Memory and Medieval Tomb

Elizabeth Valdez Del Alamo, Carol Stamatis Pendergast

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138722828
• eBook ISBN: 9781351758031
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2000: Reverent memorial for the dead was the inspiration for the production of a significant category of artworks during the Middle Ages - artworks aimed as much at the laity as at the clergy, and intended to maintain, symbolically, the presence of the dead. Memoria, the term that describes the formal, liturgical memory of the dead, also includes artworks intended to house and honour the deceased. This book explores the ways in which medieval Christians sought to memorialize the deceased: with tombs, cenotaphs, altars and other furnishings connected to a real or symbolic burial site. A dozen essays analyze strategies for commemoration from the 4th to the 15th century: the means by which human memory could be activated or manipulated through the interaction between monuments, their setting, and the visitor. Building upon from the growing body of literature on memory in the Middle Ages, the collection focuses on the tomb monument and its context as a complex to define what is to be remembered, to fix memory, and to facilitate recollection. Remembering depended upon the emotionally charged interaction between the visitor, the funerary monument, strategically placed images or inscriptions, the liturgy and its participants. Commemorative artworks may consolidate social bonds as well as individual memory, as put forth in this volume. Parallels are drawn between mnemonic devices utilized in the Middle Ages, the design of monuments and contemporary scientific research in cognitive neuropsychology. The papers were originally presented at the 1994 meetings of the College Art Association and the International Congresses of Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, and the University of Leeds, England, in 1995.

I

The tomb: between the living and the dead

1

Souvenir, synaesthesia, and the sepulcrum Domini: sensory stimuli as memory stratagems¹

Stephen Lamia

I dedicate this article to the memory of my thesis advisor, G. S. Vickers.

The tomb of Christ was indisputably central to the faith and popular imagination of Western medieval culture. Its site bore witness to an article of dogma – the mystery of the Resurrection. By nature of this very fact, it was one of the most important relics of Christianity and, hence, of paramount interest to pilgrims who kept alive its memory through visitation and souvenir – one an action, the other a memento. Both embraced sensory dimensions – the first through direct visual and physical experience, the second through mental recollection triggered by holding or gazing at the keepsake. The associative encounter between souvenir and beholder itself engendered a vicarious, symbolic visitation to the holy site. Undoubtedly, an even more vivid reminiscence would be evoked if the image on the souvenir was based on the actual appearance of the shrine in Jerusalem. Thus, imagery designed to recall a past experience compounded with synaesthetic activities that occurred at the site of the sepulcrum Domini – emotional, visual, aural, olfactory, and tactile – might very well have imprinted the pilgrim with potent mnemonic codes that were retained for a long time.²

Already in the fourth century the first descriptions of the Lord’s sepulchre appeared in the chronicles of pious travelers. For example, the experiences of a wealthy Roman matron named Paula, who undertook a pilgrimage to the Holy Land c.384–92, were recorded by St Jerome in vivid, sensory-rich prose:

Upon entering the sepulchre of the Resurrection, she kissed the stone which the angel moved from the door of the tomb, and with faithful mouth kissed the very place on which the body of the Lord has lain as one who thirsts drinks long-desired waters.³

Coeval with the pilgrimage of the Holy Paula, Egeria, a Galician nun, kept a diary of her journey to Jerusalem. It is one of the most comprehensive of allEarly Christian accounts describing not only the numerous building sites she visited, but also the liturgies she attended while there.⁴ In one instance, Egeria observed the rituals of Easter Sunday, the Feast of the Resurrection, in the rotunda of the Anastasis itself:

At four o’clock they have … Lucernare.

All the people congregate … in the Anastasis,

and lamps and candles are all lit …

The fire is not from outside, but

from the cave – inside the screen –

where a lamp is always burning.⁵

In each of these excerpts the recorded pilgrimage is associated respectively with emotional or temporal experiences – mnemonic elements which induce recollection. For Paula, her action is tactile, which prompts the mental image of the dead Christ outstretched on the tomb slab. For Egeria, the processing of information is largely visual. Her account describes meticulously the architectural setting for the Easter liturgy, thereby reinforcing the memory of her visit through detailed visualization.⁶ In fact, Egeria’s writings conform, in some measure, to the image displayed on a number of small leaden flasks manufactured in Jerusalem for pilgrims – the lattice-work screen which designated the entrance to the cave of the Holy Sepulchre in the rotunda of the Anastasis. Souvenirs such as this are most certainly memory stratagems since they function as associative keepsakes of the site visited. These vials, dated to the second half of the sixth century, contained holy oil siphoned from the lamps which burned in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.⁷ They were considered brandea – relics sanctified by contact with a holy site or with the remains of a saint – and worn around the neck for prophylactic purposes. Pilgrims like Egeria might recall their own experience of the dramatic Lucernare ritual complete with its flickering lamps and candles in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem through holding and looking at these objects. Moreover, most of these ampullae incorporate other visual devices that are also mnemonic in nature, namely, the depiction on the same circular field of the Crucifixion and Resurrection – the latter metaphorically represented by the Visit of the Holy Women to the Tomb of Christ. In this way, they evoke two fundamental events in Christian history and two principal loca sancta situated near each other in the Holy Land. That an active market for mementos of the sepulcrum Domini was in existence during the Middle Ages is proven not only by the many ampullae preserved at Monza and Bobbio, but also by quinquets, small lamps shaped like miniature aediculae or rotundas which actually burned the oil brought back from the lamps in the Holy Sepulchre.⁸

Despite the existence of a graphic, accurate representation of the tomb of Christ, western European images dating from the Early Christian period followed a radically different archetype, which responded to a different psychological need, that of familiarity. The artists of the early Middle Ages in the Latin West disregarded the literary evidence of both pilgrims’ chronicles and biblical descriptions of the tomb of Christ, preferring to rely, instead, on sepulchral evidence with which they were most familiar – indigenous funerary structures and conventional burial containers.⁹ They visualized Christ’s tomb as a two-storied edifice whose origins lay in the funerary monuments of Late Antiquity; an ivory plaque of c.400 (now in Munich), carved with scenes of the Visit of the Holy Women and the Ascension, demonstrates this alternative.¹⁰ The image prevailed with minor modification well into the twelfth century. This tendency to invest the sepulcrum Domini with a predictable, identifiable form fulfilled for the viewer a tangible impression of verisimilitude, though in reality, the appearance was fundamentally different from what we know of the tomb’s actual form.

Around the ninth and tenth centuries, the image of a coffin for Christ’s sepulchre began to emerge. The miniature of the Deposition and Entombment from the Codex Egberti of the late tenth century is perhaps the most celebrated of these Early Medieval examples.¹¹ Once the sarcophagus as paradigmatic image of the sepulcrum Domini appeared with a pronounced degree of regularity in the visual arts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, it began to receive embellishment of a decorative sort: lozenges, strigils, arcuations, floral patterns, and other motifs.¹²

The dynamic of memory is manifested in yet a different way in a third type of image for Christ’s tomb, one which parallels certain practices of the Christian cult of saints. Although it, too, is a sarcophagus, its long side, visible to the spectator, contains three circular forms aligned on an even horizontal axis. In order to explain this rather curious alteration in the iconography of the tomb of Christ – and one which appeared quite spontaneously in western Europe toward the middle of the twelfth century – it will first be necessary to return to Jerusalem, to the locus sanctus of the Entombment and Resurrection, and to information found in contemporary pilgrims’ chronicles.

During the years 1106–7, an abbot from the fringes of Eastern Orthodoxy journeyed to the Holy Land and conscientiously documented a great deal of useful and interesting items concerning the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and its famous tomb.¹³ This pilgrim, known simply as Daniel, came from an undetermined monastery in present-day Russia and, among other data, recorded this detail:

When one has entered the grotto (of the Holy Sepulchre) … one sees on the right a sort of bench, cut in the rock of the cavern, upon which the body of Our Lord, Jesus Christ, was laid; it is now covered by marble slabs. This sacred rock, which all Christians kiss, can be seen through three round openings on one side.¹⁴

Later in the century, c.1172, a German priest by the name of Theoderich, visited the same site and left this description:

No one can enter the mouth of the sepulchre itself except by crawling upon one’s knees, and (then) … one finds that most wished-for treasure – I mean the sepulchre in which our most gracious Lord Jesus Christ lay for three days – which is wondrously adorned with white marble, gold, and precious stones. In the side it has three holes, through which pilgrims give their long-wished-for kisses to the very stone on which their Lord lay.¹⁵

Based on the information found in these two twelfth-century accounts, the innovative image for the sepulcrum Domini may now be understood as an exact reflection of the shrine’s disposition in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre during that time. A marble revetment, or outer casing, covered the tomb slab almost entirely except for three apertures large enough for thrusting a head or hand in order to gain visible and tactile access to the relic inside. Thus, upon arriving at the locus sanctus, the pilgrims knelt down to enter the grotto which contained the cenotaph; and to fulfill their ardent desire for proximity, they poked their heads or their hands through one of the three openings enclosing it to kiss or touch the sacred slab. This arrangement and motion thereby afforded them visual and tangible proof of the existence of the sepulcrum and provided them with an outlet for emotional expression through the act of kissing or touching the relic. Both of these sensory activities must have stamped the pilgrims’ memory with an unforgettable moment of spiritual ecstasy attained through synaesthetic experience.

The visual documentation which corresponds identically with these descriptions is manifested in sculpted form in several regions of western Europe. From the Ile-de-France the new image may be seen on two capitals which run along the frieze on the west façade of Chartres Cathedral (Fig. 1.1).¹⁶ These carvings, dated 1145–55, display on the one hand, the conflated episodes of the Anointing and Entombment of Christ and, on the other, the Visit of the Holy Women to the Sepulchre. This latter biblical narrative is the one more frequently associated with representations of the tomb of Christ; and at the church of Notre-Dame, Etampes, we find in a sculpted capital on the south portal the identical scene including the identical pierced sepulchre (Fig. 1.2).¹⁷ What is significant is that this new imagery is shared b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• The editors
• List of contributors
• List of figures
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I The tomb: between the living and the dead
• II Shaping communal memory
• Index