Death in Medieval Europe

Death Scripted and Death Choreographed

Joelle Rollo-Koster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138802124
• eBook ISBN: 9781315466835
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Death in Medieval Europe: Death Scripted and Death Choreographed explores new cultural research into death and funeral practices in medieval Europe and demonstrates the important relationship between death and the world of the living in the Middle Ages.

Across ten chapters, the articles in this volume survey the cultural effects of death. This volume explores overarching topics such as burials, commemorations, revenants, mourning practices and funerals, capital punishment, suspiscious death, and death registrations using case studies from across Europe including England, Iceland, and Spain. Together these chapters discuss how death was ritualised and choreographed, but also how it was expressed in writing throughout various documentary sources including wills and death registries. In each instance, records are analysed through a cultural framework to better understand the importance of the authors of death and their audience.

Drawing together and building upon the latest scholarship, this book is essential reading for all students and academics of death in the medieval period.

1

Writing and commemoration in Anglo-Saxon England

Jill Hamilton Clements

In his influential work on Western views of death and dying, The Hour of Our Death (1981), Philippe Ariès argues that the early Middle Ages witnessed the near-complete anonymity of burial owing to the lack of both readers and skilled engravers.¹ He contends that, as a result, there was a loss of the sense of self that was rediscovered only after the eleventh century through a revival of epitaphs and portraiture of the dead. These statements overgeneralize such trends, however, since tomb inscriptions, epitaphs, and portraiture – though rare by comparison with the later Middle Ages – did not disappear from early medieval Europe. The use of writing to commemorate the dead is apparent from evidence on both stone and parchment, from gravestone inscriptions to memorial books. This chapter traces the form and function of Anglo-Saxon commemorative texts, demonstrating how the perceived permanence of writing was exploited by Anglo-Saxon authors as a mechanism of remembrance of the dead by present and future readers.

For the Anglo-Saxon religious and elite – like their European neighbors – the use of writing to remember the dead was one of many uses for written texts following their conversion to Christianity, and the concern for the fate of the soul after death was the driving force behind this commemorative use of writing. The Anglo-Saxons recorded their dead in a number of genres: confraternity lists; libri vitae (“books of life” meant to emulate the celestial book opened by Christ at Judgment in which the names of the saved are inscribed); obits and necrologies, which record death dates; inscriptions on stone markers and other monuments; epitaphs on gravestones and copied in manuscripts; relic tags and lists of relics; and – for the exceptional and saintly – written narratives of the life and death of the deceased that express their special qualities. These sources provide the most immediate evidence of the convergence of writing and death in Anglo-Saxon England, inscribing the dead into memory both literally and figuratively. In addition to other functions, including marking the location of the body, labeling the body part of a saint, or recording the story of a remarkable death, these written objects enabled the living to remember the dead in prayer. Posthumous prayers officially began at the individual’s funeral and continued at designated intervals after the date of death, depending on that individual’s position and any provisions – such as celebrations on the anniversary of death – requested in exchange for bequests to the church.² In essence, having participated in the liturgy as part of the laity or clerical order during life, the dead continued to participate, since “Even after death the faithful kept up their roles in the liturgical assembly, through the efforts of the living on their behalf.”³ One’s inclusion in the liturgy often meant having one’s name recorded in – and perhaps also read aloud from – a memorial list or book, which would have been placed on the altar during the celebration of Mass. The dead might also participate metonymically in services carried out at the church through the inscription of their names on the donated objects that were used during Mass, including the church building itself – a practice that remains visible on the surviving Anglo-Saxon dedication stones and plates.⁴

With issues of permanence and transience deeply imbedded in the Anglo-Saxon literary aesthetic, the interest in writing’s ability to preserve the names and lives of those no longer present had particular ramifications for the Anglo-Saxon commemoration of the dead. The name is treated as a manifestation of personhood: in life, the name signifies the embodied person; in death, the physical, inscribed object replaces the body, as the living now interact with this inscribed object, bringing the individual to mind. In most cases the dead (while still living) did not write their own names, which were instead inscribed by professional carvers or scribes, but the inscription of their identity becomes a type of bodily presence once the physical body inevitably disappears; as Laura Kendrick remarks, “Although writing is a way of controlling one’s own physical disappearance, it also denies that disappearance by substituting for the body the continuity of the line in space, the line imagined as the trace of the body, the body’s presence implicit in the linear trace.”⁵ The perdurability of writing, which imitates permanence in its ability to “speak” for the absent speaker, allows it to be invested with the words and identities of the deceased, giving the dead a textual presence where they can no longer maintain a bodily one. Since these memorial inscriptions were meant to invoke remembrance in their readers for the purpose of praying for the deceased – with some inscriptions using formulas that directly appeal for prayer for the named dead, such as “pray for the soul of N.” – the inscribed name embodies the dead in memory as a tangible, legible object whose interaction with the living directly affects the deceased’s salvation; the individual’s fate is irrevocably tied to the text. So although writing the dead is in a sense pragmatic, since keeping a record of the dead for their recollection in prayer has a practical function, these inscriptions are more than simply aides-mémoire. They are also highly symbolic, serving as an earthly imitation of the divine writing that is a metaphor for the individual’s salvation.

Written in heaven: the model for writing the dead

In medieval Christian teaching, the dominant metaphor for attaining eternal life was inscription – being written into the liber vitae (“book of life”) that Christ will open at Judgment. The basis for this metaphor is found in scripture, as John the Apostle writes about his vision of the Last Judgment in Revelation, “I saw the dead, great and small, standing in the presence of the throne, and the books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged by those things which were written in the books, according to their works” (Rev. 20:12).⁶ These books record all of one’s deeds, and the consequences for not being written in Christ’s liber vitae are severe: “whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the pool of fire” (Rev. 20:15). By the same token, one of the metaphors for eternal damnation was erasure – being forgotten not only by posterity, but also by God. The association of damnation with being unknown to God is found in Christ’s discussion of the Last Judgment in the Gospel of Matthew: many will cry out to Christ and profess His name on that day, but Christ will respond, “I never knew you: depart from me, you that work iniquity” (Matt. 7:23). This equation of erasure of identity and remembrance is also found in the Psalmist’s prayers against his persecutors: “May his posterity be cut off; in one generation may his name be blotted out. May the iniquity of his fathers be remembered in the sight of the Lord: and let not the sin of his mother be blotted out” (Ps. 108:13–14).⁷ In this way, writing and erasing become metaphors for the work of memory and human fate; to be written is to be remembered by God.

The figuring of salvation as inscription – being “marked” among the elect – is exploited across the corpus of surviving texts from Anglo-Saxon England, from metaphors of salvific writing in both verse and prose to the material iterations of such writing in Anglo-Saxon commemorative texts and funerary inscriptions. Having one’s name inscribed on the pages of a memorial book – or other commemorative objects that imitate Christ’s celestial liber vitae – was to anticipate one’s salvation; the actual written text was an image of one’s hope for remembrance and wholeness of identity within the community of the saved in heaven. In other words, to be written among the saved on earth was to anticipate being fully present and counted among the saved at Judgment.

The idea of the mind as an inscribable surface and remembrance as inscription is found in the Anglo-Saxons’ use of the metaphor of writing to illustrate salvation. Drawing on the description of salvation in the Gospels as having one’s name “written in heaven,” which is found frequently in early Christian homilies and commentaries, Anglo-Saxon authors often manipulate or expand this metaphor to give emphasis to the inscription as a correlative for the memory. The salvation of the elect – that is, after death and at Judgment – is figured as an inscription that embodies their identity not simply “in heaven,” but within the memory. This manipulation of the metaphor of being “written in heaven” appears, for example, in Homily V of the Vercelli Book. The homilist sets out his discussion of the Nativity with the miracles at Christ’s birth and the nature of man’s salvation. He states,

The gospel said that earth was written when Christ was born. In that it was betokened that he came in human form, he who intended to write the names of his chosen ones in the eternal memory of the blessed life, as he himself ordered and so said, “Rejoice and celebrate because your names are written in heaven.”⁸

Expressing the written nature of salvation, the homilist here makes a significant adaptation to both his source in this passage, a homily by Gregory the Great, and the scriptural reference he includes here, which blends Matthew 5:12 and Luke 10:20.⁹ While this passage of Gregory’s homily describes Christ as the one “who would write (or ‘enroll’) his elect in eternity” and both Matthew and Luke have the names of the chosen written “in heaven,” the Vercelli homilist changes what exactly is being inscribed.¹⁰ Rather than the writing of the elect in heaven or eternity, he says they were written “in the eternal memory,” suggesting that the Anglo-Saxon homilist viewed the memory (gemynd) of God as an inscribable surface on which the saved are written. Placed in league with the concepts of heaven and eternity, the memory in Homily V is likewise figured as permanent, securing the chosen in the text of memory. In this regard, gemynd has the more concrete sense of “memorial” or “record,” figuring remembrance in heaven as a tangible, inscribed object.¹¹ The writing is in effect an “eternal memorial” of the elect, whose remembrance is ensured through their names’ inscription on this surface. Like the Anglo-Saxon memorials and gravestones discussed below, inscribing the names of the dead is figured as equivalent to remembrance, which, although temporary on earthly surfaces, is made permanent in heaven.

Celestial writing that prefigures the salvation of the elect is also explicitly treated in Vercelli Homily X, which uses the concepts of writing and erasure as metaphors for the fate of humanity. The section on the Incarnation and promise of salvation (lines 9 to 54), which appears to be an original composition and has no known source in either Latin or Old English, includes an innovative description of salvation in terms of written rights:

Before this we were made orphans, when we were forbidden the heavenly kingdom and we were erased from the powerful original charter, in which we were written in heaven. We were now thereafter marked through the true Creator and through the living God and through the begotten Son, our Lord, for the joy of paradise.¹²

Couched in the language of both writing and “being written,” salvation is here expressed “in the social practices of inheritance and land tenure,” all of which circulate around the notion of a written, celestial document.¹³ The homilist explains the failure of humanity to uphold its first covenant with God, described as an “original charter” (frumgewrit) into which mankind was written; as a result, mankind was “erased” (adilgode) from this divine charter, leaving all of humanity orphans bereft of the inheritance of heaven.¹⁴ The homilist thus explains the salvation offered through the birth of Christ as the opportunity for humanity’s “re-inscription”: through Christ, mankind is now “marked” (amearcode) for paradise and the heavenly inheritance restored. This notion of “documenting” one’s salvation is contained not merely by the image of the foundational charter and thus the writing of the elect, but the writing on the elect: the homilist conceives of salvation at once as a celestial inscription on this heavenly document and as a written mark borne by the saved. Stating that “We were now thereafter marked” (amearcode), the homilist suggests that the elect were previously “written in heaven,” but are now themselves inscribed. This “mark” perhaps refers to the baptismal sphragis (“seal”) – the sign of the cross received by the Christian following baptism that figuratively seals the individual for heaven¹⁵ – but here the emphasis is on the relationship between the inscription and the inscribed. The homilist counters the erasure from the divine charter with the visible marking of the saved, who not only are written into heaven by Christ, but embody their salvation through bearing it as an inscribed, legible mark that signifies their identity among the elect. The celestial record of the saved is thus given a direct association with the individual body and the preservation of identity, even after death; lik...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Writing and commemoration in Anglo-Saxon England
• 2. From powerful agents to subordinate objects? The restless dead in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Iceland
• 3. Animated corpses and bodies with power in the scholastic age
• 4. Women, dance, death, and lament in medieval Spain and the Mediterranean: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim examples
• 5. Wills and testaments
• 6. Spectacular death: capital punishment in medieval English towns
• 7. Ghostly knights: kings’ funerals in fourteenth-century Europe and the emergence of an international style
• 8. Death of clergymen: popes and cardinals’ death rituals
• 9. A dead zone in the historiography of death in the Middle Ages: the sentiment of suspicious death
• 10. Registering deaths and causes of death in late medieval Milan
• Index