slaughter of Job’s servants, oxen, and asses by the pillaging Sabeans (bottom left), and then the burning of Job’s flocks and shepherds by the ‘fire of God’ (bottom right). In the final scene on MS Auct D. 4.4, fol. 244, in the historiated initial D at Dilexi, Job receives news of all the catastrophes that have befallen him. He rends his pink tunic as the kneeling figure of the servant, who stands in for all the men who carried bad news to their master, speaks the repeated motif, ‘and I alone have escaped to tell thee.’ Though the words of Job’s scroll have vanished and there is little to indicate what was there, it seems very likely that the scroll allowed Job to speak the bitter response: ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away.’14 The second set of scenes in MS Auct D. 4.4 on fol. 248v (Fig. 4-2) picks up the story where it left off on the earlier page. Just as the biblical text echoes itself, so do the images parallel one another, with the composition in the upper left quadrant of fol. 248v visibly echoing the same location on fol. 244.15 Satan stands before God, having failed to corrupt Job by attacking his family and household. He requests and is granted permission to try any means but death to persuade Job to give up his faith.16 The following three quadrants detail the consequences of the first, as in the 12 MS Auct D. 4.4 ‘The Bohun Psalter and Hours’, Psalter/Hours, England, c. 1370–80, fols. 244, 248v. Oxford: Bodleian Library. Sandler, Gothic Manuscript 1285–1385, II, 157–59, no. 138. 13 Job 1:6–12. 14 Job 1:21. 15 Job 2:1. 16 Job 2:3–6.

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Fig. 4-1, 2. MS Auct D. 4.4. ‘The Bohun Psalter and Hours’, Psalter/Hours, England, c. 1370–80, fols. 244, 248v. Oxford: Bodleian Library. CC-BY-NC 4.0 licence.

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miniatures on fol. 244. In the upper right quadrant, Job sprawls across the dunghill afflicted by sores while devils claw at his back. This is an unusual interpretation of Job 2:7–8: ‘So Satan went forth from the presence of the Lord, and struck Job with a very grievous ulcer, from the sole of the foot even to the top of his head: And he took a potsherd and scraped the corrupt matter, sitting on a dunghill.’ In this last sentence, it appears that the ‘he’ in question has been interpreted as Satan, who is scraping Job’s sores, rather than as Job scraping his own sores. In the bottom left, Job speaks to his wife, who holds out a piece of bread to him. The scene is a combination of the biblical verses Job 1:9–10, where Job chastises his wife for her lack of faith, and a scene from the various medieval legends about Job in which Job’s wife works as a servant to earn bread to feed him and is eventually reduced to selling her hair to maintain them.17 At the bottom right, Job converses with his three friends who visit him during his exile on the dunghill. The images of MS Auct D. 4.4, fol. 244, emphasize Job’s testing in areas related to his mental and social wellbeing. His home, his family, his flocks, and his servants which are taken from him are deprivations impacting his economic and social standing. He is isolated by the double loss of family and community. By contrast, the images of fol. 248v exhibit tribulations in corporeal terms as his body ails and his mind rails. By structuring the images in this way, the reader-viewer clearly perceives the two suffering bodies of Job but also sees their interconnectedness. The compositions create a visual equivalence between the two types of sufferings as they mirror one another. In these images it is not only social or bodily death that causes Job’s distress but the combination of the deaths of his family and his own social death, which is expressed through corporeal suffering. Although the narrative texts were not read as a part of the liturgical Office, these events would have been well known to the reader from the Bible, as well as from the writings, sermons, plays, legends, and their images that accrued to Job over the centuries. For the reader-viewer, the narrative events illustrated in these opening miniatures provide the context in which to understand the Office texts drawn from the central dialogue portions of the Book, which follow. As such, the images of the trials provide a narrative frame for the theologically complex content that follows in the Office texts, just as the narrative events frame the biblical texts themselves. Images of Job’s plight, as in MS Auct D. 4.4, thus visually emphasize the 17 Perhaps the longest version of this story is found in the Testament of Job, where Job narrates, ‘And I spent forty-eight years sitting on the dung-heap outside of the city beset by diseases so that I saw… my humbled wife carrying water into the house of a certain crude person as a maidservant until she could obtain bread and bring it to me.’ He continues, relating the story of his wife publicly cutting her hair for bread as a lengthy exchange between the woman and Satan, who is disguised as the bread seller. Robert A. Kraft, The Testament of Job: According to the SV Text, Pseudepigrapha Series (Missoula, MT: Society of Biblical Literature, 1974), lines 21:1–2, 22:1–23.

The Redemptive Death: Job, L azarus, and Death Undone 

narrative environment in which the central melancholy and resonant sentiments of the Office are found, and offer visual context for Job’s questions and complaints. The narrative chapters of Job are eventful, but they are not frequently fully illustrated in the Office of the Dead. If only one of the Job scenes is illustrated at the Office (as was common), it is the image of Job on the dunghill confronted by his friends during the second testing.18 The interaction between Job and his three friends (sometimes called ‘comforters’) is the longest segment of the Book of Job and the section of the book that engages most deeply with difficult theological and emotional issues. It is in these dialogues that Job questions the nature of God, sin, justice, and punishment. In the exchange that takes place between Job, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite, the friends express the conventional theodicy that if God is by nature just, those who fall on misfortune must have offended God and therefore deserve the punishment meted out. In contrast, Job asserts his innocence, rails against the injustice of his situation, and scorns the hypocrisy of his friends but also repents of his anger and, albeit grudgingly, acknowledges God’s right to do as he pleases with his people.19 In most illustrations of this scene, Job, naked and covered in sores, is seated before his three friends, as in Egerton MS 2019 fol. 167v, fol. 175, and fol. 176 (Figs. 4-3a–c).20 These exchanges are the essence of the Book of Job and the heart of the Matins texts in the Office of the Dead. The importance of these exchanges is visually reflected in Egerton MS 2019, which contains a remarkable eleven separate representations of Job on the dung heap.21 The scenes are emblematic of Job’s experience as a man suffering a kind of living death expressed through and on his body. In various ways, the dung heap image visually articulates Job’s loss of social place. His body is visibly afflicted, perhaps evoking for the reader the fears and social dangers associated with disease and contagion as well as providing a reminder of human mortality. The rich contemporary dress of Job’s visitors emphasizes their wealth and, by association, Job’s own dramatic change in status from comfort and riches to poverty and affliction. The dung heap itself is a nowhere: not clearly presented in 18 Job 2:7–8, 11. 19 On interpretation and analysis of this portion of the Book of Job, see Carol A. Newsom, The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); N. H. Tur-Sinai, The Book of Job: A New Commentary (Jerusalem: Kiryath Sepher Ltd., 1957). 20 Egerton MS 2019, Hours, France (Paris), c. 1440–50, fols. 167v, 175, 176. London: British Library. The Office of the Dead images in Egerton MS 2019 are attributed to the Master of the Munich Golden Legend. See Laurent Ungeheuer, ‘Le Maître de la Légende dorée de Munich, un émule du Maître de Bedford: Collaborations et indépendance d’un enlumineur parisien entre 1420 et 1450’, Revue de l’Art, no. 195 (2017): 23–32. 21 There are sixteen additional images detailing Job’s losses and his restoration at the conclusion of the tale. The opening pages of the Office also contain a burial series with shrouding and funeral and an abbreviated Dance of Death vignette. The full series of Office of the Dead images are digitized at the British Library, Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts.

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Fig. 4-3a–c. Detail, Egerton MS 2019, Hours, France (Paris), c. 1440–50, fols. 167v, 175, 176. London: British Library. © The British Library Board.

The Redemptive Death: Job, L azarus, and Death Undone 

relation to town or estate and certainly not a suitable place for human habitation, its ambiguous location echoes Job’s unstable social place. In Egerton MS 2019, this is illustrated in the itinerancy of the dung heap itself. Of the eleven dung heap images, it is depicted four times in a space on the edges of a town or a farmyard with three outbuildings in the background, while it appears in a landscape the remaining seven times, sometimes with a distinctive rocky outcropping behind it and sometimes in an open field (see Figs. 4-3a–c). In town the presence of the dung heap emphasizes Job’s lowly status, while the landscapes reflect Job’s position as outsider. Together they represent a social ‘wandering in the wilderness’ and perhaps recall for the reader Christ’s own period of testing in the wilderness. In Egerton MS 2019, Job’s displacement and exclusion is literalized with a wandering dung heap. Job remains an outsider for many years, and part of what sustains his outsider status and prevents him from being reintegrated into the community as, for example, the deserving poor is his active maintenance of his own liminal status through mourning. Death momentarily fragments the social order, leaving the survivors unsure of how they relate to, or belong in, the new order that quickly re-establishes itself. When Job’s friends initially visit, they do not interact with him, instead sitting in silence for seven days as an acknowledgement of his immense grief.22 In these moments the mourner is adrift outside the daily life of the community. Rites directed at these liminal moments, like the Office of the Dead, furnish social and devotional structures for those affected in this way, providing a behavioural and emotional pattern for the bereaved to follow as the social and devotional ‘dust’ settles into new shapes. Through the image of Job on the dung heap, the viewer can read themselves into Job’s mourner position and use Job’s experiences as a mourner to express their own experience via the Office texts. Job’s situation as mourner positions him as an outsider,23 and his outsider status gives him the leeway to be bold in his lament. The Office readings present a wildly emotional Job, lamenting his existence.24 However, while his expressive cries certainly reflect the feelings of the bereaved, excessive displays were discouraged in the medieval period, as it was believed that immoderate sorrow could become unhealthy, manifesting itself as a physical affliction. The thirteenth-century 22 Job 2:13, ‘And they sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no man spoke to him a word: for they saw that his grief was very great.’ 23 Moshe Halbertal, ‘Job, the Mourner’, in The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics, Hermeneutics (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 41. 24 Job 10:18–19. ‘Why didst thou bring me forth out of the womb: O that I had been consumed that eye might not see me! I should have been as if I had not been, carried from the womb to the grave.’ From the ninth lesson of Matins of the Dead. There is some variation in the text of the ninth lesson, however the use of Job 10:18–22 is the most common in the later medieval period in English and French uses, as well as in the Use of Rome. Ottosen, The Responsories and Versicles of the Latin Office of the Dead, 62.

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physician Taddeo Alderotti pointed to Job as an example of how unrestrained mourning could manifest itself in bad health.25 The dung heap image gives the reader visual space to enter the mourner’s liminal state with Job and to experience through him the range of potentially dangerous emotions associated with loss, all while remaining within the established liturgical parameters of acceptable expressions of sorrow. Using the expressive words of Job’s pain, words and sentiments that would not otherwise be encouraged, readers of the Office give voice to a volatile grief and bereavement in a ritualized manner. Expressions of anger, rebellion, doubt, entreaty, and submission were made acceptable through Job. By imagining themselves in the position of Job through the image and using his words in the text, the reader benefits from the freedom of expression granted to those in the ‘dung heap’ position until the story comes to its natural end. For Job, the end is in his redemption by God and restoration to the community of the faithful, while for the reader, their moment in the Job ‘story’ ends as they emerge from their imaginative meditation at the conclusion of their devotional reading practice. The dung heap images and associated text invite readers to undertake this imaginative journey with Job in preparation for trials ahead, in memory of trials past, and as consolation for the trials of the present. Job is well placed to speak for the mourner, as he occupies this role throughout his tribulations. The loss of his family and position comes in the early verses of the first chapter, and the subsequent exchanges that Job has with his comforters and God in the remainder of the text express the mental anguish of a man whose relationship to the world has suddenly and unpleasantly shifted. When Job’s comforters come to see him, they come to see an outcast who has lost everything that gave him a place within the community, family, wealth, and, importantly, the blessing of God. As resolution to this tale, Job must be reintegrated into the living community, just as all mourners must be. In previous chapters we have seen how important the funeral was in providing acceptable spaces for mourning within the community structure. Here the familiar repetition and ritualization of Job’s words creates a linguistic frame structuring the expression of mourning in much the same way that the funeral provides structure for action: it is the script that accompanies the funeral’s stage set and choreography. Despite the overwrought nature of Job’s mourning, as revealed in the biblical and Office texts, Job’s persona as a figure distinguished by his endurance triumphed in sermons and medical texts where he is used as an example of forbearance in the face of loss. When in the first chapter Job loses his holdings, flocks, wife, and seven children, he responds by saying, ‘the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away: as 25 Naama Cohen-Hanegbi, Caring for the Living Soul: Emotions, Medicine and Penance in the Late Medieval Mediterranean (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 177.

The Redemptive Death: Job, L azarus, and Death Undone 

it hath pleased the Lord so is it done: blessed be the name of the Lord.’26 While Job clearly suffers and expresses that suffering, the passage reflects an understanding of the power of God and trust in God. It was this response, in alignment with the medieval characterization of Job as a man of almost superhuman spiritual fortitude, that a medieval mourner was encouraged to emulate. In Job the medieval reader encounters an example of mourning which allows them to have it both ways. Job’s voice in the Office vicariously becomes the cry of the reader, structuring and channeling the emotions of grief and loss in ways that are both satisfyingly emotional and acceptably restrained. At the same time, Job’s unassailable position in the medieval imagination as patience personified provides the reader with a template for correct behaviour in the face of loss. Thus, the two characters of Job sit side by side in the Book of Hours, as they do in the medieval imagination. The Living Dead The story of Job, and the dung heap scene in particular, uses the corporeal body as the canvas on which to illustrate Job’s suffering in his living death. In many dung heap images such as MS Buchanan E. 3 (fol. 55; Fig. 4-4), Job’s body is physically assaulted by demons as the various scourges of Job’s trials are imaged as a beating.27 This physicality applies to the suffering of the mind as well as to the suffering of the body. The author of the Speculum Humanae Salvationis writes that physical scourging of Job was deemed insufficient, and so while Satan whipped Job’s flesh, his wife ‘lashed him with words’ so that he would be ‘wounded in spirit’.28 The imaging of Job’s afflictions as a physical assault of his body carried double meaning for the medieval reader, who would have seen the mental and physical suffering of Job as a prefiguration of the mental and physical suffering of Christ.29 The Speculum directly compares Christ’s flagellation with that of Job. 26 Job 1:21 27 MS Buchanan E. 3, Hours, France (Rouen), late 15th century, fol. 55. Oxford: Bodleian Library. Bodleian Library, A Catalogue of Western Manuscripts at the Bodleian Libraries and Selected Oxford Colleges (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2017), accessed April 1, 2023. https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_1995. Online catalogue adapted from Peter Kidd, Medieval Manuscripts from the Collection of T. R. Buchanan in the Bodleian Library (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2001). Another such image can be found in Egerton MS 2019 (fol. 166v). 28 Albert C. Labriola and John W. Smeltz, trans., The Mirror of Salvation [Speculum Humanae Salvationis], An Edition of British Library Blockbook G. 11784 (Pittsburgh: Dusquesne University Press, 2002), 57. MS 139, Speculum humanae salvationis. Belgium, late 15th century, ff 21v–22. Chantilly: Musée Condé, Bibliothèque du château. Adrian Wilson and Joyce Lancaster Wilson, A Medieval Mirror: Speculum Humanae Salvationis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 81–83. 29 Job’s mental suffering as represented in the image of Job on the dung heap with his head in hand seems to have provided the inspiration for the development of a late medieval topos of the suffering Christ. Von

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Fig. 4-4. MS Buchanan E. 3, Hours, France (Rouen), late 15th century, fol. 55. Oxford: Bodleian Library. CC-BY-NC 4.0 licence.

The Redemptive Death: Job, L azarus, and Death Undone 

The dung heap image in MS Buchanan E. 3 visually reinforces this idea with a compositional structure that echoes common elements of passion scenes. In MS Buchanan E. 3, God and two angels observe from above as an emaciated, nearly nude, grey-haired Job is thrashed by four winged and horned demons wielding clubs and spikes. The four demons echo the soldiers pictured in the Flagellation. The hilly landscape and the ubiquitous skull in the bottom centre are both strongly reminiscent of fifteenth-century crucifixion images. The angels above are similar to those that often appear in crucifixion scenes catching the blood of Christ.30 Finally, Job himself, here dragged down by the demons, is represented in a reclined posture similar to those of the deposition or lamentation. MS Buchanan E. 3 also includes God, gazing down at the action from a cloud as Job gazes up at him plaintively. Perhaps this is Job’s moment to wonder why God has forsaken him, as Christ does from the cross. Certainly, this is a sentiment raised by Job in dialogue sections of the biblical Book and in texts included in the Office.31 For the reader-viewer of the Office of the Dead, these visual correspondences emphasize the role of physical suffering in the salvation narrative and link this suffering with the coming redemption. Job, atop his pungent throne, eventually emerges triumphant, having come to a fuller understanding of God through his experience of suffering. (By contrast, his wife and friends, who avoid his afflictions, fail to understand what Job expresses.) As such, the specular image of Job’s mental and bodily suffering becomes a means through which the reader-viewer sees the suffering of Christ, just as Job’s legendary patience was referent to Christ’s patience. It is in this redemptive context that the reader was encouraged to see their own suffering. In the text and in the images, Job’s suffering is emphatically somatically rooted. Job’s body forms the site and the stage for the second tranche of affliction that he must endure, and thus the body forms the rhetorical and physical substance of his response.32 Many of the portions of the Book of Job that appear in the Office of the Dead use language that is evocative of the language of bodily death encountered in medieval sermons, lyrics, and devotional texts discussed in the previous chapter. der Osten describes this as the ‘Christ in distress’ motif. G. Von der Osten, ‘Job and Christ: The Development of a Devotional Image’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 16, no. 1/2 (1953): 153–58; Lawrence W. Nichols, ‘“Job in Distress” a Newly Discovered Painting by Hendrick Goltzius’, Simiolus: Netherlandish Quarterly for the History of Art 13 (1983): 182–88. 30 See for example MS 52, Leaf, German (Franconia), late 15th century. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum. 31 Matt. 27:46, ‘And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying: Eli, Eli, lamma sabacthani? that is, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ Also found in Mark 15:34. C.f. the third Nocturn of Matins, Ps. 41:13, which says ‘Why hast thou forgotten me? and why go I mourning, whilst my enemy afflicteth me?’ This appears shortly before the seventh lesson, in which Job laments ‘only the grave remains for me’. 32 Scott C. Jones, ‘Corporeal Discourse in the Book of Job’, Journal of Biblical Literature 132, no. 4 (2013): 846–49.

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In the readings of the seventh lesson of the Matins, Job laments ‘hell is my house, and I have made my bed in darkness’, echoing the grave-as-house motif found in medieval vernacular lyrics. The lyrics emphasize the smallness of the space, its cramped darkness, and the isolation of the corpse.33 Darkness (of death, of despair, of the grave) is a reoccurring theme in the Job texts, where it stands in contrast to the ‘lightness’ of life. Similarly, Job frequently refers to his body as being in a state of decay. He speaks of rot, worms, and moths: ‘If I have said to rottenness: Thou art my father; to worms, my mother and my sister.’ (Lesson 7). ‘(I) Who am to be consumed as rottenness, and as a garment that is moth-eaten.’ (Lesson 4) ‘The flesh being consumed. My bone hath cleaved to my skin, and nothing but lips are left about my teeth.’ (Lesson 8)

Rot, as we have seen, was a common theme of death literature as a reminder of the frailty of the body but also as a visceral and inevitable consequence of sin. Death, as Jacopone da Todi describes it, ‘consigns the body to worms’ who ‘gradually devour it’, just as the soul is devoured by sin.34 The medieval iconography of Job was drawn from the Septuagint text which includes the reference to the ubiquitous dung heap and to worms that infest his wounds. In the Byzantine pictorial tradition, Job is literally devoured by worms which infest his ulcerous sores.35 Despite Job’s righteousness, his anger and distress are expressed in terms of self-abnegation. He laments his birth, questions the purpose of existence, and embraces the language of dissolution and physical destruction, emphasizing the weakness of the body. He envisions this in biological terms. His flesh is consumed by worms, by moths, and even by his friends. In a particularly passionate exchange, Job cries at his comforters, ‘Why do you persecute me as God, and glut yourselves with my flesh?’36 Job reframes the verbal barbs thrown at him

33 The grave is evoked directly as an image of hell in the Vercelli homilies. Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages, 82–84. 34 From ‘How Sin Kills the Soul’. Jacopone da Todi, The Lauds, trans. Elizabeth Hughes and Serge Hughes (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), 89. 35 Job 2:9. Maria Evangelatou, ‘From Word into Image: The Visualization of Ulcer in Byzantine Illustrated Manuscripts of the Book of Job’, Gesta 48, no. 1 (2009): 19–36. 36 Eighth lesson of Matins of the Dead. Job 19:20.

The Redemptive Death: Job, L azarus, and Death Undone 

by Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar as a cannibalistic annihilation.37 These phrases, fleshy evocations of a sickly body, are repeated in the Debate between Body and Soul, Ubi Sunt, and Signs of Death texts, to name just a few, and place the Job texts of the Office of the Dead firmly and familiarly within the larger medieval discourse on death, body, and soul. The reader (or listener) could not fail to notice these linguistic similarities, as these tropes were so often repeated in the later medieval period. Indeed, the familiarity of the language would have made the texts of Job even more relevant as they echoed and reinforced the contemporary literature of death. A nearby text is a good example of this. Job is joined by another figure whose voice resounds with sorrows in Books of Hours: David. Both Job and David were musicians, and many of the themes of isolation and decay that Job articulates were also known to readers from David’s sorrowful songs.38 One finds echoes in the Penitential Psalms of Job’s plight, in particular in psalm 38, in which David petitions God for mercy and relief from physical and mental anguish. The nature of Job’s bodily afflictions is echoed in David’s words when he sings: My wounds stink and are corrupt because of my foolishness. I am troubled; I am bowed down greatly; I go mourning all the day long. For my loins are filled with a loathsome disease: and there is no soundness in my flesh. I am feeble and sore broken.39

The words of Job and David reflect an equivalence between the state of the body and the state of the mind. In addition to these physical ailments, isolation from friends and family occuring as a result of bodily decay is articulated by both David and Job. David says, ‘My lovers and my friends stand aloof from my sores; and my kinsmen stand afar off’, while Job extends this theme, saying: He hath put my brethren far from me, and my acquaintance like strangers have departed from me. My kinsmen have forsaken me, and they that knew me, have forgotten me. They that dwell in my house, and my maidservants have counted

37 See also Job 10:18–19: ‘Why didst thou bring me forth out of the womb: O that I had been consumed that eye might not see me!’ 38 Renevey, ‘Looking for a Context: Rolle, Anchoritic Culture, and the Office of the Dead’, 193; Sarah Schell, ‘Job, Music and the Dead: A Visual Expression of the Relationship between the Roles of Job in Medieval Devotion and Culture’, St Andrews Journal of Art History and Museum Studies 14 (2010): 85–94; Valentin Denis, ‘Saint Job Patron des Musiciens’, Revue Belge d’archeologie et d’Histoire de l’Art 21 (1952; reprinted 1977): 253–98; Kathi Meyer, ‘St Job as Patron of Music’, The Art Bulletin 36 (1954): 21–31. 39 Ps. 38:5–8. See also Job 2:7 and 8:5.

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Fig. 4-5. Detail, MS KB 71 A 23, Bible, France (Paris), c. 1320–40, fol. 203v. The Hague: Nationale bibliotheek van Nederland.

me as a stranger, and I have been like an alien in their eyes. … My wife hath abhorred my breath. 40

The Penitential Psalms are a regular component of the Book of Hours and usually appear after the Office of the Dead so that the piteous cries of these Old Testament figures create an echo chamber of bodily misery and mental desolation. The close proximity of the Penitential Psalms and the Office of the Dead, with its readings from the Book of Job, would encourage the reader of the Book of Hours to make a connection between these important figures via such textual congruences. Job’s self-description as a body with flesh consumed and bone ‘cleaved’ to skin render him more carcass than person, as is seen in MS KB 71 A 23 (fol. 203v; Fig. 4-5), where Job is shown not as a living man but as a cadaver, grinning a skull’s grin at 40 Ps. 38:11; Job, 19:13–17.

The Redemptive Death: Job, L azarus, and Death Undone 

his wife and visitors. 41 In this exaggerated representation, Job on the dung heap becomes a living biblical rendition of the burial scene: the dung heap strewn with bone fragments and skulls evoke the churned-up earth of the churchyard, his friends become the mourners lamenting his death, and Job himself, seated in state at the centre of attention, is the living corpse. What makes this imagery particularly interesting is that Job is not (physically) dead, nor is he in danger of death, since a stipulation of the test is that he must survive it. Rather, Job’s worldly or social death is imagined in the form of a physical death from which he is ‘resurrected’ at the end of the story. Visibly enfeebled and apparently persecuted by God, Job’s corporeal sickness and evident poverty cause him to be rejected by the community. 42 He is chastised for the assumed transgressions that God is punishing, and these (and the resulting maladies) place him outside the social body of which he was previously a leading member; he ‘dies’ through this community rejection. However, while Job’s body as the site of testing decays like a corpse, it is also restored like Lazarus to health and (social) life at the end of the tale. Indeed, the texts of the eighth lesson of Matins beginning with ‘The flesh is being consumed’ ends with Job’s stout assertion that he will be restored to bodily wholeness and to God in the last day: ‘For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth. And I shall be clothed again with my skin, and in my flesh I will see my God.’ Far from the moth-eaten garment that Job described in the fourth lesson, his body is now entire, resurrected ‘out of the earth’, and in this resurrected body, he is able to see God with his own eyes. 43 By combining the social and corporeal sufferings of Job in one place, the dunghill becomes a visual shorthand for ‘the world’, a place of suffering and tribulation which can seem distant from God. For the reader, spiritually preparing for their own death or mourning the deaths of others, Job’s experiences and dunghill proclamations are emblematic of their own experience of suffering in the world. But with a steadfast faith as modelled by Job (who is restored to a life of comfort and plenty), the reader, too, can look forward to redemption and reintegration with the community of all Christian dead in heaven. The story of Job in the Office of the Dead texts closes the poetic circle. What began with the disintegration of social bonds and corporeal health ends with their reconstitution as Job is reinstated in his previous position and gifted (by

41 MS KB 71 A 23, Bible, France (Paris), c. 1320–1340, fol. 203v. The Hague: Nationale bibliotheek van Nederland. 42 Jones, ‘Corporeal Discourse in the Book of Job’, 851. 43 ‘Whom I myself shall see, and my eyes shall behold, and not another: this my hope is laid up in my bosom.’ Eighth lesson of Matins. Job 19:27.

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God through Job’s community) an affluence that exceeds his previous wealth. 44 His physical body is healed and granted a special longevity that enables him to experience a kind of earthly ‘eternal’ life through knowledge of his descendants.45 Job is restored to health and wealth, but perhaps more importantly, he is restored to his right place in the world vis-à-vis his community and God: Job’s social body has been resurrected. In the closing scene of the narrative in the historiated initial V at Verba mea, on MS Auct D. 4.4, fol. 248v (above, Fig. 4-2), God gestures toward Job, who stands before him with hands folded for prayer. Like the parallels found between the first and second images of Satan before God, this image offers visual parallels with the corresponding historiated initial on fol. 244, where Job receives news of the tragedies from his kneeling servant. On fol. 248v it is Job who kneels before his lord, visually re-establishing his relationship to God after his years of perceived abandonment. To be redeemed is to be reclaimed, returned, or absolved, all of which apply to Job. By the end of the Book of Job, God has reclaimed his faithful servant, ending his period of testing; he is returned to the comfort of his previous life and publicly acknowledged for his steadfast faith. Job’s redemption is concretely expressed in this tale through a resolution with God and renewed proofs of God’s approbation. This was more than most readers could hope for in life but perhaps not beyond hope through a redemptive Christian death.

The Undead: Lazarus and the Promise of Resurrection In MS Auct D. 4.4, the Office of the Dead opens with a full-page illustration of the raising of Lazarus (fol. 243v; Fig. 4-6). 46 The scene shows Lazarus’s open tomb at the bottom left, with the lid leaning against the side of the coffin. Larazus sits up in the tomb, his whole body still enveloped by the shroud, the cloth of which remains tied closed on the top of his head, as so often seen in cadaver effigies and brasses. The sheet is parted around Lazarus’s face, and he looks up toward Christ standing in the centre of the composition, who raises his hand in a gesture of blessing. This is

44 Job 42:10–12. ‘So he gave back to Job twice over all that he had lost. Clansmen and clanswomen and all his old acquaintances gathered about him now, and sat down as guests in his house, and made great ado bemoaning all the afflictions the Lord had sent him; not one of them but gave him presents, a sheep and a gold earring apiece. A richer man the Lord made Job now than ever he had been in old days.’ 45 Job 42:16, ‘And Job lived after these things, a hundred and forty years, and he saw his children, and his children’s children, unto the fourth generation, and he died an old man, and full of days.’ 46 MS Auct D. 4.4 ‘The Bohun Psalter and Hours’, Psalter/Hours, England, c. 1370–80, fol. 243v. Oxford: Bodleian Library.

The Redemptive Death: Job, L azarus, and Death Undone 

Fig. 4-6. MS Auct D. 4.4. ‘The Bohun Psalter and Hours’, Psalter/Hours, England, c. 1370–80, fol. 243v. Oxford: Bodleian Library. CC-BY-NC 4.0 licence.

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the dramatic moment when Christ calls to his friend, ‘Come forth!’ and Lazarus is woken from death, still clothed for burial, while his sisters look on in amazement.47 This miraculous event where the expected realities of death are subverted was a common choice of image for the Office of the Dead in the later fifteenth century. It provided readers with a visual verification of the hoped-for resurrection of the body and visually rooted that miracle in the familiar surrounds of the medieval family. Little is related about the biblical Lazarus beyond the story of his raising. However, by the later medieval period, several legends had grown around Lazarus of Bethany and his famous sisters. Mary (sister of Martha) was thought to be the same person as Mary Magdalene, while Martha was sometimes conflated with the woman afflicted with the bloody flux whom Christ healed. 48 The medieval vita of Mary Magdalene recounts that Lazarus and his sisters were set to sea and came ashore in Roman Gaul, settled there, and preached. 49 According to this tradition, Lazarus went to Marseilles, died there, and was later translated to Autun.50 The legend has little foundation but was well established in the medieval period.51 The popularity of Lazarus at this time is attested by the development of pilgrimage sites, such as those at Marseilles and Wezemaal in France and Belgium, and by his inclusion in all the surviving English mystery play cycles and many of the French passions.52 His importance as vehicle for exploring grief, fear of death, and hope of resurrection is expressed in the various tones (didactic, descriptive, lamenting, celebratory, thankful) of the speeches that medieval writers put in the mouth of the biblically silent Lazarus. Like Job, Lazarus seems a natural subject for the Office of the Dead. Both figures can appear as cadaver-type images, and both have been ‘resurrected’:

47 John 11:43–44. 48 On the various Marys as one and several see Herbert Thurston, ‘St Mary Magdalen ‒ Fact and Legend’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 23, no. 89 (1934): 110–23. 49 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea Con Le Miniature Dal Codice Ambrosiano C 240 Inf., ed. Giovanni Paolo Maggioni, 2 vols. (Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2007), I:706. 50 An alternative claim is made by the Byzantine church. In this tradition the boat came ashore on Cyprus, and Lazarus became bishop of Kition (now Larnaka). His relics were translated to Constantinople in the ninth century. Herbert J. Thurston and Donald Attwater, eds., Butler’s Lives of the Saints, 2nd edition, 4 vols. (Notre Dame: Burns and Oates, 1956), IV: 576–77; L. Clugnet, ‘St Lazarus of Bethany’, in The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910), accessed April 1, 2023. http://www.newadvent. org/cathen/09097a.htm. 51 John Mirk’s sermon on Mary Magdalene includes reference to Mary as sister of Lazarus, Martha’s healing from the flux, and the Bethany family’s subsequent marooning at sea and arrival in Marseille. Mirk, Mirk’s Festial, 203–5. 52 Mary Hayes, ‘The Lazarus Effect: Translating Death in Medieval English Vernacular Drama’, Philological Quarterly 97, no. 4 (2018): 446; Marike de Kroon, ‘Medieval Pilgrim Badges and Their Iconographic Aspects’, in Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles, ed. Sarah Blick and Rita Tekippe, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 388–92.

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Job from his travails, and Lazarus from the grave. Lazarus does not have the same intimate connection with the lessons and responsories of the Office texts as Job, but his story is one that imbues him with eschatological relevance. Lazarus as Proof of Resurrection Lazarus was a popular subject for early Christian burial. The raising of Lazarus was the most frequently depicted of Christ’s miracles, and images appear on surviving ancient sarcophagi in Rome, North Africa, and Gaul.53 Of course, Lazarus’s story of miraculous reanimation was immediately associated with the resurrection and the Christian promise of life everlasting.54 The miracle was celebrated around Holy Week, marking the start of the Easter season. The fourth-century pilgrim Etheria recounts her visit to the place of the miracle in Bethany (the Lazarium) on the Saturday before Palm Sunday. She records that at the end of the service there, attended by ‘multitudes’, the priest gave a formal notice that Eastertide had begun.55 Thus, from the earliest days of Christianity, the Lazarus story formed part of a resurrection narrative that prepared Christians for the ultimate miracle of the undone death of Christ. The resurrection is the central component of the salvation narrative, and it would seem an entirely appropriate image to accompany the Office of the Dead text, which is performed for the sake of those dead souls who have placed their hope in it. It is then surprising that resurrection images are rare as Office of the Dead illustrations. When they do appear, they find their place elsewhere in the Book of Hours. With this in mind, Lazarus’s inclusion at the Office of the Dead takes on a greater importance, for his story presents not only itself but also stands as a referent to Christ’s story. Christ himself makes this analogy to Martha in John 11:23–26.56 53 Lee Jefferson, ‘Lazarus’, in Brill Encyclopedia of Early Christanity Online, ed. David G. Hunter, Paul J.J. van Geest, and Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte, 2018, accessed April 1, 2023. http://dx.doi. org/10.1163/2589-7993_EECO_SIM_036592. 54 Indeed, Wendy North has argued that one of the purposes of the Johannine account of Lazarus’s death and revival was to strengthen the resolve of the young Christian community facing persecution via the Lazarine assurance of resurrection on judgement day. Wendy E. S. North, ‘“Lord, If You Had Been Here… ” (John 11.21): The Absence of Jesus and Strategies of Consolation in the Fourth Gospel’, Journal for the Study of the New Testament 36, no. 1 (2013): 39–52. On Lazarus imagery in the early Church see also Jefferson, ‘Lazarus’. 55 M. L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe, The Pilgrimage of Etheria, Translations of Christian Literature, Liturgical Texts, III (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1919), 63–64; Thurston and Attwater, Butler’s Lives of the Saints, IV:576. 56 John 11:23–26, ‘Jesus saith to her: Thy brother shall rise again. Martha saith to him: I know that he shall rise again, in the resurrection at the last day. Jesus said to her: I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, although he be dead, shall live: And every one that liveth, and believeth in me, shall not die for ever. Believest thou this?’

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Some of the details of Lazarus’s revival, such as the cave burial and the rolling away of the stone, reinforce this connection by echoing the manner and language used to describe the events of Christ’s own death and resurrection.57 The circumstance and nature of the miracle and the deadness of the body emphasized by the number of days spent in the tomb enable Lazarus’s temporary death to visually and allusively presage Christ’s temporary death and resurrection. Lazarus’s similarity to Christ affords him a ‘figural resonance’ that imbues the story with greater profundity and anticipates the coming passion narrative.58 Christ’s descent into hell is also echoed in the medieval Lazarus story. The tradition of vision literature in which a living soul is given a tour of the torments and delights of the afterlife has a long pedigree throughout the medieval period, with the Vision of Tundale and St Patrick’s Purgatory being among the best known.59 The Visio Lazari appears in the mid-fourteenth century around Marseilles, the seat of the cult of St. Lazarus, and is documented in various forms by the fifteenth century.60 The account is quite bald, more in the manner of a witness statement than a journey or pilgrimage, as is often found in other examples of the genre. It was popular in the fifteenth century and one of the more commonly illustrated of the infernal narratives in manuscript and in print.61 The Visio Lazari may not have been known as such to every medieval reader of the Office of the Dead, but they would almost certainly have heard Lazarus’s account of what awaited beyond the grave from sermon literature and medieval plays, many of which incorporated elements of this vision. Unlike Christ’s triumphant Harrowing of Hell, however, Lazarus’s account is just plain harrowing – so 57 For the burial see John 11:38–44. This passage bears comparison with the following passages from the crucifixion story. Mark 15:46 and Matt. 27:59–61. 58 On this relationship in medieval cycle drama, see Robert A. Brawer, ‘The Dramatic Function of the Ministry Group in the Towneley Cycle’, Comparative Drama 4, no. 3 (1970): 169; Hayes, ‘The Lazarus Effect: Translating Death in Medieval English Vernacular Drama’, 453. The phrase ‘figural resonance’ used by both Brawer and Hayes was first used by V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), 79–80. 59 On early medieval vision literature, see Eileen Gardiner, ed., Visions of Heaven and Hell before Dante (New York: Italica Press, 1989). 60 Edward J. Gallagher, ‘The Visio Lazari, The Culture and the Old French Life of Saint Lazarus: An Overview’, Neuphilologische Metteilungen 90 (1989): 331–39. It appears in the French passion plays and the some of the English mystery plays, as well as in sermon and didactic literature such as the printed Le Traité de bien vivre et de bien mourir (1492). D. D. R. Owen, The Vision of Hell: Infernal Journeys in Medieval French Literature (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1970), 244–47; Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 229; Clifford Davidson, ‘The Fate of the Damned in English Art and Drama’, in The Iconography of Hell, ed. Clifford Davidson and Thomas H. Seiler, vol. 17, Early Drama, Art and Music Monography Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992), 56. 61 Thomas Kren, ‘Some Illuminated Manuscripts of the Vision of Lazarus from the Tome of Margaret of York’, in Margaret of York, Simon Marmion and The Visions of Tondal, ed. Thomas Kren (Malibu, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1992), 142–43.

The Redemptive Death: Job, L azarus, and Death Undone 

harrowing that the author of the Prik of Conscience recounts that for the remainder of his days, Lazarus was solemn and ‘lowghe he never ny maad glad chere’ in fear of the pains he had witnessed awaiting sinners in hell.62 The Visio aligns punishments with sins, categorizing the misery of the eternally suffering into a neat hierarchy.63 It incorporates violence as a form of instruction, as is common in medieval didactic literature, making the tale both a warning and an incentive for the conscientious reader or listener to take heed of their soul and prepare for death.64 In the context of a liturgical off ice read at funerals or for commemoration purposes, the Lazarus story may have resonated with the reader in a way that an image of the resurrection of Christ could not: the reader was a lot more like Mary, Martha, or Lazarus than he or she was like Christ. The events of John 11 provide evidence of the promised life after death to an ordinary family. In this, the raising was affirming. As Lazarus was raised from the dead, so too would all the Christian faithful be raised from the dead. Like Job, whose story emphasizes the role of faith in the face of worldly loss and sorrow, Lazarus’s story also emphasizes faith, in this case faith in the face of death and for resurrection beyond. When contemplating the image of Lazarus rising from the tomb and dressed in medieval winding clothes, as in the Oxford description of the theme, the reader-viewer would not only have seen the resurrection of Lazarus but also have recalled the words spoken by his sister Martha that affirmed her belief – and the belief of the reader – in the resurrection of all the faithful dead: ‘I know that he shall rise again, in the resurrection at the last day … Yea, Lord, I have believed that thou art Christ, the Son of the living God, who art come into this world.’65 Martha’s words resonate hopefully in the image of the risen body of her brother Lazarus and with the texts of the Office spoken by Job: ‘For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth.’ Lazarus and Body as Book The living Lazarus speaks no words in his tale and only appears after his miraculous resurrection. The body of Lazarus is essential to this miracle; it is the parchment on which the journey across the borders between life and death was inscribed. 62 James H. Morey, ed., Prik of Conscience, Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS, 2012), 153, lines 95–96. 63 Gallagher, ‘The Visio Lazari, The Culture and the Old French Life of Saint Lazarus: An Overview’, 333–34. 64 Edelgard E. DuBruck, ‘Lazarus’s Vision of Hell: A Significant Passage in Late-Medieval Passion Plays’, Fifteenth Century Studies 27 (2002): 44–55. This is also noted by Kren, who writes that the ‘violent, often disturbing illustrations’ were likely ‘more effective teachers’ than the text alone. Kren, ‘Some Illuminated Manuscripts of the Vision of Lazarus from the Tome of Margaret of York’, 150. 65 John 11:24–27.

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Fig. 4-7. Additional MS 35314, Hours, Netherlands, late 15th/early 16th century, fol. 53v. London: British Library. © The British Library Board.

Images of the body of Lazarus represented him in various ways: he is raised from the dead looking like a days-old corpse, he sometimes appears as a man feeling under the weather, and he sometimes rises from the tomb elegantly clothed and in the pink. The body of Lazarus is the pivot point around which the story turns, and

The Redemptive Death: Job, L azarus, and Death Undone 

the degree of deadness or health illustrated in this essential body could be seen by the reader to emphasize different facets of the resurrection story. In an early sixteenth-century representation of the Raising of Lazarus in Additional MS 35314 fol. 53v, Lazarus is shown as a man who has sickened and died (Fig. 4-7).66 He is thin, and his skin is taut over his protruding bones. His colour is ashen, and the shroud that winds around him is darkened with earth. The viewer of this image knows with certainty that a dead body will not recover, however much they wish it would. The astonishing nature of Christ’s miracle at Bethany rests on this profound human recognition of the finality of physical death. Images like the one in Additional MS 35314 illustrate the contrast between the living and dead body and dramatize the undoing of this boundary by having a visibly dead Lazarus return to life. By demonstrating decay, Lazarus’s body is an example of all bodies. The reader-viewer of the Office anticipates that their body will, like Lazarus in the image, become sunken, grey, and malodorous in the hours and days after death. The image conforms in spirit to the body of medieval macabre images that employ the decayed corpse as memento mori. This relationship is highlighted in the Towneley Lazarus play, in which the risen Lazarus echoes the language of the Signs literature, and in the texts of the Office itself in which Job draws attention to his physical state.67 There is also a strong visual and motivic echo of the ‘lively dead’ theme in the corpse-like Lazarus. While the ‘lively dead’ shock the viewer by aping the mannerisms of the living and violating the boundaries between life and death, Lazarus does the opposite. He is not merely lively; he is alive. He has not defied the boundary between life and death; he has been invited to recross it. Despite the visual evidence of deadness in this representation of Lazarus, the viewer knows that in this instance the body does not remain dead but is redeemed. What is visually emphasized through the dead Lazarus is the miraculous, the overcoming of the emphatic chasm between life and death, and the unique power of God through Christ to overturn this separation. The image serves to reassure the reader that he may have confidence in the power of God to transmute dead matter to living flesh and so undercuts one of the foundational fears of death – fear of its finality. Not all images of Lazarus emphasize the deadness of the body. Many picture a Lazarus who looks as though he has merely woken from a particularly long nap, perhaps taking Jesus’s initial description of Lazarus to the disciples as inspiration: ‘Lazarus our friend sleepeth; but I go that I may awake him out of sleep.’68 The Lazarus presented at the opening of the Office of the Dead in MS M. 179 (fol. 132v)

66 Additional MS 35314, Hours, Netherlands, late 15th/early 16th century. London: British Library. 67 Stevens and Cawley, The Towneley Plays, 429. 68 John 11:11.

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Fig. 4-8. Detail, MS M. 179, Hours, France, 1480–1500, fol. 132v. New York: The Morgan Library and Museum. Purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913). Photographic credit: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

is a picture of health and beauty (Fig. 4-8).69 His shroud falls away from a muscular form, his hair is bright, and his cheeks are rosy. This type of representation shifts the visual emphasis from the break between life and death to a continuity between them. This Lazarus embodies the ‘resurrection and life’ Christ promised through his own death and resurrection, a death which did not involve the sights and smells of physical decay. In this guise Lazarus’s healthy body is an echo of Christ’s decay-less death and a manifestation of the uninterrupted life of the soul. Lazarus’s body recalls medieval debates about the role of the resurrected body and the beatific 69 MS M. 179, Hours, France, 1480–1500, fol. 132v. New York: The Morgan Library and Museum. Purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913).

The Redemptive Death: Job, L azarus, and Death Undone 

vision. The precise role of the body in the experience of God after death was much debated in the early 1330s. While details varied, it was in general believed that a body must be a necessary part in the visio Dei if this was said to be experienced by a (whole) person and not only by a soul. The very somatic nature of Lazarus’s death and revival alludes to the posited reunification of soul with body after the last judgement, which finally allowed the saved to experience that most perfect vision of God.70 The beauty of Lazarus’s body after his rise from the tomb in MS M. 179 attests to this perfect union of the body and soul that was envisioned for the souls in paradise, when all the saved have risen to a heavenly reward. Unlike the memento mori which encourages a mental pause to dwell over the nature of physical death as the inevitable end of life, in the raising of Lazarus death is only the beginning of the story. Lazarus’s role in the medieval imagination parallels that of the translator, converting the unknowable experience of death into a language that could be understood by all. In this role Lazarus’s medium of translation was the body, upon which the experiences of death were physically etched. The Towneley Lazarus articulates this purpose and draws attention to the embodiment of his example saying, ‘Youre myrroure here ye loke / And let me be youre boke, / Youre sampell take by me’.71 In the Book of Hours, he could function precisely this way. He both is the book and is in the book. The trope of the body as book had a long medieval currency. The language of truths being written or recorded on the body was often used to evoke the salvific actions of Christ, an association that is apposite for a Lazarus image located in the Office of the Dead.72 The preoccupation of many readers of the Office of the Dead was to ‘know’ death through prayer, reflection, and imaginative engagement. But death is the most unknowable of things; we simply will not know much about it until we are doing it ourselves. In Lazarus there was a coveted example. It was possible to ‘see’ and to ‘know’ death better via this rare transgressive body that died and lived again. The semantic value of Lazarus images encompasses the biblical story, the medieval accretions to that story, and its Christological resonances, emphasizing the narrative similarities between Lazarus’s story of physical death, the pains of hell, and resurrection and the salvation narrative of Christ. By drawing these stories together in the imagination, Lazarus images visually start the reader on a mental pilgrimage contemplating the realities of Christian death from decay and judgement to the glories of eternal life. The astonishing nature of this promise is evoked in the body of Lazarus, who provides physical evidence of both the absolute nature 70 On the body as a necessary element of the visio Dei, see Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, 279–317. 71 Stevens and Cawley, The Towneley Plays, 428, lines 120–22. 72 Eric Jager, ‘The Book of the Heart: Reading and Writing the Medieval Subject’, Speculum 71, no. 1 (1996): 1–26.

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of the rupture between the living and the dead and the divine power of God to overcome that rupture. Lazarus’s body becomes another kind of text for the reader, instantiating the unity of body and soul at the resurrection and demonstrating continuity of self in the next life. The Bethany Family In the MS Auct D. 4.4 Raising of Lazarus, there are three groups of figures in the composition surrounding the actions of Christ and Lazarus (Fig. 4-6). Behind Lazarus, on the left of the image, stand a group of onlookers with Mary and Martha. They are dressed as contemporary wellborn ladies, with fashionable headdresses of gold netting and white bands. Behind the women, figures crowd forward to see the miracle. Opposite this group, at the top right, is another grouping of figures, several of which wear exoticized headdresses. They gesture and point toward Christ while talking amongst themselves. The figures represent those who followed Mary to Lazarus’s grave to comfort her and her sister in their mourning, as described in John 11:31.73 The division of the comforters into two groups is a reflection of the passage in John 11:45–46, which describes a division between those who believed in the miracles of Christ and those who did not: behind Mary and Martha are those who believed, while those who whisper amongst themselves represent those who did not. One way to bring the stories, men, and women of the Bible closer to the lived experiences of the medieval reader was to imagine them in a contemporary guise. The Office of the Dead images of funerals or corpses quite naturally reflect medieval life, but the illustrations of biblical Job and Lazarus are also pictured in this way. In MS Auct D. 4.4, the audience to Christ’s miracle wear contemporary fashionable dress. The elegant gear of the ladies, the fantastic headdresses, and the unmistakably medieval form of Lazarus’s burial locate the miracle in the medieval present. The characters and stories of Lazarus and Job were adapted by medieval society and imagined and recreated in writing and plays as people who might have lived and acted within their own milieu. This is true not only of the protagonists but of all the participating figures who also become part of these biblical stories of human reactions in the face of death. Standing on the edges of the Lazarus miracle (and frequently on the edges of the images) but right in the centre of the story are Mary and Martha. In many ways, for the medieval reader of the Office, Mary and Martha provide the most readily relatable figures in an image of the raising of Lazarus. When Jesus arrives at Bethany, both sisters begin their greetings with mild recriminations, ‘if only’ 73 John 11:3.

The Redemptive Death: Job, L azarus, and Death Undone 

statements such as ‘Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.’ The sisters’ impulsive ‘if only’ statements express sentiments shared by the reader: the search for a reason explaining the death and, in the face of seeming impossibility, a wish that what has occurred could be undone. In the devout imagining of the period, these interpolations of the Lazarus story find voice. In his Mirrour, Nicholas Love attributes the desire to ‘undo’ death, if not the expression of it, to Martha. He tells us that she ‘durste not say utterly that sche desired inwardely’ but that she desired the return of her brother and thought Jesus could accomplish it, he makes clear.74 Despite Martha’s expressed ‘if only’, she vigorously asserts her belief in the divinity of Christ, and it is to Martha that Christ delivers the well-known summation of his role and promise of hope that all medieval readers would recognize: ‘I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, although he be dead, shall live.’75 Martha’s response to her brother’s death is a human response, familiar to the reader. Her assertion of faith in the face of what seems like the unalterable fact of the death of Lazarus is aspirational. The text of the Office itself voices this appeal to God’s power and grace in the first responsory after the second lesson in the Matins of the Dead: ‘You who raised up Lazarus from the foul tomb. You, Lord, grant them rest and place of indulgence’.76 John’s brief reference to Christ’s own response to Lazarus’s death, ‘And Jesus wept’, is also notable.77 This is an unusual incident in the account of Christ’s ministry. While the gospel writers tell us of Christ’s emotional state, he rarely succumbs to what might be described as an emotional outburst, however decorous.78 The biblical account in fact makes clear Christ’s emotional involvement with the Bethany family, stating baldly, ‘Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister Mary, and Lazarus’, and reiterates this affection on several occasions.79 Medieval thinkers

74 ‘Sche durste not say vtterly that sche desired inwardely / seyenge as thus: Now reise my brother fro deth to lyue ‒ for sche wiste not whether it were expedient that hir brother schulde be reised/ or whether it were Jesu wille ‒ and therfore sche sette hir wordes discretely in this manere of menynge: Lorde/ I wote wele that thou myȝt reyse hym/ and therfore ȝif thou wilt it schal be done ‒ bot whether thou wilt or none / I committe it to thy dome and not to my presumpcioun.’ Love, Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ, 174–75. 75 John 11:25. 76 ‘Qui lazarum resuscitasti a monumento fetidum. Tu eis domine dona requiem et locum indulgentie.’ Collins, Manuale as Usum Percelebris Ecclesie Sarisburiensis: From the Edition Printed at Rouen in 1543 Compared with Those of 1506 (London), 1516 (Rouen), 1523 (Antwerp), 1526 (Paris), 137. 77 John 11:35 78 One notable exception is Christ’s anger in the Temple where he overturns the tables of the money changers. Matt. 21:12–13; Mark 11:15–16; John 2:14–16. 79 John 11:5. On friendship in the Latin Lazarus plays, see Kathleen M. Ashley, ‘The Fleury “Raising of Lazarus” and Twelfth-Century Currents of Thought’, Comparative Drama 15, no. 2 (1981): 139–58.

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and theologians considered this response evidence of Christ’s true humanity.80 The tears substantiated his true incarnation as man and were thus part of the broader salvation narrative. Christ’s tears also emphasize his engagement with the community around him. Mary wept. The neighbours who had come to comfort the family wept. Christ notes this, is troubled, and finally also weeps. He does not admonish his friends for their tears; he joins them in this spiritually productive action.81 Bonaventure highlighted the communal orientation of these tears in the Life of Christ, challenging his reader to imagine the scene: ‘Contemplate Him, and the sisters, and the disciples. Do you not suppose that they wept also?’82 Love’s free translation of the Life goes further, listing three reasons why Christ weeps, the first of which is for love of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.83 While this incident is not depicted in the images, Christ’s emotional involvement was an essential part of the pathos of the story. Indeed, the example of Jesus and Mary weeping for the dead Lazarus provided a biblical justification for demonstrative mourning in the medieval period, establishing that such behaviour did not indicate weak faith nor compromise a belief in the resurrection of the dead. Bernard of Clairvaux drew on the example of the Lazarus story to justify his own sorrow at the death of a fellow brother, and Christ himself had said, ‘Blessed are those who mourn: for they shall be comforted.’84 For the reader-viewer of the Office, who may be looking at the image of Lazarus’s raising and reading the Office as part of a mourning or commemorative practice, the exchange provides assurance that mourning has a place, particularly when expressed in ways supported by, and encouraging participation in, the broader faith community. The reading of the Office was just such a practice.

80 ‘Even the Lord Himself, when He condescended to lead a human life in the form of a slave, had no sin whatever, and yet exercised these emotions where He judged they should be exercised. For as there was in Him a true human body and a true human soul, so was there also a true human emotion.’ Augustine, ‘City of God’, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, ed. Phillip Schaff and Keven Knight, trans. Marcus Dods (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co.; Catholic Encyclopedia Online, 1887), Book 14:9, accessed March 18, 2023. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1201.htm. 81 Piroska Nagy, ‘Religious Weeping as Ritual in the Medieval West’, Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 48, no. 2 (2004): 119–37. 82 Bonaventure, The Life of Christ, ed. W. H. Hutching (London: Rivingtons, 1888), 227. 83 Love, Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ, 176. Not all medieval accounts of Lazarus’s death include Christ’s tears. Rosemary Woolf notes a certain discomfort with Christ’s tears evidenced by their omission in many of the Lazarus plays. Woolf, The English Mystery Plays, 228. 84 ‘you must not imagine that a person cannot yield to grief without prejudice to his faith. It is thus with my tears also. They are not a sign of unbelief, but an indication of our human condition.’ Sermon 26, ‘On the Death of his Brother Gerard’ in Samuel J. Eales and John Mabillon, eds., Life and Works of Saint Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, Vol IV, Cantica Canticorum, Eighty Six Sermons on the Song of Soloman (London: John Hodges, 1896), 165–66. As quoted in Ashley, ‘The Fleury “Raising of Lazarus” and Twelfth-Century Currents of Thought’, 141. Matt. 5:5.

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Fig. 4-9. MS M. 1003, Hours, France, c. 1465, fol. 153v. New York: The Morgan Library and Museum. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Landon K. Thorne, Jr., 1979. Photographic credit: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

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Mary and Martha present an emotional template for mourning that is recognizably human and contemporary to the expectations of the medieval reader. Lazarus himself was also cast as a contemporary of medieval viewers, but often in social and economic terms. This is clear in many of the religious dramas in which Lazarus appears, but his temporal translation is particularly apparent in the manner of his burial. The ritual of Lazarus’s internment is not addressed in the biblical narrative at all, but medieval artists filled in that gap with contemporary experience, eliminating in the process the historical distance between the biblical past and medieval present. In a French fifteenth-century example, MS M. 1003 fol. 153v, we see this temporal collapse at work (Fig. 4-9).85 The raising of Lazarus occupies the centre-right in an arched frame with the text of the Office below. In the foreground a grey-haired Lazarus sits up in his grave, and his naked body is partially revealed as the white shroud falls away. Christ, front and centre, points heavenward while onlookers react to the miracle with surprise, pointing and gesturing at the lively Lazarus. In this scene the only visual references toward a contemporary setting are the earth burial and the walls of a medieval town in the distance. The accompanying images in three roundels around the central image locate the miracle firmly in the contemporary medieval world. In the lowest roundel, a man lies on his deathbed with family and clergy surrounding him. A woman holds a candle, while another clasps her hands in prayer, and a cleric holds an aspergillium over the bed as last rites are performed. In the next roundel, moving into the left-hand border, the red-pink bedspread has become a pall. The coffin rests before an altar as the Requiem Mass is sung, and three mourners in enveloping black gowns look on. Finally, the last roundel contains a scene of churchyard burial. The body, sewn into a white shroud, is lowered into a waiting grave as the burial rites are read over him. All three roundels describe in familiar terms the events of the medieval death-tide, from deathbed to graveside. The deathbed scene echoes illustrations of the ars moriendi, while the funeral and burial scenes would, as we have already seen, have been familiar as images, through ekphrasis and from common experience. The reader might leave it at that: complimentary images of a medieval death surrounding an accompanying, but separate, image of the raising of Lazarus. However, there are indications that an attentive reader-viewer should see the roundels not merely as complimentary but as essential parts of Lazarus’s own story, revealing the events that occurred surrounding his death. Around the head of the woman with the candle in the centre of the lower roundel, faint indications of a halo are discernible, suggesting that she is one 85 MS M.1003, Hours, France, c. 1465, fol. 153v. New York: The Morgan Library and Museum. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Landon K. Thorne, Jr., 1979.

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of Lazarus’s sisters. Her long, loose hair, when considered with the medieval conflation of Martha’s sister with Mary Magdalene, suggests that this could be Mary. The same green dress is worn by one of the sisters in the raising of Lazarus image above. This image of Lazarus’s deathbed evokes the ideal death described by the fifteenth-century genre of instructional literature, the ars moriendi. Lazarus in this moment not only provides an exemplar of faith and resurrection but also models the good death – anticipated, surrounded by friends and family, prepared for. This is a role that Lazarus also played in many of the popular medieval religious dramas, where his miraculous story began with an exemplary death.86 In the top roundel, a shovel rests on the lip of the open grave; this shovel rests in the same location on the edge of the grave out of which the newly revivified Lazarus rises in the central scene. These are small details, but they serve to visually link the scenes of familiar death with this most unusual and miraculous of deaths. The passage in John 11 says that Lazarus was ill, that he died, and that when Christ arrived in Bethany, the body had already been interred. The roundel images in this French example fill in the time between death and burial with the familiar sights and sounds of a medieval death. The visual implication here is clear. Lazarus’s death began like any other bodily death, like the reader’s inevitable death, but with faith and divine intervention, the reader, like Lazarus, can experience the resurrection of the body. Both Job and Lazarus were reimagined as wealthy medieval men of rank who conducted their affairs in a manner recognizable to the contemporary reader. In the Digby Mary Magdalene play, Lazarus and his sisters deal with the complexities of inheritances upon the death of their father Cyrus, a great lord in Jerusalem.87 In the Pety Job, Job articulates his desire for remembrance using the familiar language and framework of medieval commemorative practice. In the fifteenth-century French passion play adapted by Jean Michel, Lazarus is described as fully aristocratic, dressed in rich clothing, and accessorized by a hunting hawk.88 These descriptions confirm Lazarus as the kind of man who would be buried in the elegantly carved stone sarcophagus of the type depicted in MS Auct D. 4.4. Lazarus’s position as man of economic and social significance is reinforced in representations of the funeral in visual form familiar to a wealthy reader, with a stone tomb and black-clad mourners

86 In the Arras passion play, for example, Lazarus avoids deathbed temptations and departs after instructing his sisters to be charitable and generous with their worldly goods. Kathleen M. Ashley, ‘The Resurrection of Lazarus in the Late Medieval English and French Cycle Drama’, Papers on Language and Literature 22 (1986): 238–39. 87 Theresa Coletti, ‘Paupertas Est Donum Dei: Hagiography, Lay Religion and the Economics of Salvation in the Digby Mary Magdalene’, Speculum 76 (2002): 347–49; Mirk, Mirk’s Festial, 203, lines 115–16. 88 Ashley, ‘The Resurrection of Lazarus in the Late Medieval English and French Cycle Drama’, 240.

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Fig. 4-10. MS 21, ‘The Castle Hours’, Hours, France, late 15th century, fol. 69v. Bryn Mawr: Bryn Mawr Special Collections Library.

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at the ready.89 Additionally, the location of Lazarus’s burial confirms his place as an important community figure. In the fifteenth-century Castle Hours (fol. 69v; Fig. 4-10), the scene is set inside a medieval church nave, near to the apse.90 Christ and Mary regard Lazarus as he climbs out of a grave laid under the church floor just in front of the altar. The desire to be buried close to the altar originated in the early church, when nearness to the altar was equated with burial ad sanctos. Augustine’s On the Care of the Dead was written in response to the demand for this type of burial. In the medieval period, this honour was primarily accorded to aristocrats, clergy, and prominent members of the parish community.91 The medieval reader of the Office of the Dead would recognize the implications of securing burial in such a prominent and desirable location within the church, which established Lazarus as a man of considerable standing in his social and church community. The visual and dramatic characterization of Lazarus as a man of elevated social rank may have influenced choices to include Lazarus at the Office of the Dead. In fifteenth-century manuscripts, Job and Lazarus are regularly featured in French and Netherlandish books. The exceptions are books produced in England, where these figures are a comparatively rare choice for the illustration of the Office.92 The 89 ‘Here þe one knygth make redy þe stone, and other bryng in þe wepars, arayyd in blak.’ Frederick J. Furnivall, The Digby Mysteries. 1. The Killing of the Children. 2. The Conversion of St. Paul. 3. Mary Magdalene. 4. Christ’s Burial and Resurrection, with an Incomplete Morality of Wisdom, Who Is Christ (Part of One of the Macro Moralities), New Shakespeare Society Series VII (London: N. Trübner & Co., 1882), 86, lines 841. ‘As the use is now, and has always been / With weepers to the earth bring him. / Alle this must be done as I tell you, / Clad in black, without lacing.’ Furnivall, The Digby Mysteries, 86, lines 834–37. A similar scene is found in BL Burney 332, fol. 69. 90 MS 21, ‘The Castle Hours’, Hours, France, late 15th century, fol. 69v. Bryn Mawr: Bryn Mawr Special Collections Library. 91 C.f. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Add. A. 185, Hours, France (Nantes), c. 1440, fol. 106v which shows a medieval floor burial in progress. Badham, Seeking Salvation, 208–14, esp. 211; Edward James, ‘Burial Status in the Early Medieval West’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 39 (1989): 29; Augustine, ‘On Care to Be Had for the Dead’. 92 In addition to Auct D 4.4, see also Norwich Castle Museum, MS 228.961, Hours, England (Cambridgeshire?), 15th century, fol. 57v. Walter de Grey Birch lists at least twenty-two examples of Hours at the British Library containing images of Job, three Flemish and nineteenth French, ranging from the early f ifteenth century through to the early sixteenth century. Walter de Gray Birch and Henry Jenner, Early Drawings and Illuminations. An Introduction to the Study of Illustrated Manuscripts; with a Dictionary of Subjects in the British Museum (London: Samuel Bagster and Sons, 1879). The subject also seems to be rare in wall painting. Rosewell lists only two examples, Brook, St. Mary (Kent), and Wincester Cathedral (Hampshire), that have Lazarus scenes. Roger Rosewell, Medieval Wall Paintings in English & Welsh Churches (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008), 314. The raising of Lazarus seems to have been particularly popular in Italian illumination as seen in the fifteenth-century manuscripts, London, British Library, Additional 19417, Hours, Italy, second half of the 15th century, fol. 110v; London, British Library, Additional 27697 ‘The Saluces Hours’, Hours, Italy, mid-15th century, fol. 118v; London, British

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English example discussed here is a highly decorated and expensive volume commissioned by wealthy patrons. MS Auct D. 4.4 was commissioned by the Bohuns, a family with royal connections that is known for having commissioned several richly illuminated devotional books.93 As both Job and Lazarus were envisioned within contemporary society as wealthy men, they may have been considered subjects of particular relevance for persons who were themselves wealthy and influential. Part of the potency of the raising of Lazarus story comes from the medieval recasting of the Bethany family as a contemporary medieval family, turning them from historical figures into people recognizable to the reader-viewer. In so doing, the barrier to the reader’s imaginative engagement with the events of Lazarus’s story is reduced, and the similarities of experience are emphasized. The doubts, sadness, mourning, and rejoicing of Mary and Martha become a template of appropriate behaviour for medieval mourners who may themselves be afflicted with a similar emotional landscape during their engagement with the Office of the Dead texts. The Lazarus story demonstrates the veracity of Martha’s affirmation of faith in bodily resurrection and the continuity of body and soul. For the reader, the image of events that took place in Bethany provides evidence that the death of their own body, or that of a loved one, will be but the beginning of a second, everlasting life, complete with the resurrection of the body at the last day. *** There are many analogies between Job and Lazarus that would resonate with the reader of the Office of the Dead. Both are figures of faith in unfortunate circumstances and demonstrate the (eventual) positive effect of that faith in life and in death. The stories deal with the hopes of the mortal: both tales articulate faith in the resurrection, and both accept the sorrows and losses of life with resignation in light of this belief. Both figures were seen as Christ-like: Job as the suffering Christ, and Lazarus as the resurrected Christ. Job was an Old Testament prefiguration whose earthly sufferings, both mental and physical, foreshadowed those of Christ during his temptation in the desert and eventual torment and death. Lazarus’s resurrection prefigured the loosening of the bonds of death effected by the death and resurrection of Christ, as he was freed from death just as the souls of others would be during the harrowing of hell. Library, Additional 34294, Hours, Italy, c. 1490, fol. 257v; London, British Library, Yates Thompson 23, Hours, Italy, c. 1485, fol. 97. 93 See Lynda Eileen Dennison, ‘The Stylistic Sources, Dating and Development of the Bohun Workshop, ca 1340–1400’ (PhD thesis, University of London, 1988); Lucy Freeman Sandler, ‘A Note on the Illuminators of the Bohun Manuscripts’, Speculum 60 (1985): 364–72. See also this volume, ‘Regular Death’.

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Fig. 4-11. MS M.1001, Hours, France, c. 1475, fol. 114. New York, The Morgan Library and Museum. Purchased on the Fellows Fund, 1979. Photographic credit: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

The stories complement each other, and while not all Offices with Job images also contain one with Lazarus, all Lazarus images appear with Job, who is present through the texts of the Office. They also appear together, as they do on facing pages of MS Auct D. 4.4 fols. 243v–244 (Figs. 4-1, 4-6). In a full-page illustration at the opening of the Off ice in MS M.1001 (fol. 114), they also appear together,

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each image complementing the narrative contributions of the other.94 An inset contains Job on the dung heap, naked and exposed, surrounded by onlookers yet drawing away from them (Fig. 4-11).95 This is an afflicted Job at his lowest ebb. In the borders around this image is Lazarus rising from the tomb. He, too, is naked but for the shroud, and he is surrounded by a crowd. But this is Lazarus at his most miraculous. Together the images provide the reader with a vision of suffering and salvation, of the trials of world and its miracles. It contains and resolves many of the expressed anxieties around medieval death explored in the previous chapters. The events that overtake Job and Lazarus force them out of their communities, leaving Job and Job’s and Lazarus’s families to mourn their absence from the social fabric. Similarly, these men are both failed by their bodies, which succumb to pain, indignity, and mortal illness. But in both instances Job and Lazarus emerge from their social or physical deaths to be restored to health and community. Theirs are ‘redemptive’ deaths. The images in the Office of the Dead of Job and Lazarus allow the reader to explore concerns regarding the nature of death both social and physical but, importantly, provide a resolution to them through a redemptive narrative arc that is available to the reader. They may not be unique upon the earth as Job was, but they can emulate Job’s steadfast faith.96 They may not be able to repeat Lazarus’s miraculous reanimation, but they can be reassured by his example and know that the resurrection of the body will in time come to them as well. The two scenes of Job and Lazarus in MS M.1001, literally overlapping one another, are a visual illustration of the hope a medieval reader had that though loss, pain, and death must inevitably come, all Christian deaths are in the end redemptive deaths, ‘non-deaths’, promising both the reunion of body to soul and soul to God: ‘For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth. And I shall be clothed again with my skin, and in my flesh I will see my God.’97

94 Such fruitful pairings are of course not limited to these. On Job paired with Dives and Lazarus in Books of Hours, see Dagmar Eichberger, ‘Bernard van Orley’s Triptych “La Vertu de Patience” and the Office of the Dead’, Bulletin des Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts 43–44 (1994): 66–75. See also MS, M. 179 which also includes a Job image in addition to the Lazarus discussed here at fol. 145v. 95 MS M.1001, Hours, France, c. 1475, fol. 114. New York, The Morgan Library and Museum. Purchased on the Fellows Fund, 1979. 96 Job 1:8. ‘And the Lord said to him: Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a simple and upright man, and fearing God, and avoiding evil?’ 97 Office of the Dead, Matins, eighth lesson.

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Conclusions Abstract: The ‘regular’, ‘repellent’, and ‘redemptive’ death images and their corresponding conceptual modes (social death, bodily death and non-death) provide a useful articulation of reoccurring themes present in the wide variety of images found in the Office of the Dead. This articulation draws out some of the fundamental ways we understand the world and death in it: through our relationships with one another, as occupants of a mortal coil, and in relationship to God. The three concepts of death explored here are not exclusive of one another but are found with endless variety and combination. The images support a hermeneutic process each time the reader returns to the images and continues the work of imaginative interpretation. Keywords: medieval, ritual, identity, experience of death

Death is hard to understand. The word is used to describe many things: an event (a death), a post-life state of being (death), a community (the dead), and a villain with scythe in hand (Death). What is conveyed in these instances – a task that you do yourself, a state of being, a collective identity, an autonomous agent active in the world – are different facets of the complex of ideas that together comprise ‘death’. Our perceptions of these facets are subtly different (active versus passive, natural versus supernatural, solitary versus participatory, sudden versus expected, process versus event, concrete versus abstract, etc.), and how we interpret the nuance of each use of the word impacts how we respond to it. Medieval readers of the Office of the Dead engaged with the images and texts of the Office to explore these nuances, navigating through them to an understanding of death that would respond to their own situation and experience as well as to the broader devotional landscape. It is not easily done. We cannot familiarize ourselves with the realities of our own death because we cannot experience it in advance. We can only get at this knowledge sideways, drawing on analogous experiences such as the death of a loved one or engaging with representations of death, textual and image-based

Schell, S., Image and the Office of the Dead in Late Medieval Europe: Regular, Repellent, and Redemptive Death. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463722117_con

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such as those found in the Office of the Dead in Books of Hours.1 These tools give us access to deaths external to ourselves. It is through the considerable human capacity for imagination that the deaths of these ‘others’ can be brought to bear signif icantly on what it means to die ourselves. As the reader of the Off ice of the Dead imagined themselves into the images that accompanied their texts, they could temporarily inhabit those deaths. Sigmund Freud wrote in his essay ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’ that ‘in the realm of fiction we find the plurality of lives which we need. We die with the hero with whom we have identified ourselves; yet we survive him, and are ready to die again just as safely with another hero.’2 The ‘regular’, ‘repellent’, and ‘redemptive’ imageries discussed here gave the reader-viewer different stories, different genres, through which to engage with the plurality of experiences and meanings in death. As they immersed themselves through devotional looking, the reader-viewer had the opportunity to identify with the ‘hero’, to become the mourner, the absence, the corpse, or the redeemed, and to experience the coffin, the earth, or the dunghill. Each image, each fiction, presents a different death and a different way to understand it: as a social body woven into the community, as a physical body doomed to decay, and as a body that knows it dies to live again. As the ‘hero’ of these stories, imaginatively dying and surviving, readers gain new insights into the complexities of death with each devout engagement with the Office of the Dead images. The ‘regular’ death imagery engages with how death is received by and understood in the community. To some degree this is a practical death, a prosaic and bureaucratic one of reordered lives, inheritance law, and disposing of property. It is also about the relationship between the dead and bereaved within the social environment and as experienced by social creatures. The rounds of masses, obits, funerals, and Offices that were intoned and the various ways people engaged in preparing, participating, and remembering the dead offered the Christian community a familiar shape for death. These images present viewers with the rituals and structures that enfold and guide the action of both the living and the dead during the period after decease, and they allow the reader to imagine the meaning of their own social absence in a community-oriented conception of death. The presence of images of these familiar rites in the context of the Office of the Dead created a vicarious social space in which the reader could be imaginatively present or absent as they read a text that was an integral part of the shared experience of death. 1 Paul Barrett notes that the ‘data of revelation which refer to death do so obliquely’, adding to the various possibilities of what is meant by ‘death’. Paul Barrett, ‘A Theology of Death’, New Blackfriars 46, no. 536 (1965): 266–67. 2 Sigmund Freud, ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death (1915)’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. XIV (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), 291.

Conclusions 

The ‘repellent’ death images explore the experience of death through the body: as one who must die (my death), as a physical end of being (my rot), and as a time of accounting for the actions of life (my sins). They require the reader to reflect on the relationship between the spiritual health of the body and the soul and emphasize the reader’s responsibility for their own corpse, living and dead. In this way, the image of bodily death was a tool for the devout reader in pursuit of spiritual life. Images of ‘repellent’ death encouraged an embodied knowledge of death via consideration of the physical remnant of death, the corpse in its various manifestations. Unlike ‘regular’ death images, which have roots in the lived experience of countless funerals past and present, the ‘repellent’ visual tradition is self-consciously uprooted from reality. These images objectify death, making visible the immaterial and reifying the non-existent. Actual rotting corpses were regularly and quickly hidden from view. In this sense, the conceptual death that is represented in the ‘repellent’ images is necessarily shaped and sustained by images rather than lived experiences (though there were scenarios in which corpses were exhibited). Much of the rot and decay illustrated here is visionary rather than actual, and the reader can indulge in them safely within the contained environment of the manuscript page. Hidden or exposed, lively or inert, the illustrated corpses of ‘repellent’ death imagery invited the reader-viewer to see them all as a possible self. In doing so, the reader considered both the rhetorical power of the dead body in the culture of the period but also how to interpret their own dead body – as a measure of time, as an external sign of spiritual health, and as the locus of selfhood. The goal of all that healthy gazing at repellent imagery was to prepare the soul for the rigours of the afterlife. The presence of death in the medieval period was emphasized in images, sermons, and theological texts while simultaneously being denied. For a medieval Christian, there was no death, at least in the modern sense of death as obliteration or annihilation. A Christian does not die but lives on eternally, in one place or another. When medieval people considered death and deaths, it was as part of a teleological world view that emphasized endings with redemptive purpose, whether that was creation’s end or their own. The images of ‘redemptive’ death focus on this Christian truth of ‘non-death’; the soul will not be extinguished, and the body that dies will rise to live again. Body and soul will be reunited at the last judgement and (ideally) be rejoined to the community of the faithful in heaven. Neither the social nor the bodily death have any cosmic permanence in the Christian worldview. The ‘redemptive’ death images serve to reinforce the powerful conception of death as a step in the soul’s journey toward reunion with God. Nonetheless, in the average experiences of the medieval parishioner, death surely seemed permanent enough. Both Lazarus’s and Job’s stories provide concrete examples of deaths that are transitory. They illustrate the possibility of redemption

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and resurrection, and their stories model the path of the soul through death toward God. Along the way they express the human misery of loss, provide channels for acceptable mourning, and model patterns of behaviour in the face of death that the reader can emulate. The ‘redemptive’ images invite the participation of the reader-viewer by representing these biblical men not as part of the distant past but as part of the contemporary medieval present – as recognizable medieval men and families. The ‘regular’ death clearly responds to the quotidian experiences of mortality, and the ‘repellent’ death seems to offer a path through imaginative meditation on the corpse to spiritual improvement. However, it is the ‘redemptive’ death, with its images of miraculous non-deaths, that ultimately responds most keenly to the needs of the reader for reassurance in the face of the apparent ‘fullstop’ that is death. While acknowledging both the bodily and social deaths, the ‘redemptive’ deaths of Job and Lazarus also overturn them. The ‘regular’, ‘repellent’, and ‘redemptive’ death images and their corresponding conceptual modes (social death, bodily death, and non-death) provide a useful articulation of reoccurring themes present in the wide variety of images found in the Office of the Dead. It draws out some of the fundamental ways we understand the world and death in it: through our relationships with one another, as occupants of a mortal coil, and in relationship to God. This articulation provides a structure through which some of the threads in the fabric of death can be teased apart and its complexities contemplated, but of course they are ultimately all part of the same cloth. It has been functional to discuss them here as distinct by focusing on Office images that seem to emphasize a particular way of thinking about death for the purposes of a deeper exploration of these ideas. However, the images discussed in these pages contain and can be interpreted via several of these ideas at once. Sometimes this is obvious, as in an early sixteenth-century French manuscript in Châlons-en-Champagne, MS 0332 (fol. 55v), in which the Office is accompanied by five framed images that respond to these ideas.3 There is a graveside burial rite, with mourners, readers, and clergy, along with a shrouded corpse, a scattering of bones, and a lively corpse, naked with a loosely draped shroud while menacing a man and woman at the crossroads. The Châlons-en-Champagne manuscript also contains an image of Job on the dung heap. In this example these elements are framed and thus superficially appear to be separate from one another, but they are one image, one complex visual rendering of the various deaths that medieval readers knew and did not know, feared and looked forward to, here presented to the reader as a totality. Not all Office of the Dead images so clearly speak to each of the social, bodily, and non-deaths, but these ideas are there. As we have seen, all funeral images contain an inferred corpse and thus can be used to reflect on 3

MS 0332, Hours, France, early 16th century. Châlons-en-Champagne: Bibliotheque municipal.

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bodily dissolution and the loss of a physical self as much as to consider death as part of a social body. Much corpse imagery explores the social relationships between the living and the dead and, in navigating the ambivalent spaces between these states, reflects on death in the community. And for the medieval viewer, all images of death engaged with the fundamental truth of non-death, for Christian deaths were part of the redemptive process. In addition, the reader of the Office of the Dead encountered all these images, whether of regular, repellent, or redemptive death, situated in a liturgical text that carries its own messages about the nature and experience of Christian death. For the medieval reader, the viewing experience was enriched by this semantic layering. The Office of the Dead is one of the most iconographically diverse parts of the Book of Hours. The three concepts of death explored here are not mutually exclusive but are found with endless variety and combination. Nor are they the only ones. Not every remarkable or striking image has been included here, and a good many unremarkable images have been. I have not tried to present one way to understand the visual culture of the Office of the Dead, because this does not reflect the variety of connections and interactions that are possible when considering a subject of this nature. Silent and oral, solitary and communal, a warning and a comfort, a text and a performance, the text offered the reader of the Office various and dynamic ways to engage with it. Likewise, the images have no single interpretation but can be continuously resituated to reflect the purpose or mood with which the reader-viewer comes to the book. The reader returns at different times with new or different experiences or understandings and continues the work of imaginative interpretation, pouring over the same texts and the same images, looking for and finding new or greater insights. The images support and participate in this hermeneutic process. Together, the image, text, and reader create a contemplative devotional space that is both immersive and flexible. *** Death is a fundamental fact of life, perhaps the defining fact of life. Coming to terms with this fact is part of the human experience, now as it was in the past. One way that medieval men and women did this was through an imaginative engagement with images of death, both visual and textual. By using the devotional reading practices of the period and immersing themselves in these images, readers engaged with a multifaceted death which responded to lived experience, to the anxieties surrounding the knowledge of one’s own death, and to the church structures that framed the medieval encounter with death. The images are contributors to and reflections of the socially and culturally constructed idea of medieval death. The perceptual truths of medieval death were created by and in the images and literature of death in important ways.

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The introduction asserted that this book was about using imagination to understand what it meant to be a person-that-dies in the medieval world, and this book has demonstrated how images assisted readers as they wrestled with this question. However, to die was to move along the divinely mandated path toward the eternal, and any grappling with the meaning of medieval death was also a grappling with the profundity of (eternal) life. And so, this book has also been about the person-that-lives. Absences, while mourned, would also be remembered, and the decaying body, while ‘sown perishable’, would one day be ‘raised in glory’. 4 For the medieval reader and all the Christian faithful, death was the path to Life. Bibliography Barrett, Paul. ‘A Theology of Death’. New Blackfriars 46, no. 536 (1965): 266–73. Freud, Sigmund. ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death (1915)’. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey, XIV:273–303. London: The Hogarth Press, 1957.

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Saunders, O. Elfrida. English Illumination. 2 vols. Florence: Casa Editrice, 1928. Scarborough, Elizabeth. ‘Living in the Time of Christ: Margery Kempe’s “Devoute Ymaginacion”’. In Devotional Culture in Late Medieval Engand and Europe: Diverse Imaginations of Christ’s Life, edited by Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry. Turnhout: Brepols, 2014. Schell, Sarah. ‘Death and Disruption: Social Identity and Representation in the Medieval English Funeral’. In Art and Identity: Visual Culture, Politics and Religion in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, edited by Sandra Cardarelli, Emily Jane Anderson, and John Richardson, 71–96. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. Schell, Sarah. ‘Job, Music and the Dead: A Visual Expression of the Relationship between the Roles of Job in Medieval Devotion and Culture’. St Andrews Journal of Art History and Museum Studies 14 (2010): 85–94. Schmitt, Jean-Claude. Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society. Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Scott, Kathleen L. Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390–1490. A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles. London: H. Miller, 1996. Sears, Elizabeth. ‘“Reading” Images’. In Reading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object, edited by Elizabeth Sears and Thelma K. Thomas, 1–7. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Sicard, Damien. La liturgie de la mort dans l’Église latine des origines à la réforme carolingienne. Münster: Achendorff’sche Buchdruckerei, 1978. Smith, Kathryn A. Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England: Three Women and Their Books of Hours. The British Library Studies in Medieval Culture. London: British Library, 2003. Smith, Kathryn A. The Taymouth Hours: Stories and the Construction of the Self in Late Medieval England. London: British Library, 2012. Smith, Macklin. Prudentius’ Psychomachia: A Reexamination. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976. Sneyd, Charlotte Augusta, trans. A Relation, or Rather a True Account of the Island of England; with Sundry Particular of the Customs of These People, and of the Royal Revenues under King Henry the Seventh about the Year 1500. London: Camden Society, 1847. Solterer, Helen. ‘Seeing, Hearing, Tasting Woman: Medieval Senses of Reading’. Comparative Literature 46, no. 2 (1994): 129–45. Stanbury, Sarah. The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Stanford, Charlotte A. ‘The Body at the Funeral: Image and Commemoration at Notre Dame, Paris, about 1304–18’. The Art Bulletin 89 (2007): 657–73. Sterponi, Laura. ‘Reading and Meditation in the Middle Ages: Lectio Divina and Books of Hours’. Text & Talk: Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse Communication Studies 28, no. 5 (2008): 667–89.

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Stevens, Martin, and A. C. Cawley, eds. The Towneley Plays. 2 vols. Oxford: Early English Text Society by Oxford University Press, 1994. Storck, Willy F. ‘Aspects of Death in English Art and Poetry-I’. The Burlington Magazine 21, no. 113 (1912): 249–56. Sutton, Anne F., Livia Visser-Fuchs, and P. W. Hammond. The Reburial of Richard, Duke of York, 21–30 July 1476. London: The Richard III Society, 1996. Swanson, R. N. Religion and Devotion in Europe, c. 1215–c. 1515. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Symons, Thomas. ‘Monastic Observance in the Tenth Century: I. The Office of All Saints and of the Dead’. The Downside Review 50–51 (1932): 449–64, 137–52. Symons, Thomas. Regularis Concordia Anglicae Nationis Monachorum Sanctimonialiumque (The Monastic Agreement of the Monks and Nuns of the English Nation). Medieval Classics Series. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1953. Taguchi, Mayumi. ‘A Middle English Penitential Treatise on Job 10:20–22, Dimitte Me, Domine…’ Mediaeval Studies 67 (2005): 157–217. Taylor, Andrew. ‘Displaying Privacy: Margaret of York as Devotional Reader’. In Cultures of Religious Reading in the Late Middle Ages: Instruction the Soul, Feeding the Spirit, and Awakening the Passion, edited by Sabrina Corbellini, 275–96. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 25. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. Thurston, Herbert. ‘Candles’. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 3. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1908. Accessed March 18, 2023. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03246a.htm. Thurston, Herbert. ‘Paschal Candle’. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 11. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911. Accessed March 18, 2023. http://www.newadvent.org/ cathen/11515b.htm. Thurston, Herbert. ‘St Mary Magdalen ‒ Fact and Legend’. Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 23, no. 89 (1934): 110–23. Thurston, Herbert J., and Donald Attwater, eds. Butler’s Lives of the Saints. 2nd edition. 4 vols. Notre Dame: Burns and Oates, 1956. Todi, Jacopone da. The Lauds. Translated by Elizabeth Hughes and Serge Hughes. New York: Paulist Press, 1982. Tolhurst, J. B. L. The Monastic Breviary of Hyde Abbey, Winchester: Mss. Rawlinson Liturg. e. 1*, and Gough Liturg. 8, in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Volume VI: Introduction to the English Monastic Breviaries. Henry Bradshaw Society. London: Printed for the Society by Harrison and Sons, 1942. Toynbee, J. M. C. Death and Burial in the Roman World. Aspects of Greek and Roman Life. London: Thames & Hudson, 1971. Tristram, Philippa. Figures of Life and Death in Medieval English Literature. London: Elek Books Ltd., 1976. Tur-Sinai, N. H. The Book of Job: A New Commentary. Jerusalem: Kiryath Sepher Ltd., 1957.

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Zieman, Katherine. Singing the New Song: Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Zohl, Caroline. ‘A Phenomenon of Parallel Reading in the Office of the Dead’. In Mixed Metaphors: The Danse Macabre in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Sophie Oosterwijk and Stephanie Knoll, 325–60. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011.

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Page numbers set in italics refer to images. France Boulogne-sur-Mer: Bibliothèque municipal de Boulogne-sur-Mer: MS 93, Hours, England (York?), late 14th century 65 Châlons-en-Champagne: Bibliothèque municipal: MS 0332, Hours, France, early 16th century 208 Chantilly: Bibliothèque du Château (Musée Condé): MS 28 ‘Histoire extraite de la Bible et Apocalypse’, France (Paris or Bourges), c. 1415 31 n. 1 MS 139, Speculum Humanae Salvationis, Belgium, late 15th century 171 Paris: Bibliothèque Mazarine: MS 507, Hours, France (Paris), c. 1500 120, 121–22, 123 The Netherlands The Hague: Nationale bibliotheek van Nederland MS KB 71 A 23, Bible, France (Paris), c. 1320–40.: 176, 176–77 United Kingdom Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland: MS Adv. 18. 6. 5 ‘The Psalter of Eleanor de Bohun’, Psalter, England, 1382–c. 1396 73–74, 78 Edinburgh: Heritage Collections, University of Edinburgh Library: MS 39, Hours, England, c. 1420–40 78, 79, 81, 86–87, 88 London: British Library: Additional MS 16997, Hours, France (Paris), early 15th century 63 n. 21 Additional MS 25695, Hours, France, late 15th century 125, 126, 128, 129 Additional MS 35313 ‘The Hours of Joanna I of Castile’, Hours, Flanders, c. 1500 137–138 Additional MS 35314, Hours, Netherlands, late 15th/early 16th century 184, 185 Additional MS 49622 ‘The Gorleston Psalter’, Psalter, England (East Anglia), c. 1310–24 109 Additional MS 50001 ‘The Hours of Elizabeth the Queen’, Hours, England (London), c. 1425 75, 75–76 Arundel MS 83 II ‘The De Lisle Psalter’, Psalter, England (London?), c. 1308–10 133 Egerton MS 1151, Hours, England (Oxford), 1260–70 65, 101

Egerton MS 2019, Hours, France (Paris), c. 1440–50 163, 167,168, 169 Egerton MS 2781, ‘Neville of Hornby Hours’, Hours, English (London?) c. 450 63 n. 21 Egerton MS 3277 ‘Bohun Psalter-Hours’, Psalter/ Hours, England, c. 1361–73 73, 74, 75–76 Harley MS 2884, Hours, Netherlandish, 1440–60 63 n. 21 Harley MS 2934, Hours, France (Troyes), c. 1410 113, 114, 123, 128–130 Royal MS 2 A XVIII ‘The Beauchamp Hours’, Hours, England (London), c. 1430 48, 49, 50 Sloane MS 2468 ‘The Hours of the Umfray Family’, Hours, France (Paris), c. 1420 110, 111, 112 Yates Thompson MS 7, ‘The Hours of Dionora of Urbino’, Hours, Italy (Florence or Mantua), c. 1480, historiated initials added c. 1510–15 123, 124 Yates Thompson MS 13 ‘The Taymouth Hours’, Hours, England, c. 1325–40 133, 134, 135, 138–139 Yates Thompson MS 31 ‘Breviari d’Amour’, Spain (Catalonia), late 14th century 51 n. 67 Yates Thompson MS 46, Hours, France (Paris), c. 1410–20 111–112 Norwich: Norwich Castle Museum: MS 228.961, Hours, England (Cambridgeshire?), 15th century 195 n. 92 Oxford: Bodleian Library, University of Oxford: MS Auct D. 4.4. ‘The Bohun Psalter and Hours’, Psalter/Hours, England, c. 1370–80 163, 164–165, 166–167, 178, 179, 188, 193, 195 n. 92, 196, 197 MS Buchanan E. 3, Hours, France (Rouen), late 15th century 171, 172, 173 Oxford: Jesus College Library, University of Oxford: MS 29, Miscellany, England, 13th century 13–14 York: York Minster Library: MS XVI. K. 6 ‘The Pavement Hours’, Hours, England (York). C. 1420 21 n. 28, 73 n. 47 United States Baltimore: Walters Art Museum: MS W. 102 ‘The Walters Hours’, Hours, England, c. 1290–1300 65, 101–102 Boston: Boston Public Library: MS Q Med. 88, Hours, Flanders, late 15th century 144, 146, 147, 148 n. 105 Bryn Mawr: Bryn Mawr Special Collections Library, Bryn Mawr College:

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MS 21, ‘The Castle Hours’, Hours, France, late 15th century 194, 195 Cambridge, MA: Houghton Library, Harvard University: MS Richardson 34, Hours, England, c.1470 86–87, 87, 88 MS Typ 180, Hours (frag.), Italy (Venice), early 15th century 144, 145, 146, 148 n. 105 Lawrence: Kenneth Spence Research Library, University of Kansas: MS A6, Hours, France, 1440–75 111–112 Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum: MS 52, Leaf, German (Franconia), late 15th century 173 n. 30 New York: New York Public Library: MS MA 118, Hours, Flanders, 1490–1510 150–151 New York: Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries: MS BP.96, Hours, France (Paris), 1475–1500 102, 103–104, 106 New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Cloisters Collection 1969 (69.86) ‘The Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg, Duchess of Normandy’, Hours, France (Paris), before 1349 133

New York: The Morgan Library and Museum: MS M.179, Hours, France, 1480–1500 185, 186, 187, 198 n. 94 MS M.231, Hours, France (Paris?), c. 1485– 90 103 n. 7 MS M.453, Hours, French, c. 1425–30 104, 105, 106, 112 MS M.1001, Hours, France, c.1475 197, 197–198 MS M.1003, Hours, France, c. 1465 103–104, 191, 192 Philadelphia: Rare Book Department, Free Library of Philadelphia: MS Lewis E 92, Hours, France (Paris?), 1440–60 126, 127, 128–129 MS Lewis E 108, Hours, Flanders (Bruges), 1485–1500 142–143, 144, 146, 148 n. 105 MS Lewis E 120, Hours, Italy (Naples), c. 1490 144, 146 MS Lewis E 212, Hours, France, c. 1475–1500 132, 133, 138 San Marino: Huntington Library: MS HM 1346, Hours, England, early 14th century 65



General Index

Page numbers set in italics refer to images. Adam 31, 117 afterlife, the 22, 140 as eternal/life everlasting 98, 130, 146, 178, 181, 187, 196, 207, 210 preparation for 57 suffering in 51, 182–83 vision or infernal narratives of 182–83 Alan of Lynn 85 Albert the Great 160 n.5 Alcuin 38 Alice Chaucer 150 All Souls Day 44, 119 almsgiving see charitable acts Amalar of Metz 38–39, 40 n.29 Ambrose 118 n.49 Angilbert, abbot of St. Riquer 38 annunciation, the 48, 49, 50, 63 Apostolic Constitutions 35 Ars moriendi tradition 15, 17, 137, 146, 192, 193 Athanasius, On the Incarnation 31 n.2 Augustine: ‘City of God’: 31 n.2, 190 n.80 On the Care of the Dead 34, 195 and visio imaginaria 60 Bathsheba 117–18 Baudouin de Condé 131 n.75 beatific vision 119 n.55, 186–87 Benedict of Aniane 39–40 Bernard of Clairvaux 32, 190 Bible 33, 34, 196 apocrypha: Tobit 113 n.32 books of: Deuteronomy 118 n.45 Genesis 24, 31 n.2, 34 n.8, 118 n.45, 146 n.102 Isaiah 118 Job 36, 41, 63, 66, 99 n.2, 146, 158–63, 166–67, 169–71, 173–78, 198 n.96 John 180–83, 185 n.68, 188–90, 193 Letters of Paul 32 Leviticus 118 n.46 Luke 84 n.64 Mark 173 n.31, 182 n.57, 189 n.78 Matthew 34 n.8, 71 n.45, 84 n.64, 113 n.32, 173 n.31, 182 n.57, 189 n.78, 190 n.84 Psalms 35, 36, 37, 42, 44, 68, 173 n.31, 175–76 Romans 31 Samuel 118 n.45 biblical figures see individual names bodily death see death, bodily bodily decay see decay, bodily; rot body, the: as a book 149, 183–88

frailty of 108, 121, 149, 158–59, 174, 198 medieval responses to 119 as a mirror 119–26 naked 117-18 transience of 110 body and soul 135 as intertwined 119 medieval discourse on 175 reunion of 13, 98, 130, 151, 187, 188, 196, 198, 207 as separated at death 98–99, 130 theological path for 141, 150–51 Bohun family 73–74, 75, 76, 196 Boke of Curtasye 138–39 Bonaventure 61 n.12, 62 Life of Christ 190 Book of Hours: compositional structure of: Hours of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Little Office of): 21, 44, 57–58, 63 Office of the Dead 18, 21, 31, 44–45, 50, 51, 176 Penitential Psalms 176 and David 175 diverse ownership and use of 21, 46, 47, 50, 85 use of imagery in 21, 50, 181, 209 and literacy 48, 50, 59 n.3, 85 personalization of 21, 73–76, 124 popularity of 21, 44–45, 90 book ownership 46, 73–76, 85, 88, 196 Bruno of Asti 159 n.1 burial: Christian practice 33–34, 35, 36, 42, 43, 51, 57, 99, 100, 109, 119 disinterment 110, 111, 112, 148 gifts or almsgiving 72, 113, 115–16 Jewish practice 32–33 in Lazarus story 181–82, 188, 191, 192, 195 non-burial 115–17 Roman practice 33 nn.5–6, 34 n.7 social significance of 115–17 location near altar 195 visual representations of 74, 102, 103–04, 105, 106, 110, 111, 112–13, 127, 128, 167 n.21, 177, 191, 192, 208 see also cemeteries; charnel houses; grave, the Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogue on Miracles 130 Carolingian Reform 37–39 cathedrals 43–44 St Paul’s Cathedral 44 n.45 Cecily Neville, 1st Duchess of Warwick 75 cemeteries 18 Cemetery of the Innocents, Paris 131 n.77 see also burial

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charitable acts 70–72, 116, 117 almsgiving 104, 116, 119, 162 Seven Works of Mercy 51 n.67, 113 chantry chapels 17, 20 charnel houses 110–12, 142, 144, 148 Christian church: early development of 36–37 ritual structures of: as multi-sensory experience 83–89 Requiem Mass 20, 191, 192 see also funeral rites; monasteries; Office of the Dead, in Christian liturgy commemorative practices 24, 34, 38–39, 44, 51, 64, 69, 78–79, 117, 119 almsgiving 104, 116, 119, 162 devotional intensity of 110 familiar framework of 193 fasting 162 prayer 36, 39, 51, 78–79, 119, 162 contemptus mundi 124 corpse, the: and agency, loss of 129, 141, 149 attitudes toward 33–34, 116–19, 149, 207 desecration of 116–17 display of: for the elite 109 as punishment 24, 115–17 as disruptive influence 115, 117, 141 and identity 110, 112, 119, 149 as a mirror 119, 120, 121–22, 123, 124–26, 133, 135 movement and burial of 101, 102, 103, 110 as a shameful sight 117–19, 149 transmutable nature of 112 ‘wet’ versus ‘dry’: 110, 141, 148 see also corpse imagery; decay, bodily corpse imagery: absence of 58, 59, 77, 78–80, 82, 83, 97 on cadaver or transi tombs 17, 122, 124, 150 as confrontational 97, 113, 117, 118 as contemplative 112–13, 124, 126, 128, 148 didactic or rhetorical power of 13, 24, 31, 98, 99, 121–22, 129, 150 female 123, 124 physical anonymity of 99, 107, 112, 148 proliferation of 18, 98, 17–18 as reflection on own death 98–99, 109, 118, 124–26, 150–51, 207 variations of 97, 98 the exposed corpse 98, 109, 112, 113, 114, 115–17, 118–19, 120, 121–26, 123, 125, 127, 128–30, 136 the lively/living corpse 22, 24, 98, 99, 119, 130–41, 150, 185, 208; see also Three Living and Three Dead the shrouded corpse 98, 99, 102, 103, 105, 109–10, 111, 112, 113, 191, 192, 208 the skeleton 98, 99, 141, 142–43, 144, 145, 146–49, 176, 176–77 the skull 121, 124, 130, 143, 144, 146, 147, 148, 173

as visual caesura 126–30 see also corpse, the; decay, bodily crossroads 130, 136, 137–38 crucifixion 60–61, 62, 171, 173, 182 n.57 Danse Macabre 17, 167 n.21 David: lust for Bathsheba 117–18 songs of 175–76 dead, caring for the 119, 126 as a social/religious duty 51, 113, 115 see also corpse, the; corpse imagery death, bodily 17–18, 78, 157 anxiety and fear of 24, 32, 100 n.3, 133, 137, 141, 149, 180, 185, 198 conceptualization of 13, 23, 24–25 finality of 185 as identity loss 24, 98–99, 106–07, 109–13, 141, 148–49 and mortality 77, 82, 90–91, 131 n.75, 144, 148, 157, 167 physical realities of 97, 207 rhetorical imagery of 24, 149, 150, 207 ‘signs’ of 13, 107–08 see also corpse, the; decay, bodily death, concept of: as ‘bad’ or ‘good’: 137, 146; see also Ars moriendi tradition in Christian belief 14–15, 20, 22, 31, 36, 51, 99, 146, 207 in the community 15–16, 23, 57–58, 66, 67, 89, 209 as a disruptive force 99, 141 fear of 83, 99–100, 133, 135, 137, 149, 157, 180, 185 as an imagined state 16–17, 22, 25, 100, 148–49 as incomprehensible 22, 82, 187, 205–06 as lived experience 14–15, 17, 20, 58, 82–83, 162, 209 in modern times 14, 57 as multifaceted 14, 22, 25, 205, 206, 209 and one’s own death: knowledge of 14, 104, 209 preparation for 25, 76–77, 82, 99–100, 129, 137, 146, 147–49, 150, 177, 183, 207 pervasive presence of 20, 136, 146 reification of 99 scholarship on 15–19 as a social and cultural construct 13–15, 22, 209 visual culture of 17, 22–23 see also death, bodily; death, social; non-death death, social 149, 157 as absence 23, 57, 67, 77, 83, 89, 90 as a community experience 23, 24, 57–59, 62, 64, 67, 69, 71, 77, 83, 88, 91, 97, 206 conceptualization of 13, 23, 25, 57 as distinct from bodily death 68, 69, 77, 91 familiar imagery of 62–67, 90 as social isolation/separation 68, 157, 177, 198 deathbed: and early Christian ritual 35, 51

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imagery 106, 112, 191, 192, 193 and last rites 35, 102, 103, 104, 105, 191, 192 in a monastic setting 42 death-tide 99, 126, 149 heterogeneous representations of 102–05 and the journey of the body 100–01, 103, 106–07, 149 as a liminal period 100, 103, 112–13 stages of 102, 103–04, 106–07, 109, 191, 192 as visual frame of reference 126–28 decay, bodily 78, 100, 138, 148, 149, 177, 185 anxiety and fear of 24, 100, 108, 118–19, 135, 137, 140, 151 as dangerous or repellent 23, 24, 97, 108–09, 115, 135, 149 as hidden 100, 107, 126, 207 as inevitable 107, 112, 141, 185 as measure of time 99, 100, 106–07, 112, 149 medieval encounters with 108–09, 136 as return to earth 106, 129 as sin made visible 24, 98, 108–09, 117–18, 119, 121, 129, 174 slowness of 107–08, 110, 112 smell of 108, 115 as subject of pious meditation 98, 129–30, 151 visual culture of 98–99, 114 and worms 174 see also corpse, the; corpse imagery; death, bodily devotional practices see reading Duke of Berry 131 n.77 dynastic unrest 20 Edward III, funeral of 70 n.40 Edward IV 74 n.49 Elizabeth of York, queen to Henry VII 75 Etheria, pilgrim 181 Eve 31, 117 executions 116–17, 136 fall, the 31–32, 117 death as penalty for 31 Fasciculum Morum 108 Freud, Sigmund, ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’: 206 funeral imagery 58, 62, 64, 65, 74, 75, 88, 91, 101–03, 104, 105, 138 architectural settings in 64–66, 65 as creation of a devotional space 80–82, 91, 206 elements of: the bier 101, 103 candles 74, 90, 191, 192 the coffin 78, 79, 80, 82, 113, 191, 192 the hearse 74, 78 mourners 79, 80–82, 83, 86–87, 87, 90, 127, 128, 191, 192 the procession 101, 102, 103 as familiar 73, 77, 82, 88, 104, 106, 112–13, 188, 192, 206 placement of 63

regulating role of 23, 58, 76 and relationship with the reader 73–76, 77, 78–81 in time (anytime) and space (anyplace): 62–67, 73, 78 see also death, social; funerals funeral rites: in Christian tradition, development of 20, 32–44 in Jewish tradition 32–33 monastic 42–43 in Roman tradition 32–33 Ordo Defunctorum 34–37 pagan rites 32 see also funerals funerals: and almsgiving 104, 113, 115, 116, 119, 162 as aural experience 83–89 of bishops 109 and changing attitudes to the dead 33–34 as communal experience 88 emotional nature of 160 material evidence of 69–74 material trappings of 57, 59, 68–77, 116 of monarchs 68, 69, 70 n.40, 74 n.49 social function of 69–70, 77, 109, 116, 170, 206 and social identity/status 67–77, 109 and symbolism of lights 70–72 see also funeral imagery; funeral rites Gabriel 48 grave, the 102 as home in earth 106, 174 as image of hell 174 n.33 as temporary 110–11, 111, 151 grief 23, 158, 180 as liminal state 169, 170 unrestrained, as physically unhealthy 169–70 Golding, William, The Princess Bride 137 n.90 Gregory, Moralia in Job 159, 160 Gregory of Nyssa 118 n.46 heaven 32, 36, 130, 150, 177, 207 court of 63 vision of 182 hell 150–51, 174, 183, 187 Harrowing of Hell 182, 196 Henry VII 75 funeral of 69 Henry Suso, Horologium Sapientiae 137 n.89 historiated initials 48, 51, 63, 65, 65–66, 75, 123, 163, 178 Holy Land see Jerusalem Honorius of Autun 159 n.1 Hugh of St. Victor 60 Hugo de Tunstede, funeral of 69, 72 identity 73, 97 and the body 110 in community 57, 59, 64, 77, 91

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continuity of after death 188 loss of in death 24, 98–99, 106–07, 109–13, 141, 148–49 Israelites 118 Jean Michel 193 Jerusalem 63, 64, 193 Jesus Christ 62, 64, 178, 179, 196 crucifixion of 60–61, 62, 171, 173, 182 n.57 death of 34 descent into hell of 182–83 as healer 180 humanity of 189–90 and Lazarus story 178, 179, 180, 181–82, 184, 185, 186–87, 188–90, 191, 192, 195, 196 as mourner 190 passion narrative of 182 as Redeemer 157 resurrection of 33, 35, 181–82, 183, 196 salvation narrative 173, 187 and test in the wilderness 169, 196 Joan Rogers 72 Job: in biblical texts 158, 159, 161, 170, 173, 174 characterization as wealthy/high rank 193 as Christian exemplar 25, 36, 157–58, 159, 170–71, 177, 183, 198, 207–08 of patience 159, 161, 171, 173 as Christ-like 171, 173, 196 as complement to Lazarus 196, 197, 198 and David 175 and death, corporeal 163 as living dead 171–77 of his family 164, 166 and death, social 157–58, 163, 166, 167, 169, 170, 175–76, 177 in medieval texts 158, 159–63, 166, 170, 171, 188 Dimitte me, domine 161 n.9 Pety Job 161, 162, 193 Story of Holy Job 161 Testament of Job 159–60 in manuscript illustrations 195–96 Byzantine art tradition 174 and medieval setting 188, 193, 208 as a mourner 158, 169–71 and the Office of the Dead 157, 158, 160, 161, 162, 166–67, 170, 173–74, 175, 180, 183, 185, 188 popularity of 159, 161 n.9 trials of 36, 157, 160, 163, 196 bodily suffering 158–59, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169–70, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176, 176–77, 185 destruction of worldly riches 163, 164, 166, 167, 170–71 on the dunghill 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176, 176–77, 197, 198, 208 exchanges with friends 167, 168, 170, 174–75 redemption/restoration of 158, 159, 165, 170, 173, 177–78, 180–81, 198 and wider literary discourse on death 173–75

wife of 160, 166, 171, 173, 176, 176 John Baret of Bury, funeral of 70, 72, 76 John Lydgate 161 n.9 John Mirk: Instructions for Parish Priests 115 Mirk’s Festial 100–01, 106, 108, 119, 180 n.51, 193 n.87 John of Salisbury, The Metalogicon 62 n.17 Julian the Apostate 34 n.7 Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury 41–43 Lazarus 119 and the Bethany family 188–96 biblical account of 180, 187, 189 bodily resurrection/raising of 104, 149, 158, 177, 179, 180–82, 183, 184, 185, 186, 186–87, 191, 192, 193, 197, 198 body of, as book 183–88 burial of 182, 191, 192, 193, 195 characterization as wealthy/high rank 193, 194, 195, 196 as Christian exemplar 25, 157, 158, 180, 187 of faith 183, 193, 196, 198 of resurrection 193, 196, 207–08 as complement to Job 196, 197, 198 Easter celebration of 181 father of 193 imagery of 181, 183–84, 184, 185, 186, 187, 191 and medieval setting 188, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 208 manuscript illustrations of 195–96 medieval legends and literature of 180, 182, 187, 188, 192, 193 physical death of 158, 182, 185, 187, 189 as exemplary 193 popularity of 180, 181, 182 as referent to Christ 181–82, 187, 196 and Towneley Lazarus play 119, 149, 185, 187 in the Office of the Dead 157, 158, 180, 181, 183, 185, 187, 189, 190, 195 and his sisters 180, 181, 183, 188, 188-93, 195 lepers, separatio leprosorum 68 life and death 150 continuity between 186, 188, 210 boundary between 130, 133, 135, 136, 137, 157, 183, 185, 187 as natural counterparts 135, 144, 146, 148 literacy: and imagery 50, 59, 63 in Latin 47 medieval evidence of 46, 85 modern versus medieval ideas of 45–47, 59 and orality 46, 47, 85–86 types of 46–48, 50 see also readers; reading literary sources, medieval: courtesy 138–39 on death 13, 113, 130, 150, 188 devotional 16–17, 61, 98, 150

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didactic and moral 182 n.60, 108, 130, 183 fables: Renart the fox 102, 103 n.7 ‘Grateful Dead’ genre 116 n.39 homilies 141 n.98, 150, 174 n.33 infernal or vision narratives 182 language of 129 173–77 on the macabre 17–18, 115–16, 117, 118, 121, 123 n.62, 131–41, 167 n.21 Ars moriendi tradition 15, 17, 137, 146, 192, 193 plays 182 n.60 English mystery cycles 180 French passion plays 180, 193 Digby Mary Magdelene 193 Towneley Lazarus 119, 149, 185, 187 poetry 101, 106, 107–08, 131–33, 140 ‘Body and Soul’ lyrics 106 n.12, 175 chanson-de-geste 140 n.97 Ubi sunt 175 Signs of Death 175, 185–86 ‘Song of Death’ (Middle English): 13–14 see also individual authors and texts Louis the Pious, son of Charlemagne 39 Luttrell Psalter 103 n.7 martyrs: as blessed dead 34 cult of 34 n.7 macabre, the 15, 17, 113, 122, 185 see also literary sources, medieval Margaret of York 85 Margery Kempe: aurality and ‘reading’: 85–86 Book of Margery Kempe 85 Martha, sister of Lazarus 180, 181, 183, 188–92, 193, 196 Mary, sister of Lazarus 180, 183, 188–93, 195, 196 Mary Magdalene 180, 193 Digby Mary Magdelene play 193 Mary, Virgin 62 visual depictions of: annunciation, the 48, 49, 50, 63 as devotional reader 48, 49, 50 Funeral of the Virgin 103 n.7 Pietà, the 80–81 visitation 63 Master of the Munich Golden Legend 167 n.20 Meditationes vitae Christi 60–61 memento mori 15, 129–30, 141, 144–46, 147–49, 185, 187 mirror motif 119, 120, 121–23, 123, 124–26 monasteries 129 Aachen (at Inde): 39–40 commemorative traditions of 38–39, 42–43 Christ Church Canterbury 43 Cluny 42 Fulda 37–38, 40 n.29 Metz 42

Monte Cassino 37–38, 39 St. Riquer (Order of Centule): 38 monastic constitutions and law: Benedictine Rule 37–40 Lanfranc’s Constitutions 41–43 Regularis Concordia 40–41, 45 n.49 Synod of Aachen 39–40 see also Carolingian Reform mortality see death, bodily mourners 86–87, 90, 188, 208 as blessed 190 exemplars of 80–81, 157, 158, 192, 196, 208 and mourning dress 69, 70, 71 role of 81–82 see also funeral imagery; grief nativity, the 62, 63 New Testament 33, 34; see also Bible Nicholas de Margival 131 n.75 Nicholas Honey 71, 72 Nicholas Love 16, 89 Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ 60–61, 62, 66, 83–84, 189, 190 non-death 157–98, 208 conceptualization of 13, 23, 24–25 as continued life of the soul 24, 25, 98, 186, 207 see also Job; Lazarus; redemption, Christian belief in; resurrection, Christian belief in; salvation Odo of Cluny 159 n.1 Odysseus 159 n.2 Office of the Dead, in Christian liturgy 20, 51, 58, 64, 84, 88–89, 112, 122, 128, 146 Antiphons 37 Dirige 20, 45, 63, 160 n.7, 162 Lauds 41, 45 Matins 41, 44, 45, 137, 146, 158, 160 n.7, 161, 167, 169, 173, 174, 177, 189, 198 origins and development of 20–21, 31, 32 and Carolingian reform 37–40 as an early Christian rite 32, 38 in monastic context 34–44 and Roman Ordo Defunctorum 34–37 in secular community 43–50, 51 Placebo 20, 45, 162 Psalms and Psalter 37, 42 variations of 41, 44, 169 n.24 Vespers 41, 45 Office of the Dead, in medieval society: accessibility of 21, 50, 89 communal nature of 86–87 in devotional books 18 n.15, 44–51 emotional context of 162–63 familiarity with 20–22, 47, 50, 89, 90, 140, 161, 175 flexibility in form and use of 2–3 function of 51, 57–58, 59, 169 as a ‘mirror’: 122–24

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multi-sensory experience of 83–89, 90, 91, 209 scholarship on 19, 38–39 visual imagery of 50, 61 and diverse conceptualizations of death 13, 14, 19, 23, 205, 208–09 familiarity of 63–64, 66, 90, 104, 106, 126 importance of 17, 58–59, 205–06, 210 as sensorially rich 84, 88, 91 unique quality of 63–64 in wider literary discourse on death 173–75 see also Book of Hours Old Testament 34, 196; see also Bible optics, medieval ideas on 60–61 oral culture see literacy penal practice, medieval 116–17 Peter of Limoges, De Oculo Morali 60, 61 Peter the Venerable, De miraculis 130 Petronax, abbot of Monte Cassino 37 n.20 Philip Repingdon, bishop of Lincoln 85 physical death see death, bodily Pierre des Gros 84, 89 Pietà, the 80–81 pilgrimage 180, 181 of the mind 187 Pippin, son of Charlemagne 38 plague 20 Prik of Conscience 182–83 Prudentius, Psychomachia 159–60 readers: aristocratic 73–76 female 48–50, 85–86 images of 86–87, 87 types and abilities of 47–48, 50 see also literacy: reading reading 20, 59–60, 90 and aurality (reading aloud): 84, 85–86, 88–89 in church 84–85, 89 as a communal commemorative practice 24, 59, 64, 67, 81, 88–90, 190 and contemplation of death 13, 15, 24, 25, 82–83, 90, 106–07, 112, 121, 135, 146, 198, 205, 208 as devotional practice 16, 45–50, 80–81, 84, 91, 135, 146–47, 206, 209 exemplars of 48–50 lectio divina 48, 50, 91 and images, importance of 16, 17, 22–24, 47, 50, 58–59, 86 in manipulating narrative 104 for spiritual growth or salvation 60, 138, 149, 150–51, 208 as imaginative practice 22–23, 57, 58–62, 64, 66–67, 78–82, 104, 112, 122–23, 128, 135, 148–49, 158, 187, 206, 209 visio imaginaria 60–62, 67 medieval theological discussions of 60

and mimetic engagement 80–83, 128, 135, 169, 170, 173, 206 as a social interaction 85–86, 89 as a somatic activity 16–17, 59–62, 64, 68, 88, 90–91 see also literacy; readers redemption, Christian belief in 13, 157, 158, 173, 177, 178, 185, 207, 209 redemptive death see non-death regular death see death, social Reichenau, abbot of 40 repellent death see death, bodily resurrection, Christian belief in 157, 161, 181, 183, 196 of the body 24–25, 160 hope of 180, 198 of Jesus 33 see also Lazarus; non-death Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel 74 Richard Rolle, Postillae super novem lectiones 161 n.9 rot 97, 100; see also decay, bodily Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Emile 100 n.3 saints 21, 117 death of 32 uncorrupted bodies of 108 n.19 salvation 20, 91, 98, 109, 107, 117, 128, 187 Christian promise of 157, 181 as a growing concern of the church 38 and soteriological time 140 and the soul’s agency 99 suffering in the narrative of 173, 198 see also non-death Sarah, death of 34 Satan 159, 163–64, 166, 171, 178 shame, spiritual value of 118 sin: and damnation 20 death or violence as punishment for 20, 183 hierarchy of 183 as inherent in human nature 117 and the naked body 117–18 and purgatory 20, 51 and urgency for repentance 99 see also fall, the Sir Amadace 115–16, 117, 118 skeletons see corpse imagery social death see death, social social identity 57, 58, 67–77 social status 33 and decorum 138–39 as fragile 157 soul, the 91 agency of 99 in heaven or paradise 187 preparation of 129–30 see also afterlife, the; body and soul Speculum peccatoris 85, 86

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Speculum Sacerdotale 19 St Patrick’s Purgatory 182 Taddeo Alderotti 169–70 Testament of Abraham 36 time 97, 98 and decay 106–07 liturgical 67, 140 and repentance 99 and symbolic atemporality 128 see also death-tide Third Lateran Council of 1179 68 Thomas Aquinas: Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima 16 on Job 160 n.5 Summa Theologica 113 n.32, 118 and visio imaginaria 60 Three Living and Three Dead 17, 22, 121, 123 n.62, 131–41 ‘chase’ form of 132, 133, 136–38, 139, 140 in devotional books and the Office of the Dead 131, 135–36, 137, 138, 140 fluidity of time in 139–40, 141 ‘mirror’ form of 121, 133, 134, 135–37, 139–40 popularity and familiarity of 131, 140 as satirical 138–39 story of 131 n.75 theme of disruption in 98, 136, 139, 140–41 as warning (I am what you will be): 124, 131 n.75, 135–36, 137, 140

tombs 146, 179 brasses 17, 124, 160 n.7, 178 cadaver or transi 17, 122, 124, 150 effigies 178 and epitaphs 160 and sum quod eris 124 Towneley Lazarus play 119, 149, 185, 187 Le Traité de bien vivre et de bien mourir 182 n.60 undead: as dangerous 130 n.73, 133 see also Lazarus Vercelli homilies 174 n.33 vigils 23, 37, 40, 43, 115 visio imaginaria 60, 62 Visio Lazari 182–83 Vision of Tundale 182 Walter Percehay, Lord of Ryton Manor, funeral of 69–70, 72 war 20 William of St. Thierry 60 wills 69–73, 76 women: anchorites 68, 129 readers 48–50, 85–86 in Lazarus story 188–96 in medieval Job lore 160

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Image and the Office of the Dead in Late Medieval Europe explores the Office of the Dead as a site of interaction between text, image, and experience in the culture of commemoration that thrived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Office of the Dead was a familiar liturgical ritual, and its perceived importance and utility are evident in its regular inclusion in devotional compilations, which crossed the boundaries between lay and religious readers. The Office was present in all medieval deaths: as a focus for private contemplation, a site of public performance, a reassuring ritual, and a voice for the bereaved. Examining the images at the Office of the Dead and related written, visual, and material evidence, this book explores the relationship of these images to the text in which they are embedded and to the broader experiences of and aspirations for death. Sarah Schell is Lecturer in Art History at American University of Beirut. She received her PhD in Art History at the University of St Andrews (Scotland) and has held research and teaching positions in Canada, the UAE, Lebanon, and the United States.

ISBN: 978-94-6372-211-7

AUP. nl 9 789463 722117