A Companion to Death, Burial, and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early

Modern Europe, c.1300–​1700

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 Brill’s Companions to the
Christian Tradition
A Series of Handbooks and Reference Works on the
Intellectual and Religious Life of Europe, 500–​1 800

Edited by

Christopher M. Bellitto (Kean University)

volume 94

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/​bcct

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A Companion to Death, Burial,
and Remembrance in Late
Medieval and Early Modern
Europe, c.1300–​1700

Edited by

Philip Booth and Elizabeth Tingle

LEIDEN | BOSTON

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Cover illustration: Pietà, Sizun parish church, Finistère, France. This Pietà was originally part of an
early modern calvary in Kersanton granite, located in the parish close of Saint-​Suliau church, Sizun.
© Martin Tingle.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Booth, Philip, 1986- editor. | Tingle, Elizabeth C., editor.

Title: A companion to death, burial, and remembrance in late Medieval and early
modern Europe, c.1300-1700 / edited by Philip Booth and Elizabeth Tingle.
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2021] | Series: Brill’s companions to the
Christian tradition, 1871-6377 ; volume 94 | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020037559 | ISBN 9789004361232 (hardback) |
ISBN 9789004443433 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Death–Religious aspects–Christianity. | Memorialization–Europe. |
Mourning customs–Europe.
Classification: LCC BT825 .C655 2021 | DDC 236/.1–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037559

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/​brill-​typeface

issn 1871-​6 377

isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​3 6123-​2 (hardback)
isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​4 4343-​3 (e-​book)

Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi,
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Contents

Acknowledgements ix
List of Figures x
Abbreviations xiii
Notes on Contributors xiv

Introduction: Dying, Death, and Commemoration, 1350–​1700 1

Philip Booth and Elizabeth Tingle

part 1
Dying, Death, Burial and the Afterlife

1 Changing Western European Visions of Christian Afterlives, 1350–​1700:

Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory 33
Elizabeth Tingle

2 Preparations for a Christian Death: The Later Middle Ages 72

Stephen Bates

3 Deathbed and Burial Rituals in Late Medieval Catholic Europe 106

Madeleine Gray

4 “Do This in Remembrance of Me”: Offerings, Identity, and Bills in the

Medieval English Royal Funeral 132
Anna M. Duch

5 The Reformation of Burial in the Protestant Churches 156

Gordon D. Raeburn

6 The Counter Reformation and Preparations for Death in the European

Roman Catholic Church, 1550–​1700 175
Elizabeth Tingle

7 Dying, Death and Burial in the Christian Orthodox Tradition: Byzantium

and the Greek Churches, ca. 1300–​1700 199
Zachary Chitwood

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vi Contents

8 Death, Burial and Remembrance: The Christian Orthodox Tradition in

the East of Europe 225
Ludwig Steindorff

part 2
Cultural and Emotional Responses to Loss: Grief and
Commemoration

9 Body, Liturgy, and Tomb Monuments in the Later Middle Ages 251
Robert Marcoux

10 Images of Death in Art and Literature in Late Medieval and Early

Modern Europe (1300–​1700) 272
Christina Welch

11 Funeral Sermons and the Reformation: The British Isles and Germany

Part i . Funeral Sermons over Time: From Catholic to Protestant in the

British Isles 300
Jacqueline Eales

Part ii. Protestant Funeral Sermons in Early-​Modern Germany 319

Ruth Atherton

12 Dramatizing and Celebrating Death in the Early-​Modern

Visual Arts: The Fortunes of the Post-​Tridentine Iconography of
Martyrdom 339
Ralph Dekoninck

13 The Motion of Another’s Death: Grief and Mourning 368

Christopher Ocker

14 Relics and Saints: Commemoration and Memorialization of the

Holy Dead 393
Freddy C. Domínguez

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Contents vii

15 The Undead: Ghosts and Revenants 418

Polina Ignatova

Bibliography 439
Index 500

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Acknowledgements

The authors and editors of this volume owe many debts of thanks. We would
like to thank the staff of all the libraries and archives listed in our footnotes, for
works of scholarship are not possible without their assistance. We would also
like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers of the volume for their perceptive
and helpful comments. Thanks are also due to Brill and in particularly to Chris-
topher Bellitto as series editor.
The volume was completed during the global pandemic of covid-​19. Librar-
ies, archives and universities were closed, and scholars had to adjust to new
ways of working. It seems fitting that a volume on death and remembrance
should be finished when these were at the forefront of society’s discussions
about the future. For this reason, we would like to dedicate the volume to the
care workers who saved many lives and to those whose lives were lost to the
Coronavirus pandemic of 2020.

Philip Booth and Elizabeth Tingle

June 2020

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List of Figures

2.1 The weighing of souls, with the Virgin Mary intervening, mid-​14th century, St
Botolph, Slapton, Northamptonshire. Logically the Virgin does not practice the
rosary, so the beads used in her intervention here reflect the lifetime pieties of
the devotee in preparation for judgement. © Stephen Bates 82
2.2 The three living and the three dead, 15th century, St Giles, Packwood,
Warwickshire. The figures are unusually positioned here on either side of the
chancel arch, making them a central feature of the painted scheme of the
church and (probably) associating them with a scene of the Last Judgement.
© Stephen Bates 84
2.3 The cadaver monument to Bishop Richard Foxe (d. 1528), Winchester
Cathedral. The striking image of a disintegrating body intentionally contrasts
with the reputation of the wealthy statesman and cleric in an act of abjection
designed to unsettle the viewer. © Stephen Bates 86
2.4 Faith, St Mary & All Saints, Willingham, Cambridgeshire, early 16th century.
The virtue is anthropomorphised as a woman holding a chalice in one hand
and a cross in the other. The image forms part of a scheme in which the biblical
virtues on the south wall of the nave face the cardinal virtues painted on the
north wall. © Stephen Bates 89
2.5 Death of the Virgin, alabaster panel, 37.6 × 24.2 cm, late 15th century. A.9-​1946.
Mary passes a palm branch to the beardless apostle John. It symbolised her
victory over sin and death: like the martyrs, who also carry palms, her soul will
go directly to heaven. Her deathbed is a pious, serene, and communal event.
© Victoria and Albert Museum, UK. Reproduced with permission 101
7.1 Patterns of Sovereign Patronage on Mount Athos in the Late Middle Ages.
Created by the author on the basis of Google Maps 210
7.2 Present-​day view of the Monastery of Dionysiou, from the west. Photo taken by
Zachary Chitwood, September 2019 212
7.3 Artistic rendering of the Monastery of Dionysiou, with captions showing the
various parts of the monastic grounds. Printed at Venice in 1780. Display from
the Byzantine Museum of Culture in Thessaloniki. Photo taken by Zachary
Chitwood, September 2019 214
7.4 Present-​day view of the Monastery of St Paul, from the west. Photo taken by
Zachary Chitwood, September 2019 221
7.5 Wooden commemorative register (brebeion) from the Church of Forty Martyrs,
near Saranda (contemporary southern Albania), 1593–​4. Display from the
Byzantine Museum of Culture in Thessaloniki. Photo taken by Zachary
Chitwood, September 2019 223

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List of Figures xi

7.6 Wooden commemorative register (brebeion) from the Convent of the Life-​giving
Fountain in Thessaloniki, 1731. In this case the register was apparently never filled
in (or the names were later painted over). The central panel of the register divides
the names of those to be commemorated by category, including priests, ordained
monks, and regular monastics. Display from the Byzantine Museum of Culture in
Thessaloniki. Photo taken by Zachary Chitwood, September 2019 223
9.1 Tomb slab of Perrin de Reugney (d. 1342), Saint-​Seine-​l’Abbaye. France
© M. rosso, Ministère de la culture et de la communication –​drac
de Bourgogne –​ sri, 2006 © Service Inventaire et Patrimoine, Région
Bourgogne-​Franche-​Comté 261
9.2 Miniature from the Office of the Dead (detail), Breviary of Louis de Guyenne
(1410–​1413). Châteauroux, Médiathèque Équinox, ms. 2, fol. 395v. © Institut de
recherche et d’histoire des textes –​cnrs 263
9.3 Tomb slab of Eudes de Bèze (d. 1419), Saint-​Seine-​l’Abbaye. France
© M. rosso, Ministère de la culture et de la communication –​drac
de Bourgogne –​ sri, 2006 © Service Inventaire et Patrimoine, Région
Bourgogne-​Franche-​Comté 265
9.4 Tomb of Jean iv de Blaisy (d. 1439), Saint-​Seine-​l’Abbaye. France
© M. rosso, Ministère de la culture et de la communication –​drac
de Bourgogne –​ sri, 2006 © Service Inventaire et Patrimoine, Région
Bourgogne-​Franche-​Comté 266
9.5 Tomb of Nicolas d’Estouteville (d. 1177?), Valmont Abbey, drawing from the
Gaignières Collection. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Est. Réserve Pe 8
fol. 471 © Bibliothèque nationale de France 269
10.1 Transi effigy of Sir John Fitzalan (d.1434); in the Fitzalan Chapel Arundel Castle,
England © Lampman. Creative Commons Licence 278
10.2 Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica, plate 164. © Public domain 281
12.1 Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Lodovica Albertoni 1674, Church of San Francesco a Ripa,
Rome © San Francesco a Ripa, Rome 340
12.2 Pietro Testa, Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 350
12.3 Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, 1617 © Uffizi Gallery,
Florence 354
12.4 Niccolò Circignani, Martyrdom of Saint Peter bishop of Alexandria, detail, 1582.
© Santo Stefano Rotondo, Rome 357
12.5 Anonymous, Michael et Matthias occumbunt, engraving from Nicolas Trigault,
Histoire des martyrs du Japon (Paris, 1624) © Royal Library of Belgium,
Brussels 361
12.6 Anonymous, Horribilia scelera ab Huguenotis in Gallia perpetrata, engraving
from Richard Verstegan, Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum nostri tempori
(Antwerp, 1587) © Royal Library of Belgium, Brussels 363

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xii  List of Figures

12.7 Nicolas Poussin, Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus, 1628 © Vatican Museums,

Rome 365
13.1 Rogier van der Weyden, Descent from the Cross, ca. 1436 © Museo del Prado,
Madrid (used with permission) 382

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Abbreviations

aesc Annales Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations

ab Analecta Bollandiana
AfR Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte
aoga Andreas Osiander d.A., Gesamtausgabe, eds Gerhard Müller and
Gottfried Seebaß, 10 vols (Gütersloh: 1975–​1997)
bl The British Library, London, UK
bnf Bibliothèque nationale de France
cccm Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, ed. A.P. Orbán,
353 vols (Turnhout: 1992)
eets Early English Texts Series
her English Historical Review
jeh Journal of Ecclesiastical History
mgh ss rer. Ger. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptorem Rerum Germanicarum
mgh ss rer. Merov. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptorem Rerum Merovingicarum
pl Patrologia Latina, ed. Jacques-​Paul Migne, 221 vols (1844–​55)
rhéf Revue de l’Histoire de l’Eglise de France
sch Studies in Church History
scj The Sixteenth Century Journal
stc Scottish Text Society
tna The National Archives, London, UK
wa D. Martin Luthers Werke, kritische Gesammtausgabe, 128 vols
(Weimar: 1883–​1929)

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Notes on Contributors

Ruth Atherton
is a Lecturer in History at the University of South Wales. She completed her
PhD at the University of Birmingham in 2018. Ruth’s thesis examined the na-
ture of the sacramental knowledge that was taught in 16th-​century German
language catechisms. More broadly, Ruth’s work explores the development of
early-​modern confessional identities, focusing in particular on late medieval
and early modern educational development, and religious, social, political and
cultural change.

Stephen Bates
is a Fellow at the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of
Warwick and an Associate Lecturer at the University of Northampton. He was
formerly Lecturer in History at Warwick and a Visiting Lecturer at Newman
University. He has published several essays on the Virgin Mary and is currently
preparing a monograph on her changing place in 16th-​century England.

Philip Booth
is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan
University currently working on the history of Christian Holy Land pilgrimage.
He received his PhD from Lancaster University in 2017, and his research inter-
ests are in the religious cultures of the Middle Ages and medieval travel.

Zachary Chitwood
is a specialist in Byzantine Studies at Johannes Gothenburg University, Mainz
in Germany. He was previously a research fellow on the erc-​Project “Founda-
tions in Medieval Societies: Cross-​cultural Comparisons” at the Humboldt Uni-
versity of Berlin. He has published numerous essays and articles as well as the
volume Byzantine Legal Culture and the Roman Legal Tradition, 867–​1056 (2017).
He is currently preparing a monograph: Memoria in the Byzantine World.

Ralph Dekoninck
is a Professor of the History of Art in the Institut des civilisations, arts et lettres
(inca) at the University of Leuven, Belgium. He is a specialist in early modern
religious art. He has published extensively on baroque spectacle, with partic-
ular reference to the art of the Jesuits. His extensive recent works include Cul-
tures du spectacle baroque (2019) and the co-​edited volume Les images miracu-
leuses de la Vierge au premier âge moderne (2015).

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Notes on Contributors xv

Freddy C. Domnguez
is a historian of early modern Europe with a focus on politics and religion.
His first book was Radicals in Exile: English Catholic Books during the Reign
of Philip II (2020). He is currently editing a collection of essays on “Spanish
Elizabethans” and a monograph on Maria de la Visitación, the so-​called Nun
of Lisbon.

Anna M. Duch
is an Assistant Professor and the faculty lead in World History at Columbia
State Community College in Columbia, TN. She has published several essays,
including the recent “Chasing St. Louis: England’s Pursuit of Sainthood” in The
Routledge History of Monarchy (2019) and “ ‘King by Fact, not by Law’: Legiti-
macy and Exequies in Medieval England,” in Dynastic Change: Legitimacy and
Gender in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (2019). She received her PhD from
the University of York. Her research focuses on the special medieval dead, par-
ticularly royalty and saints.

Jacqueline Eales
is Professor of Early Modern History at Canterbury Christ Church Universi-
ty and former President of the Historical Association (2011–​14). She has pub-
lished extensively on the English Civil wars, Puritanism and early modern
women. She is currently working on the roles of women in early modern cleri-
cal families and her recent publications include “Religion in Times of War and
Republic, 1642–​1660” in Andrew Hiscock and Helen Wilcox (eds), The Oxford
Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Religion (2017) and “Anne
and Thomas Fairfax and the Vere Connection” in A. Hopper and Philip Major
(eds), England’s Fortress: New Perspectives on Thomas, Lord Fairfax (2014).

Madeleine Gray
is Professor at the University of South Wales and a medieval historian. She has
close links with a number of heritage and community organisations and is an
honorary research fellow of the National Museum of Wales. She has published
extensively on late medieval and early modern history with a particular focus
on visual evidence for the history of religious belief and practice. She appears
regularly on television and radio and is currently working on a survey of medi-
eval tomb carvings in Wales.

Polina Ignatova
recently completed her PhD in history at Lancaster University. She is particu-
larly interested in how knowledge was generated and received in the Middle

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xvi  Notes on Contributors

Ages. She is currently working on developing her thesis into a monograph, pro-
visionally titled Raising the Dead: The Meaning and Purpose of Restless Corpses
in Medieval English Narratives. She is also looking at the ways aquatic organ-
isms were studied in the Middle Ages and hopes to develop this research into
a postdoctoral project.

Robert Marcoux
is Associate Professor of Medieval art at Université Laval (Quebec City, Cana-
da). His field of research focuses on tombs and the image of the human corpse
in the Middle Ages. In addition to a funded project on the tomb slabs of medi-
eval France, his current work centres on the iconography of Lazarus and on the
concept of the macabre in art history.

Christopher Ocker
is Director of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the Institute for Religion
and Critical Inquiry in the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne. He was
until recently professor of history at San Francisco Theological Seminary. Ock-
er specializes in the history of religion in Europe, medieval and early modern
intellectual and cultural history, and the social and political history of late me-
dieval and early modern Central Europe. His most recent book is Luther, Con-
flict, and Christendom: Reformation Europe and Christianity in the West (2018).

Gordon D. Raeburn
obtained his PhD in early modern Scottish burial practices from the University
of Durham in 2013, and from 2014 to 2017 he was a postdoctoral research fellow
in the arc Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion at the University
of Melbourne. In 2018 he was the inaugural John Emmerson Research Fellow
at the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne. His research interests include early
modern death and emotion, developments of communal identity, and emo-
tional manipulation as a weapon of war.

Ludwig Steindorff
is a specialist in the history of Old Russia, the medieval history of South-​Eastern
Europe, national and denominational identity in South-​Eastern Europe since
the 19th century, and the state and church under socialism. He is Emeritus Pro-
fessor at the Christian-​Albrechts-​University in Kiel, where he is also scientific
director of the Schleswig-​Holstein University Society. He is a prolific author on
religious history and his most recent book, with Olivier Auge, is Monastische
Kultur als transkonfessionelles Phänomen (2016). He was recently awarded the

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newgenprepdf

Notes on Contributors xvii

cau medal of honour and made an honorary doctor at the University of Split,
Croatia in 2019.

Elizabeth Tingle
is Professor of History at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. She has written
extensively on the Wars of Religion and the Catholic Reformation in France
and her latest book is Sacred Journeys: Long Distance Pilgrimage in North-​
Western Europe in the Counter Reformation (2020).

Christina Welch
lectures in Religious Studies at the University of Winchester and leads a mas-
ter’s degree by distance learning in Death, Religion and Culture. She is a dyslex-
ic interdisciplinary scholar with research interests in the intersection between
religion, and visual and material culture, especially in relation to death. She
works collaboratively with a historian exploring a Victorian cemetery, and with
an archaeologist on heritage in the Anglophone Caribbean.

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Introduction: Dying, Death, and Commemoration,
1350–​1700

Philip Booth and Elizabeth Tingle

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there will be
no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any
more pain: for the former things are passed away.1

∵
In the Christian tradition, death was a punishment by God for the Original
Sin of Adam and Eve. Banished from the Garden of Eden after eating the for-
bidden fruit of the tree of knowledge, they were condemned to labour, until
“you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to
dust you shall return.”2 But later in historical time, God sent his son Jesus
Christ to earth to teach people how to overcome death and achieve eternal
life, as witnessed in the gospels. Christ taught that if sinful humans would
repent of their sins and love God, they would be saved from death, for as he
said to Martha in the house of Lazarus, “I am the resurrection and the life; he
who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live.”3 The central narrative of
Christian soteriology is the death of Christ himself, through crucifixion, and
his resurrection from the dead three days later. Having triumphed over death,
his purpose was to lead his followers to salvation. After Christ’s bodily ascen-
sion into heaven, the task of saving souls for eternity was passed to his church.
The emphasis on Christ’s death and resurrection, and its representation in
the eucharistic service, mean that death and commemoration lie at the very
heart of Christianity.
The academic study of dying, death, and remembrance in Europe of the lat-
er Middle Ages and the early modern period has produced an enormous body
of scholarship over the last thirty years and remains vigorous. This is partly a

1 The Bible, Revised Standard Version. Rev. 21:4.

2 rsv Gen. 3:19.
3 rsv John 11:25.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004443433_002

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2 Booth and Tingle

result of rich and often visually striking primary evidence: wills, handbooks
and tracts, buildings, art and archaeological remains, are extant in some mea-
sure across all European regions. The fascination with the dead also mirrors
our contemporary interest in commemoration; for public, ritualised remem-
brance –​from war dead to locally significant individuals –​seems to have re-
placed formal church observance in many communities, while contributing to
local, regional, and national identities. Above all, for the historian, behaviours
surrounding dying and death offer a lens through which to observe religious,
social, and cultural practices and their change over time. Although all Chris-
tian communities share a belief in the hope of eternal life for the saved, how
that worked in practice varied enormously: the understanding of the nature of
eternity; explanatory glosses on the narrative of the gospels; the institutional
framework established for the consolation of the dying and the deposition of
the dead; the social and cultural conventions of death, were and are every-
where different. For this reason, the dead remain an important category of his-
torical analysis.
This Companion volume comprises a collection of essays on current re-
search on the history of Christian dying, death, and commemoration in the
later Middle Ages and the Reformation centuries in Europe. The approach is
multi-​and interdisciplinary, with contributors writing from a range of disci-
plinary perspectives, theology, art history, archaeology, literature studies, his-
torical anthropology and, predominantly, history. Some of the pieces treat with
a short time frame to present new research on a specific theme; others offer
a consideration of longer periods, to evaluate change over time. The volume
also offers perspectives from eastern and western Europe; while the majori-
ty of the contributions are on the western churches, two important chapters
discuss Greek and Russian Orthodox traditions. The aim is not to offer a defin-
itive overview of studies of death and remembrance, for there are numerous
existing surveys and collections to this end. Rather, its purpose is to engage in
a dialogue with existing scholarship on two areas of current research: the phys-
ical passage from life to the afterlife, and emotional and cultural responses to
death. The volume does not include all Christian traditions –​dissenting groups
receive less attention, apart from those which became ‘official’ creeds with the
passage of time; the focus is European, rather than European colonies in the
new and old world from the 15th century onward –​because a full consideration
of Christian practice would necessitate several volumes. In the remainder of
this introduction, a summary of the historiography of death and commemora-
tion is given, to contextualize the essays in the deep body of existing scholar-
ship, followed by a discussion of current areas of interest and how the chapters
of this volume contribute to these contemporary debates.

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Introduction: Dying, Death, and Commemoration, 1350–1700 3

1 Context: Trajectories of the Historiography of Death and

Commemoration

1.1 Historical Demography, Mentalities and Mortality

Modern studies of pre-​modern dying, death, and disposal have their origins in
the quantitative demographic studies of the French annaliste historians and
in the histoire sérielle of the post-​World War ii era.4 Beginning with the pio-
neering study of the population history of the Normandy village of Crulai by
Louis Henry and Étienne Gautier in 1958, quantitative studies have charted the
statistics of mortality and burial across early modern Europe, where sources al-
low.5 Much of the early work was on France and England, areas with long series
of parish registers, which provided the serial data necessary for these studies.
In an influential work of 1960, Pierre Goubert published a demographic model
of the city of Beauvais and its region in the 17th and 18th centuries, in which
he argued that death and mortality conditioned structures of life more than
birth.6 François Lebrun’s landmark study of early modern Anjou of 1971 simi-
larly examined demographic structures, mortality cycles, death rates, and their
change over time and inspired numerous other regional studies.7 In England, it
was primarily the new social history of the 1960s and 1970s, exemplified by the
work of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Struc-
ture, founded by Tony Wrigley and Peter Laslett in 1964, that focused historical
attention on mortality in pre-​industrial society.8 Studies followed for other Eu-
ropean regions and Iberia produced a particularly rich harvest. For Spain, the
pioneering analysis of the population of Valladolid in the 16th century by Bar-
tholomé Benassar stimulated studies of Castile-​La Mancha, the Asturias region

4 For France, a useful short introduction to the historiography of death can be found in Régis
Bertrand, “L’histoire de la mort: De l’histoire des mentalités à l’histoire religieuse,” RHEF 86
(2000), 550–​9.
5 Étienne Gautier and Louis Henry, La population de Crulai, paroisse normande: Étude his-
torique (Paris: 1958).
6 Pierre Goubert, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 à 1730: Contribution à l’histoire sociale de la
France du XVIIe siècle, 2 vols (Paris: 1960).
7 François Lebrun, Les hommes et la mort en Anjou aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: Éssai de démo­
graphie et de psychologie historiques (Paris: 1971).
8 Edward Anthony Wrigley and Roger Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–​1871: A
Reconstruction (London: 1981); Edward Anthony Wrigley and Roger Schofield, “English Popu-
lation History from Family Reconstitution: Summary Results 1600–​1799,” Population Studies
37 (1983), 157–​84; Lloyd Bonfield, Richard Smith, and Keith Wrightson (eds), The World We
Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure. Essays presented to Peter Laslett on
his Seventieth Birthday (Oxford: 1986).

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4 Booth and Tingle

in the north, and Guadalajara and Lisbon in Portugal, to give a few examples.9
There are however fewer for eastern and Central Europe, where surviving se-
rial sources are fewer, an exception being the Swiss territories, German and
French-​language regions, where there is rich archival material for death and
dying in the later Middle Ages, particularly commemorative books and lists,
much of which is unedited or unexamined.10 It was clear from these studies
that mortality formed a fundamental structure of early modern society. Their
originality lay in charting these structures in detail, over long periods of time
and in their model of pre-​industrial immutability, la longue durée.
Studies of mortality soon moved beyond statistical analysis to examine the
impact of demographic structures on popular attitudes to death, part of the
histoire des mentalités which emerged in the 1970s, influenced by the theory
and methods of sociology, ethno-​anthropology, and psychology. The most
influential work was that of Philippe Ariès who, in the 1970s, published two
texts that offered an interpretative framework within which death might be
comprehended historically over long periods of time: Western Attitudes To-
wards Death, published in 1973, and L’Homme devant la mort, published in
1977, the latter translated into English as The Hour of Our Death in 1981.11 Using
a range of literary, personal, administrative, and visual sources, Ariès argued
that the early modern centuries saw a move away from a concept of death as
a collectively-​experienced event to an individualisation of mortality. This was
accompanied by a rise in the belief in a particular judgement at death rather

9 Bartholomé Bennassar, Valladolid au siècle d’or: Une ville de Castille et sa campagne au

XVIe siècle (Paris: 1967); José Camacho Cabello, La población de Castilla-​La Mancha (siglos
XVI, XVII, XVIII): Crisis y renovación (Toledo: 1997); Alfredo Alvar Ezquerra, Demografía
y sociedad en la España de los Austrias (Madrid: 1996); Ángel Luis Velasco Sánchez, Po-
blación y sociedad en Guadalajara: Siglos XVI –​XVII (Toledo: 2011); Teresa Rodrigues, Cri-
ses de mortalidade em Lisboa: Séculos XVI e XVII (Lisbon: 1990). For overviews see Jordi
Nadal, La población española, siglos XVI a XX (Barcelona: 1984) and Rosa Maria González
Martínez, La población española: Siglos XVI, XVII y XVIII (Madrid: 2002).
10 Useful reference works for Germany are: Christian Pfister, Bevölkerungsgeschichte und
historische Demographie 1500–​1800 (Berlin: 2007); Ulrich Pfister and Georg Fertig, “The
Population History of Germany: Research Strategy and Preliminary Results,” Max Plank
Institute for Demographic Research Working Paper, 2010, along with its bibliography.
For Swiss examples: Rainer Hugener. Buchführung für die Ewigkeit: Totengedenken,
Verschriftlichung und Traditionsbildung im Spätmittelalter (Zürich: 2014) and Arthur
Bisseger, Une paroisse raconte ses morts: L’obituaire de l’église Saint-​Paul à Villeneuve
(XIVe –​ XVe siècle) (Lausanne: 2003).
11 Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Towards Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present,
trans. P.M. Ranum (Baltimore and London: 1973); L’Homme devant la mort (Paris: 1977);
The Hour of Our Death, trans. H. Weaver (London, 1981). See also Allan Mitchell, “Philippe
Ariès and the French Way of Death,” French Historical Studies 10 (1978), 684–​95.

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Introduction: Dying, Death, and Commemoration, 1350–1700 5

than the final, collective “doomsday” of humanity. Historians agree that there
were conceptual and methodological limitations to Ariès’s work, but these do
not detract from its significance and impact.
Ariès’s publications stimulated a wave of focussed enquiries that incremen-
tally modified, refined, and improved on his findings and methods. The work
of Armin Nassehi Tod, Modernität und Gesellschaft: Entwurf einer Theorie der
Todesverdrängung of 1989, developed a similar grand theory of the relationship
between attitudes to death and modernity.12 In Germany an influential group
grew up in the late 1970s around Karl Schmidt and Joachim Wollasch at Freiburg
and Münster universities, which combined the use of obituaries (necrologi) as
serial sources with research about the social and religious functions of charity
and donations. They created the research term “memoria” which summarizes
the intertwined complex of liturgical commemoration, donation, and charity.13
This has become a seminal concept in understanding death and remembrance.
Perhaps the most influential of this work is that of Otto Gerhard Oexle on me-
moria, and more specifically the notion of the dead as full members of society
in pre-​modern Europe, while Ludwig Steindorff used this concept to consider
the mentalities and practices of the Slavic Orthodox world.14 These influential
works led to the publication in the 1980s and 1990s of studies of death that were
more methodologically and theoretically refined, and penetrating in their con-
clusions, which tested and debated the grand theories above.
In the 1970s, there was also renewed interest in theology, attitudes of the
dying, and beliefs about the fate of the soul, as well as the material processes of
mortality and interment. Much of the classic work was still focused on France.
Pierre Chaunu’s great work La mort à Paris focused on changing attitudes to
death, using ars moriendi works and testamentary evidence. He argued for
the emergence of a “new eschatology” in the early modern period, a changed
perception of death and judgement, and for the increasing secularisation of
death in the 18th century.15 Michel Vovelle’s studies of southern France used

12 Armin Nassehi, Tod, Modernität und Gesellschaft: Entwurf einer Theorie der
Todesverdrängung (Opladen: 1989).
13 Karl Schmidt and Joachim Wollasch (eds), Memoria: Der geschichtliche Zeugniswert des
liturgischen Gedankens im Mittelater (Munich: 1984).
14 For example, Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Die Gegenwort der Toten,” in Death in the Middle
Ages, eds Herman Braet and Werner Verbeke (Louvain: 1983), 19–​77; Otto Gerhard Oexle,
“Memoria und Memorialbild,” in Memoria: Der geschichtliche Zeugniswert des liturgischen
Gedankens im Mittelater, eds Karl Schmidt and Joachim Wollasch (Munich: 1984), 384–​
440; Ludwig Steindorff, Memoria in Altrussland: Untersuchungen zu den Formen christ­
licher Totensorge (Stuttgart: 1994).
15 Pierre Chaunu, La mort à Paris: XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siècles (Paris: 1978).

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visual evidence and wills to argue that new attitudes to death and the afterlife
emerged in the later Middle Ages, based on the increasing importance of be-
lief in purgatory. This was reinforced during the Counter-​Reformation, which
taught that the whole life of humankind should be lived with the end in mind,
culminating in the great baroque ceremonial of death.16 As with Chaunu, he
argued that this cosmology changed in the 18th century, when fear of hell and
the role of corporate salvation declined, and mortality was contained within
the family, part of what Vovelle calls “dechristianisation.” Other regional stud-
ies confirmed this periodisation for France and other regions of western Eu-
rope. For the Middle Ages, Jacques Chiffoleau used wills from the papal territo-
ry of Avignon to argue for the emergence of a new individualism expressed in a
novel sense of death as “one’s own death” across the period from the 13th to the
16th centuries. Increasing urbanisation, commercialisation, and migration led
to new levels of social dislocation, the loss of ties to family and ancestors, and
fears for salvation in an eschatology increasingly dominated by purgatory. The
result was ever-​increasing numbers of masses and intercessors for the soul,
combined with “flamboyant” and “profoundly narcissistic” funerals. This was
an individualism “marked by solitude, melancholy and angst.”17 For the early
modern period, one of most prominent studies is Alain Croix’s magisterial the-
sis on Brittany, published in 1981.18 Croix argued that the cult of the dead was
especially important in the dissemination of Counter-​Reformation ideas after
1600. Studies of other regions of Europe soon followed.
Historians of the Low Countries largely supported French methodologies
and conclusions. Jean-​Pierre Deregnaucourt’s study of Flanders argues that
the disturbances of war, famine, and plague traumatised the region of Douai
leading to increased solitude; the Douaisians became “uprooted,” as seen in
the decline of burials in ancestral graves.19 Michel Lauwers’s study of death
rituals in Liège has argued for the emergence of the will in the 12th century
as the instrument of liberation from the influence of the ancestors and of the
formation of a new individualism: again, Ariès’s “la mort de soi” is important.20

16 Michel Vovelle, Piété baroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe siècle: Les atti-
tudes devant la mort d’après les clauses des testaments (Paris: 1973); La mort et l’Occident de
1300 à nos jours (Paris: 1983).
17 Jacques Chiffoleau, La comptabilité de l’au-​delà: Les hommes, la mort et la religion dans la
région d’Avignon à la fin du Moyen Âge (Rome: 1980).
18 Alain Croix, La Bretagne aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles: La vie, la mort, la foi, 2 vols (Paris: 1981).
19 Jean-​Pierre Deregnaucourt, “Autour de la mort à Douai: Attitudes, pratiques et croyances
1250 à 1500” (Université de Lille Charles de Gaulle, PhD diss.: 1993).
20 Michel Lauwers, La Mémoire des ancêtres, le souci des morts: Morts, rites et société au
Moyen Âge (diocèse de Liège, XIe–​XIIIe siècles) (Paris: 1997).

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Introduction: Dying, Death, and Commemoration, 1350–1700 7

Attitudes towards death shown by literary sources were particularly prom-

inent in Germany, as with the classic works of Alois Haason on the represen-
tation of death in medieval German literature and of Peter von Moos on con-
solation literature and grief.21 Yet medievalists studying the Central European
evidence undercut Chiffoleau’s arguments. For example, Ralf Lusiardi’s study
of late medieval testaments from Stralsund found no convincing evidence
that teaching of purgatory had drastically changed testamentary practices.22
The idea of a pan-​Christendom transformation of religious beliefs with the
introduction of the doctrine of purgatory appears to have been regionally
nuanced.

1.2 The Black Death, Change and Continuity

As part of the study of historical demography and its impact on mentalities,
debates about the significance of the Black Death in European culture became
prominent. The disease originated in “the East” and came into Genoa and Ven-
ice in 1347, probably on ships via the Black Sea ports, Greece, and Constantino-
ple. In 1349–​50 it reached Germany and Scandinavia, and in 1351–​52 it contin-
ued through Poland and the north-​western principalities of Russia. Thereafter,
“plague” was endemic in Europe until the late 17th and early 18th centuries.23
The effect on the European population was catastrophic, for it appears to have
been a new, virulent strain of the bacterium Yersinia pestis against which hu-
man immunity was low, although over time the microparasite’s potency be-
came attenuated. Quantifying the scale of population loss is difficult because
of a lack of contemporary population statistics, but most authors estimate its
initial toll to have been 30–​50 percent losses across Europe. What was partic-
ularly striking about the mortality was that it affected urban and rural areas
alike and it could affect any social group.

21 Peter von Moos, Consolatio: Studien zur mittellateinischen Trostliterature über den Tod und
zum Problem der christlichen Trauer, 4 vols (Munich: 1971–​1972); Alois Haas, Todesbilder im
Mittelalter: Fakten und Hinweise in der deutsche Literatur (Darmstadt: 1989).
22 Ralf Lusiardi, Stiftung und städtische Gesellschaft: Religiöse und soziale Aspekte des
Stiftungsverhaltens im spätmittelalterlichen Stralsund (Berlin: 2000).
23 Recent works on the Black Death in English include: Ole Jørgen Benedictow, The Black
Death 1346–​1353: The Complete History (Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Rochester, NY: 2006);
Andrew Noymer, “Contesting the Cause and Severity of the Black Death: A Review Essay,”
Population and Development Review 33 (2007), 616–​27; Mark Bailey and Stephen Rigby
(eds), Town and Countryside in the Age of the Black Death: Essays in Honour of John Hatcher
(Turnhout: 2013); Joseph Byrne, Encyclopedia of the Black Death (Santa Barbara, CA,
Denver, CO, and Oxford: 2012); Monica H. Green, (ed.), Pandemic Disease in the Medieval
World: Rethinking the Black Death (Kalamazoo, MI: 2016).

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8 Booth and Tingle

Historians traditionally saw the Black Death as a great rupture in the social and
political history of Europe.24 It was argued that the plague changed the demo-
graphic system of Europe from a pre-​modern one based on Malthusian positive
checks –​war, famine, plague –​to a modern one of preventative checks of later
ages at marriage, increased celibacy, and family planning. It was also argued to
have underpinned the creation of modern Europe, transforming its vernacular
culture into a capitalist system of interconnected technological progress and con-
sumer societies.25 In the last three decades, historians have questioned the sem-
inal role of the Black Death in transforming the West and ushering in modernity.
Neither social structures nor cultural norms underwent radical changes as a result
of its advent in Europe. In the longer term, the Black Death caused some rebal-
ancing of social and particularly tenurial relations and conditions of labour, as
workers became scarce and settlements were abandoned over time.26 In a survey
of Europe, Evket Pamuk argues that the impact of population decline was not
really evident in wage differentials until the mid-​15th century.27
Similarly, historians of the earlier 20th century saw the experience of the
Black Death as ushering in a new religious culture focused on the macabre.
This view owes much to the opening line of Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of
the Middle Ages of 1919: “no other epoch has laid so much stress as the ex-
piring Middle Ages on the thought of death.”28 This statement was taken up
and explored energetically by church and art historians, especially of French-​
speaking regions, such as Emile Mâle.29 They saw a great shift in religious and
artistic imagery, to skeletal figures, rotting corpses, and vividly emotional Pas-
sion scenes of Jesus Christ: the Dies Irae, danse macabre, ars moriendi, the fres-
coed cemetery of the Church of the Holy Innocents in Paris and the hall of
the Marienkirche in Berlin.30 Literature of the 14th century was seen as filled

24 Albrecht Classen, Death and the Culture of Death: Universal Cultural-​ Historical
Observations, with an Emphasis on the Middle Ages (Berlin: 2016), 23.
25 David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (Cambridge, MA: 1997);
Richard Goldthwaite, Building of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: 1980), 40–​1.
26 Per Largeras (ed.), Environment, Society and the Black Death: An Interdisciplinary Approach
to the Late-​Medieval Crisis in Sweden (Oxford: 2016), 18.
27 Evket Pamuk, “The Black Death and the origins of the ‘Great Divergence’ across Europe,
1300–​1600,” European Review of Economic History 11 (2007), 289–​317.
28 Johan Huizinga, Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen (1919) translated into English as The Waning of
the Middle Ages (London: 1924), 1.
29 Jean E. Jost, “The Effects of the Black Death: The Plague in Fourteenth-​Century Religion,
Literature, and Art,” in Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: The Material and
Spiritual Conditions of the Culture of Death, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin: 2016), 193–​238.
30 Classen (ed.), Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, 23; Jost, “The Effects of
the Black Death,” 193, 217; Erik Hühns, “Der Berliner Totentanz,” Deutsches Jahrbuch für

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Introduction: Dying, Death, and Commemoration, 1350–1700 9

with plague angst: Petrarch (1304–​1370), Boccaccio (1313–​1375), Chaucer (1340

–​1400), and Langland (ca. 1332–​ca. 1400), were influenced by the Black Death
and its impact. Norman F. Cantor concludes that spiritually, the century after
the Black Death in Northern Europe was marked by the rise of intense personal
mysticism, and penitentialism became the leitmotif of late medieval religion
and mentality.31
Again, recent historians have adopted a more nuanced view to the Black
Death’s impact on European religion and culture. Ariès scarcely mentioned
the plague at all in his history of death. While positing the later Middle Ages
as an age of fear, anxiety, and trauma, Jean Delumeau emphasises 15th-​century
developments –​the Schism of the Church and invasions of the Turks –​to ex-
plain this new European-​wide mentality.32 Rosemary Horrox argues that the
chronology of the artistic representation of death warns against too close an
association with the plague; representations of the three living and three dead
show that there was a lively sense of the macabre before the plague, while the
representation of Death as an armed, attacking corpse seems, in England at
least, to postdate the plague by many years.33 There was a change in funerary
traditions over time, with greater numbers of masses for the dead and more
spectacle, but the increasing importance of purgatory and indulgences, along
with the development of the centrality of the eucharist in salvation, were
almost certainly of greater significance. In short, current historiography em-
phasises that during and after outbreaks of great mortality, the explanatory
framework of death and social upheaval remained traditional. The scourge
was understood in long-​standing, apocalyptical terms; reflections upon it and
remedies to prevent it were developed within existing structures of religiosity,
urban governance, and charitable provision.34 The plague terrified individuals,
its impact took a toll on communities, but it was dealt with within the tradi-
tional eschatologies of death across the later Middle Ages and early modern
period.35

Volkskunde 14 (1968), 235–​46; see also work by Sophie Oosterwijk for example “Of Corpses,
Constables and Kings: The Danse Macabre in Late Medieval and Renaissance Culture,”
Journal of the British Archaeological Association 157 (2004), 61–​90.
31 Norman F. Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World that it Made
(London: 2002), 204.
32 Jean Delumeau, La Peur en l’Occident (XIVe–​XVIIIe siècles) (Paris: 1978).
33 Rosemary Horrox, “Purgatory, Prayer and Plague 1150–​1380,” in Death in England: An
Illustrated History, eds. Peter C. Jupp and Clare Gittings (Manchester: 1999), 90–​118, on 115.
34 Aron Ja. Gurevich, “The Merchant,” in The Medieval World, ed. Jacques Le Goff, trans.
Lydia G. Cochrane (London: reprint of 1997), 243–​84, on 274.
35 Franco Mormando and Thomas Worcester, Piety and Plague: From Byzantium to the
Baroque (Kirksville, MO: 2007).

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10  Booth and Tingle

1.3 Discontinuities? Reformation Revisionism, Religious Cultures

and Death
In the 1980s and 1990s, new areas of investigation were pursued. Prominent
was the impact of religious change across the Renaissance and Reformation,
using attitudes to death, burial, and commemoration as a way of understand-
ing beliefs and religious practices of individuals and communities. At the core
of the many currents of religious protest movements which arose in Europe
after 1350 was the issue of the correct way for a soul to be saved for Christ.
Therefore, the fate of the dying and the relationship of the deceased to the
community of the living were fundamental to their theologies and pastorates.
Such movements were more a feature of western or Latin Christendom than of
the Orthodox churches of east and south east Europe in the period, although
the experience of Islamic rule and proselytising in Ottoman regions had conse-
quences for the mortuary and memorial practices of Christians living there. As
a result of major religious shifts in this period, the way in which the dead were
conceptualised and understood, as individuals and as a category, changed. One
of the seminal contributions to scholarship on the dead of the Middle Ages was
Gerhard Oexle’s notion of the presence of the Dead (Die Gegenwart der Toten),
who had a continuing and ongoing relationship with the living.36 These ideas
were explored by the authors of a collection edited by Bruce Gordon and Peter
Marshall, who noted that for the later Middle Ages, much historical writing
has emphasised the reciprocity, exchange, and mutual gift-​giving between the
living and the dead. In some ways, the dead were perceived as an “age group,”
part of a continuum of human existence rather than wholly separate from it.37
After the Reformations of the 16th and 17th centuries, the relationship with the
dead became more distant or at least more formal, although the moment of
death continued to be conceived as a threshold moment for individuals rather
than simply the end of a life, a view which remained largely unchanged until
the 18th century.38 Across all confessions, “officially sanctioned exchanges with
the dead operated alongside and within a ‘black-​market’ of popular customs
and beliefs.”39

36 Oexle, “Die Gegenwart der Toten.”

37 N.Z. Davis, “Some Tasks and Themes in the Study of Popular Religion,” in The Pursuit of
Holiness, eds. C. Trinkhaus and H. Oberman (Leiden: 1974), 327–​8.
38 Hillard von Thiessen, “Das Sterbebett als normative Schwelle: Der Mensch in der Frühen
Neuzeit zwischen irdischer Normenkonkurrenz und göttlichem Gericht,” Historische
Zeitschrift 295/​3 (2012), 625–​59, on 627–​8.
39 Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (eds.), The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance
in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: 2000), 7.

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Introduction: Dying, Death, and Commemoration, 1350–1700 11

In the Latin west, a core cause of religious dissent was the theological devel-
opment of a third place in the afterlife, purgatory. The belief held that the ma-
jority of the faithful dead did not pass immediately to heaven but underwent
purgation of the debt due for their sin in this intermediary state and place in
the next world. It was linked to the belief that all Christians, living and depart-
ed, were incorporated into a single “communion of saints,” and that those who
were alive had the ability and the duty to ease the dead’s suffering in purgatory
through commissioning of masses, saying of prayers, giving of alms, fasting,
and the acquisition of indulgences.40 The movements of reform and dissent
of the later 14th and early 15th centuries, of John Wyclif and later, the so-​called
Lollards, in England; Jan Hus and his followers in Bohemia; the Waldensians
of the western Alpine regions, all criticised the Catholic Church’s teachings
on purgatory and popular practices around death and the afterlife. The radial
groups offered an eschatology based on the biblical heaven and hell, alone.
The great schism of the Protestant Reformations developed similar escha-
tologies and institutionalised new beliefs and practices more formally, in states
and societies where Catholicism was rejected. The result was a renegotiation
of the relationship between the living and the dead. Martin Luther’s revolu-
tionary theology of justification “by faith alone” (sola fide), salvation through
the saving grace of God achieved only by faith, with no other mediator, under-
mined the whole intercessory framework of saints, priests, and fellow Chris-
tians. Luther’s rejection of purgatory as unscriptural and his criticism of the
Catholic clergy as feeding upon the dead’s resources to the detriment of the
deserving poor, reshaped the geography of the afterlife. Henceforth, there was
only heaven and hell to receive the soul and no communion between the living
and the dead: “the living could do nothing to alter the condition of the de-
ceased, and … the dead had no knowledge of the affairs of the living, a recogni-
tion of the reciprocal bonds between present and past generations.”41
The implications of this theology for the consolation of the dying, funerals,
and post-​mortem commemoration, were far-​reaching. For the dying, extreme
unction as a last rite disappeared and the presence of priests at the deathbed
was not as necessary in Protestant regions as before. Ralph Houlbrooke has
observed that in England, funerary practice came to have fewer services and
shorter obsequies. The burial liturgy was transformed from a means of assist-
ing the deceased through purgatory to a means of comforting and consoling
the living.42 In regions which adopted the Reformation, institutions which

40 Gordon and Marshall (eds.), The Place of the Dead, 3.

41 Gordon and Marshall (eds.), The Place of the Dead, 10.
42 Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England, 1480–​1750 (Oxford: 1988).

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12  Booth and Tingle

serviced the needs of souls, priests and colleges, requiems and chapels, were
largely abolished. On monuments, intercessory symbolism was discouraged so
instead, there was greater concentration on the status and family of the de-
ceased. Conversely, Tridentine Catholicism restored belief in purgatory and
the need for a strong intercessory framework for souls, along with more stan-
dardised Roman liturgies for the dying and burial across Europe. The changes
wrought by religious schism to attitudes to the dying, death, and memorialisa-
tion are a core theme of this volume.
Longitudinal studies of dying, death, and disposal remained popular in the
1990s but rather than focusing on long-​term structures, their core theme was
the impact of religious change over time. The prime sources remained wills,
along with obit rolls, necrologies, and family documents. Many of these studies
were regional and linked to an interest in social history, the differential ex-
periences of elite and non-​elites, urban and rural groups. Three geographical
regions in particular produced numerous studies. England remained prom-
inent, linked to a strong revisionist historiography that increasingly saw the
Reformation as a slow process largely imposed from above, rather than a rapid,
grass-​roots movement. Claire Gittings’s pioneering work on the early modern
period was followed by studies such as those of David Cressy on the impact of
the Reformation on the life cycle, including death, and Ralph Houlbrooke’s im-
portant work on death and the family.43 This was taken further with numerous
detailed investigations of individuals, communities and peer groups, for death
became an important means of understanding religious choice and change.
A second region rich in sociocultural studies was central Italy. A pioneering
study by Sharon Strocchia examined the impact of the Renaissance on death
and ritual in Florence, while Samuel Cohn focused on central Italian cities in-
cluding Siena, to examine death, family, property transfers, and commemora-
tion.44 The third region rich in studies of death was Spain, where historians
had a particular interest in the rituals of baroque Catholicism and the impact
of the Counter Reformation. For example, Francisco Pinar published a study
of preparation for death and burial practices in the city of Zamora and Carlos

43 Claire Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (Dover,
N.H.: 1984); David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-​Cycle
in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: 1997); Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and Family in
England.
44 Sharon Therese Strocchia, Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: 1992);
Samuel K. Cohn Jr., Death and Property in Siena, 1205–​1800. Strategies for the Afterlife
(Baltimore and London: 1988) and The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death: Six
Renaissance Cities in Central Italy (Baltimore: 1992).

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Introduction: Dying, Death, and Commemoration, 1350–1700 13

Eire examined the new capital, Madrid, alongside microstudies of the deaths
of Philip ii and Teresa of Avila.45 More recently, their methodologies have been
projected back in time and there are now detailed studies of medieval Tole-
do, Navarre, and Castile, among other regions.46 Across Europe, however, we
continue to have a better picture of towns than the countryside and of elites
rather than common folk, largely because the wealthy are always more visible
in documentary and material sources.
Since the 1990s, there has also been questioning and interrogation of grand
models of continuity and change over time, and a demonstration of nuanced
and varied attitudes to death and commemoration. In an important collec-
tion of essays edited by Gordon and Marshall, the central questions examined
were the status of the dead, socially and ontologically, and the nature of their
relations with the living, benign and malevolent. A major theme was “how the
relations of the living with the dead were profoundly embedded in religious
cultures, and, further, how those relations were not only shaped by, but them-
selves helped to shape, the processes of religious change.”47 Every town, village
and even family had its own experience of religious change, which affected its
understanding of death and the afterlife. This is illustrated with some of the
post-​millennium longitudinal regional studies such as that by Clodagh Tait for
early modern Ireland –​contrasting the religious cultures of Catholic and Prot-
estant in this divided territory –​and Serge Brunet for the Pyrenees, caught be-
tween the different religious policies of France and Spain.48 There is also now a
strong tradition of looking comparatively across regions, largely in collections
of essays on specific methodological themes or questions. Two important com-
pendia are Albrecht Classen (ed.), Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern
Times and Joelle Rollo-​Koster (ed.), Death in medieval Europe: Death Scripted
and Death Choreographed, which consider the cultural effects of death, using
case studies from across the continent.49 These regional studies often sit side

45 Francisco Pinar, Muerte y ritual en la Edad Moderna: El caso de Zamora, 1500–​1800

(Salamanca: 1991); Carlos Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in
Sixteenth-​century Spain (Cambridge: 1995).
46 Arturo Ruiz Taboada, La vida futura es para los devotos: La muerte en el Toledo medieval
(Madrid: 2013); Julia Pavón Benito (ed.), Morir en la Edad Media: La muerte en la Navarra
medieval (Valencia: 2007); Carlos González Minguez, La muerte en el nordeste de la Corona
de Castilla a finales de la Edad Media: Estudios y documentos (Bilbao: 2014).
47 Gordon and Marshall (eds.), The Place of the Dead, 3.
48 Clodah Tait, Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550–​1650 (London: 2002); Serge
Brunet, La vie, la mort, la foi dans les Pyrénées centrales sous l’Ancien Régime (Aspret: 2001).
49 Joëlle Rollo-​ Koster (ed.), Death in Medieval Europe: Death Scripted and Death
Choreographed (London: 2017).

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by side rather than being clearly comparative, and few include the Orthodox
and Muslim parts of Europe. But they offer implicit comparisons and they are
expanding our knowledge of the nuances of belief and practice across Europe.

2 Current Themes and the Structure of This Volume

Since the new millennium, the historical examination of death and commem-
oration has splintered into a hugely diverse range of studies with a plurality of
foci, and it is difficult to represent all the areas of current scholarship succinctly.
To the editors here, three in particular stand out and will be discussed: ritual and
performativity; the body, its treatment and representation; and the materiality of
death. It is these three theoretical and methodological approaches that the essays
in this volume address in their different ways. Here, authors enter into dialogue
with recent debates and present new responses and case studies, based on multi-​
disciplinary considerations of texts, images and material culture.

2.1 Ritual and Performativity

Ritual and performativity have long of interest to anthropologists, sociolo-
gists, and archaeologists, and ceremonies around death have been privileged
as sites of social construction. With the influence of the social sciences on the
humanities, particularly from the 1990s, the study of mortuary ritual has been
prominent. In the anglophone world, Paul Binksy’s edited collection of essays
Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation of 1996 was influential because of
its broad chronological sweep across late antiquity and the Middle Ages and
its emphasis on visual evidence.50 Ritual and performance as subject matter
spoke to an academy increasingly influenced by postmodernism, semiotics,
and the works of philosophers such as Michel Foucault on bodies, power, and
political culture. The result was a proliferation of works on the iconographic
and symbolic significance of death rituals.
Of especial importance for the Middle Ages and early modern period have
been studies of the rituals, representations, and meanings of elite funerals, es-
sentially of monarchs and the high aristocracy –​partly in engagement with
Ralph Giesey’s pioneering 1960 examination of French Renaissance funer-
al ceremonies.51 Such studies demonstrate that in the later medieval period

50 Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (London: 1996).

51 Ralph Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France (Geneva: 1960); see also
Alexandre Bande, Le coeur du roi: Les Capétiens et les sépultures multiples, XIIIe-​XVe siècles
(Paris: 2009).

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Introduction: Dying, Death, and Commemoration, 1350–1700 15

funerary practice became more elaborate, formalised, and expensive, a reflec-

tion of its eschatological and social importance. Rites could last several weeks
and include different ceremonial elements: procession, heraldic elements,
requiem services, charity, gift giving, and feasting. While there were changes
in the religious framing of funerals across the Protestant and Catholic Ref-
ormations, much of the ritual of power remained. The symbolic function of
royal and noble funerary iconography for legitimation of power is shown by
Reformed Protestants’ destruction of such imagery in some regions, in protest
against idolatry and also tyranny. All regions of Europe have attracted study of
elite funerary rituals and while the iconography has regional differences, the
style and function of elaborate interments were the same: a theatricalization
of power and legitimation of succession. Again, the monarchs of France, En-
gland, Germany, and the Rhineland have received the most attention to date.
Prominent works include Danielle Westerhof’s examination of death and the
noble body in medieval England, Juliusz A. Chrościcki’s edited collection of
essays on aristocratic and princely burials in Europe. Three German contri-
butions stand out: Helga Czerny, Der Tod der bayerischen Herzöge im Spätmit-
telalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit 1347–​1579 on funerary ritual associate with the
Bavarian dukes across for the later Middle Ages and early Reformation period,
and for the later period, Linda Brüggemann, Herrschaft und Tod in der Frühen
Neuzeit: Das Sterbe-​und Begräbniszeremoniell preussischer Herrscher vom Gros-
sen Kurfürsten bis zu Friedrich Wilhelm II. (1688–​1797) on Prussia, and Magda-
lena Hawlik-​Van der Water, Der schöne Tod: Zeremonialstrukturen des Wiener
Hofes bei Tod und Begräbnis zwischen 1640 und 1740 on the Viennese court aris-
tocracy.52 To this should be added studies of the papacy with Agostino Bagli-
ani’s study of papal funerals and Minou Schraven’s work on early modern ritu-
als in St. Peter’s, Rome.53 Gender has become an important lens through which
to understand representations of power, and queenly and female aristocratic
burials have provided rich sources of study. For example, Anne, duchess of
Brittany and twice queen of France, received elaborate funerary rituals, at the

52 Danielle Westerhof, Death and the Noble Body in Medieval England (Woodbridge: 2008);
Juliusz A. Chrościcki (ed.), Les funérailles princières en Europe, XVIe-​XVIIIe siècle. 1, Le
grand théâtre de la mort (Versailles: 2012); Helga Czerny, Der Tod der bayerischen Herzöge
im Spätmittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit 1347–​1579 (Munich: 2005); Linda Brüggemann,
Herrschaft und Tod in der Frühen Neuzeit: Das Sterbe-​und Begräbniszeremoniell pre-
ussischer Herrscher vom Grossen Kurfürsten bis zu Friedrich Wilhelm II. (1688–​1797)
(Munich: 2015); Magdalena Hawlik-​Van der Water, Der schöne Tod: Zeremonialstrukturen
des Wiener Hofes bei Tod und Begräbnis zwischen 1640 und 1740 (Vienna: 1989).
53 Agostino Bagliani, Le corps du pape (Paris: 1997); Minou Schraven, Festive Funerals in Early
Modern Italy: The Art and Culture of Conspicuous Commemoration (Farnham: 2014).

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royal mausoleum of Saint-​Denis but also in her duchy capital of Nantes, where
her heart was buried in the ducal mausoleum of the Carmelite Convent.54
The ritual ‘journey’ of the medieval Christian body from deathbed to final
resting place and beyond, is examined in this volume by Madeleine Gray. The
essay commences with a discussion of current scholarship on the practice
of commending the soul, material preparations of the body for burial, the
funeral, and its associated liturgies for interment and commemoration. As a
case study, Gray focuses on Welsh funerary culture, particularly of the nobili-
ty, which has important contrasts as well as similarities with the rest of Latin
Christendom. Anna Duch contributes to the literature on royal burials with
an examination of the English royal funeral of the later Middle Ages, a highly
stage-​managed event, from the moment of the king’s death to his interment.
Duch plays particular attention to elaborate gift giving. Every church which
hosted the royal corpse received gifts from the king’s household, with the
final funeral mass immediately before interment being the most ornate and
costly, involving the donation of cloths of gold and funerary achievements.
Duch interrogates the theological beliefs attached to these oblations and dis-
sects the intricate offertory ceremonies. Ultimately, she argues, although the
theatrical performance was appropriate to the station of the king, the true
objective of the ceremonies was common to all Christian funerals, the deliv-
erance of a church’s fees and the offering of votive oblations for the sake of
the soul.
Protestantism in the western churches challenged and reshaped elite fu-
nerary practice. But while the theology of the soul’s journey changed, the-
atricality and legitimation did not. This is shown in Gordon Raeburn’s essay
for this volume on Reformed communities, principally Scotland. Raeburn’s
study of burial in the churches of the Reformed Protestant traditions of
Scotland and beyond shows how they attempted to reform death and burial
through the removal of ceremony, ritual, and superstition, as well as the al-
teration of aspects of burial such as the appropriateness of certain locations
or the performance of sermons. It uses the burial of the reformers them-
selves and examples of aristocratic burial, to show how exemplary burial
should work.
If we turn to Eastern and Southern Europe, there were fewer dissenting re-
ligious movements, but again, early modernity saw shifts in ritual traditions
of elites. Two contributions in this volume examine regions of Orthodox

54 Jacques Santrot, Les doubles funérailles d’Anne de Bretagne: Le corps et le cœur (janvier-​
mars 1514) (Geneva: 2017).

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Introduction: Dying, Death, and Commemoration, 1350–1700 17

tradition. The Orthodox world was little influenced by the Reformation and
Counter/​Catholic Reform movements of Western Europe and there was no
marked departure of doctrine or practice in the early modern period. The
documentary bases for studies of Orthodox churches are also different from
those of the Western churches, so both contributions here rely upon specific
sources. Zachary Chitwood examines dying, death, and burial in the Orthodox
tradition of Byzantium and the Greek Churches from the 14th to the 17th cen-
turies. Here, in contrast with Western Europe, there was an absence of a theo-
logically defined, purgatory-​type space, but a different sort of hurdle to get
into heaven, the tollgates. An important cause of change in Byzantine funer-
ary and commemorative practices was the effect of Ottoman rule on the use
of Christian charitable foundations or waqf and the decline of Constantino-
ple as a focus for elite commemorative practices. Case studies of the religious
houses of the Athonite Monastery of Pantokrator, the Dionysiou, and the Stau-
roniketa, and the example of the patron Mara Branković, wife of Murad ii,
illustrate elite practices of death and commemoration. Non-​elite death and
funerary traditions are also considered through an examination of the acts of
the Pontic Monastery of Vazelon and the Macedonian Monastery of St John
Prodromos. Ludwig Steindorff examines death, burial, and remembrance in
the Orthodox tradition of the East of Europe, focusing on the territories of
the former Kievan realm: the principalities united under the rule of the grand
prince and later tsar of Muscovy, and the territories which were integrated in
Poland and Lithuania. In Muscovy, while the tradition of monumental tomb
building was modest compared to Western Europe, the practices of donat-
ing to churches and liturgical commemoration flourished among the Ortho-
dox. The emergence of monasteries as centres of care for the dead was a new
development from the second half of the 15th century. It was accompanied
by a corresponding “pragmatic literacy,” that is, of a careful documentation
of commemoration which is unique to this region. These practices were less
common among the Orthodox in Poland-​Lithuania, perhaps because of west-
ern influences. Here, monastic liturgical care for the dead had lost much of its
attractiveness and was replaced by a move towards “visible” commemoration
through monumental tombs.
Looking comparatively and over the long term, the Orthodox world had
much in common with the Western tradition. The studies by Chitwood and
Steindorff show that care for the deceased on the basis of donations was a
common tradition in Catholic and Orthodox religious practice. Such compar-
isons have been highlighted by the work on endowments by Michael Borgolte
and subsequent scholars. Borgolte looks at the interdependence between care
for the deceased, foundation, and commemoration, common to Christianity,

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Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism.55 Yet there was no single, monolithic practice
across Christianity, not even in the Orthodox world. In the eastern Slavic re-
gions, there were clear differences between Muscovy and the Orthodox areas
in Poland-​Lithuania. In Muscovy, the role of the large monasteries as centres
of care for the deceased from the 15th to the 17th centuries is reminiscent of
monasteries like Cluny in the High Middle Ages. This did not occur in Poland-​
Lithuania. Yet only in Poland-​Lithuania were Orthodox brotherhoods formed,
following the Catholic pattern. The Greek and South Slav Orthodox world was
heavily affected by the establishment of Ottoman rule and the fall of Byzan-
tium. Christianity was no longer the religion of the ruler and the elite, and
Christians were in an inferior position.
The richest seam of recent historical work probably comes in the form of
studies of liturgical and para-​liturgical commemoration for the dead, usually
linked with studies of funerary practice and memorialisation. Again, with cur-
rent interest in signification and meaning, the textual record and the gestural,
visual, and aural aspect of liturgy, are used to illustrate changing belief over
time; the transformative impact of the Reformation on liturgical commemo-
ration is a common theme. The practices of the British Isles, particularly En-
gland, are well covered. Pioneering studies by Clive Burgess on Bristol, Caroline
Litzenberger on Gloucestershire, and others, used wills to show the rate and
extent of penetration of Protestant ideas into local communities, through their
burial and commemoration practice.56 Such work continues, with recent ex-
amples being Sally Badham’s detailed survey of textual and material commem-
oration across England, Judith Middleton-​Stewart’s regional study of Suffolk,
and Steve Werronon’s of Ripon in North Yorkshire.57 France and the Rhineland
are represented by studies of conventual and collegiate church necrologies
and civic wills. As examples, Michelle Fournié has studied responses to pur-
gatory in the French Midi, largely through collegiate foundations in Toulouse;
Charlotte Stanford has worked on the Book of Donors of Strasbourg Cathedral;
Arthur Bisseger has analysed the practices associated with the donors of on a

55 Michael Borgolte, World History as the History of Endowments, 3000 BCE to 1500 CE, trans.
Zachary Chitwood (Leiden and Boston: 2020).
56 Clive Burgess, “By Quick and By Dead: Wills and Pious Provision in Late Medieval
Bristol,” English Historical Review 102 (1987), 837–​58; Caroline Litzenberger, The English
Reformation and the Laity: Gloucestershire 1540–​1580 (Cambridge: 1997).
57 Sally Badham, Seeking Salvation: Commemorating the Dead in the Late-​Medieval English
Parish (Donington: 2015); Judith Middleton-​Stewart, Inward Purity and Outward Splendour:
Death and Remembrance in the Deanery of Dunwich, Suffolk, 1370–​1547 (Woodbridge:
2001); Steve Werronen, Religion, Time and Memorial Culture in Late Medieval Ripon
(Woodbridge: 2017).

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Introduction: Dying, Death, and Commemoration, 1350–1700 19

mortuary roll at Lausanne; Rainer Berndt has edited a collection on memoria

and memory related to the necrology of the Parisian Abbey Saint-​Victor; and
William J. Courtney has studied commemoration in the medieval University
of Paris.58 The impact of the Counter-​and Catholic Reformations on memorial
practice and changes in ritual forms has also seen rich regional explorations
such as Elizabeth Tingle on Brittany.59 Studies of post-​Reformation German
commemoration, Protestant and Catholic, have been particularly prominent,
with Craig Koslofsky’s study of transition from Catholic to Protestant ars
moriendi, which paid particular attention to the Lutheran tradition, and Trev-
or Johnston’s work on the Counter-​Reformation of the Upper Wurttemburg
region being of most importance.60
Sermons as a form of memoria have stimulated a number of recent proj-
ects, particularly for Protestant territories. German Lutheran sermon studies
include Ulrike Ludwig’s analysis of texts of 16th-​century funerary sermons
for nobles who served the dukes of Saxony, showing the impact of religious
change on representations of spirituality, particularly new emphases on piety,
humility, and religious conduct.61 Tarald Rasmussen and Jon Øygarden Flæten’s
collection of essays, Preparing for Death, Remembering the Dead, focuses on
Lutheran and Calvinist communities in Scandinavia, Germany, and Switzer-
land, and demonstrates that sermons show denominational differences. Partly,
these consist in the use of genres: funeral sermons are frequently used by Lu-
therans, while they are much rarer in the Reformed tradition. They also find
continuities, for example, between 16th-​century Lutheran funeral sermons
and the late medieval tradition of ars moriendi.62 A project on funerary ser-
mons called “Preaching Death” based at the Université de Montpellier iii took

58 Charlotte A. Stanford, Commemorating the Dead in Late Medieval Strasbourg: The

Cathedral’s Book of Donors and its Use (1320–​1521) (Farnham: 2011); Bisseger, Une paroisse
raconte ses morts; Michelle Fournié, Le Ciel peut-​il attendre? Le culte du Purgatoire
dans le Midi de la France (1320 environ-​1520 environ) (Paris: 1997); Rainer Berndt (ed.),
Wider das Vergessen und für das Seelenheil: Memoria und Totengedenken im Mittelalter,
(Münster: 2013); William J. Courtney, Rituals for the Dead: Religion and Community in the
Medieval University of Paris (Notre Dame, IN: 2019).
59 Elizabeth C. Tingle, Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–​1720 (Farnham: 2012).
60 Craig Koslofsky, The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany,
1450–​1700 (Basingstoke: 2000); Trevor Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles: The
Counter Reformation in the Upper Palatinate (Farnham: 2009).
61 Ulrike Ludwig, “Erinnerungsstrategien in Zeiten des Wandels: Zur Bedeutung der
Reformation als Generationserfahrung im Spiegel sächsischer Leichenpredigten für
adlige Beamte,” AfR, 104 (2013), 158–​84.
62 Tarald Rasmussen and Jon Øygarden Flæten (eds), Preparing for Death, Remembering the
Dead (Gottingen: 2015).

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an interdisciplinary look at English and French, largely Protestant sermons.63

But Protestants were not the only sermonisers. The Counter Reformation also
inspired preachers to speak of the dead. For Spain, Carmen M. Grace, has
studied the sermon given by Fray Alonso de Cabrera on the death of Philip ii,
concluding that sermons were a central part of baroque funeral rites through
which the preacher communicated the rules of conduct necessary to achieve
salvation, and for reinforcing the legitimacy of the Habsburg dynasty.64 Ser-
mons have also been used to study gendered aspects of funerary traditions,
specifically those related to women. Again, Protestant territories dominate.
Femke Molekamp has studied 17th-​century English funeral sermons written
in commemoration of women, noting general themes such as women’s piety,
devotional life, and domestic activities.65
The two-​part chapter in this volume by Jacqueline Eales and Ruth Atherton
charts the evolution of the funerary sermon in the Reformation, first in En-
gland, then Germany, and examines confessional differences in the genre. For
England, Eales shows the growing importance of sermons for middling sort pa-
trons and for women, across the later Middle Ages and more especially, in the
post-​Elizabethan period; for the German territories Atherton examines funeral
sermons delivered in the Lutheran cities of Wittenberg and Nuremberg, in bi-​
confessional Augsburg, and in the Lutheran/​Reformed Palatinate. Protestant
sermons were not meant to eulogise the dead; instead, they were to instruct
the living on how to live and die well, drawing attention to the dangers of living
impious lives. Broader themes of identity and meaning suggest that sermons
were influenced by local circumstances and individual state policies, rather
than developed only along strictly confessional lines.

2.2 The Body, Its Treatment, Representation and Meaning

The centrality of the body to the exercise of power in post-​modern scholar-
ship has had a profound impact on the theorising of death and burial, as many
of the essays in this volume show. In particular, the dead body or corpse has
been examined as a social construct and a site of power and performativity.

63 A collection of essays on England and France, Catholic and Protestant, resulting from the
project is Paula Barros, Inès Kirschleger, and Claudie Martin-​Ulrich (eds), Prêcher la mort
à l’époque moderne: Regards croisés sur la France et l’Angleterre (Paris: 2020).
64 Carmen M. Grace, “Exequias reales en la Contrarreforma: Doctrina católica y Barroco
en el sermón funeral de fray Alonso de Cabrera (1549?–​1598) por la muerte de Felipe II,”
Bulletin of Spanish Studies 92 (2015), 25–​49.
65 Femke Molekamp, “Seventeenth-​ Century Funeral Sermons and Exemplary Female
Devotion: Gendered Spaces and Histories,” Renaissance and Reformation/​Renaissance et
Réforme, 35 (2012), 43–​63.

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Introduction: Dying, Death, and Commemoration, 1350–1700 21

Funerals of course had the body at their centre. With regard to the physicality
and materiality of the corpse itself, two areas have received scholarly atten-
tion: representation and treatment. Ideas relating to the representation and
understanding of the body constitutes a broad field of study which is difficult
to categorise. It has been arising partly from medical history and interest in
anatomy, but has since extrapolated out to an interaction with religious be-
lief. For example, Katharine Park has studied dissection in late medieval En-
gland, France, and Italy, concluding that attitudes toward the recently dead
and the length of time envisioned for the separation of body from soul resulted
in Italians resisting division and northern Europeans opposing dissection. She
argues that Italians identified the person more with the soul than the body
and thus had no objections to autopsies, while northern Europeans viewed
the body as an integral part of the person even after death and thus resisted
procedures that dissected the corpse.66 One of the recent seminal studies in
this field is that of Romedio Schmitz-​Esser, Der Leichnam im Mittelalter, on
the materiality of death, the physical treatment of corpses, and their cultur-
al construction in community and religious identity.67 Schmitz-​Esser argues
that the significance of corpses relates directly to the cultures from which they
originate, proposing that, as there are different cultures present throughout
medieval Europe, so corpses had different meanings across the continent. He
questions whether medieval literature about dying and death is really repre-
sentative of actual practices as evidenced in archaeological finds and stresses
the importance of using new archaeological and medical approaches to bodies
to enhance our interpretation of more traditional evidence. Schmitz-​Esser is
particularly interested in the interactions between corpses and memory; he
argues that the more medieval theologians sought to understand the relation-
ship between death, the soul, and the body, the more they came closer to the
bodies of the dead. This important study places the materiality of the body
at the centre of scholarly discussions of death and the afterlife. For the early
modern period, practices and cultural readings of human dissection remains a
popular topic, for example with the survey of early modern England by Eliza-
beth T. Hurren, Dissecting the Early Modern Corpse, representing an important

66 Katharine Park, “The Life of the Corpse: Division and Dissection in Late Medieval Europe,”
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 50 (1995), 111–​32.
67 Romedio Schmitz-​Esser, Der Leichnam im Mittelalter: Einbalsamierung, Verbrennung und
die kulturelle Konstruktion des toten Körpers (Ostfildern: 2014). English translation as The
Corpse in the Middle Ages: Embalming, Cremating and the Cultural Construction of the
Dead Body, trans. Albrecht Classen and Carolin Radke (Turnhout: 2020).

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example.68 Studies of dead bodies are enormously diverse, however, from their
representation on the stage to their public use as relics and in other rituals, as
discussed in a collection of case-​study essays including Naples and Palermo,
edited by Silvia Cavicchioli and Luigi Provero.69
A second fecund area of study related to the dead body is linked more di-
rectly to power, the use of punishment and especially executions, as sites of the
performance of justice and authority. There are increasingly numbers of stud-
ies of theatres of ritualised death across Europe. Adriano Prospero has pro-
vided a European overview, with Italian material figuring prominently, as has
Franck Lafage.70 Freddy Joris has provided several studies of executions over
the medieval and early modern periods, and there is Pascal Bastien’s Une his-
toire de la peine de mort: Bourreaux et supplices for Paris and London.71 Richard
J. Evans examines the evolution of capital punishment in the German lands
across the early modern and modern periods.72 Thea Tomaini’s edited collec-
tion looks across different European regions, on three themes: interactions be-
tween the dead and the living; legal approaches to death in terms of criminals,
executions, and regulations for burial; and funerary art and memento mori.73
Art historians have used the rich evidence of pictorial representations of death
to consider understanding and uses of bodies. John Decker, in Death, Torture
and the Broken Body in European art, 1300–​1650, looks comparatively at the
Netherlands and Italy in detail, but also at Germany and England.74 In this vol-
ume, the dramatized, emotional impact of the representation of violent death
is discussed by Ralph Dekoninck in a study of the iconography of martyrdom
in post-​Tridentine art. Dekoninck charts the historiography of the ‘invention’

68 Elizabeth T. Hurren, Dissecting the Early Modern Corpse: Staging Post-​ Execution
Punishment in Early Modern England (London: 2016).
69 Silvia Cavicchioli and Luigi Provero (eds), Public Uses of Human Remains and Relics in
History (London: 2019).
70 Adriano Prosperi, Delitto e perdono: La pena di morte nell’orizzonte mentale dell’Europa
cristiana, XIV-​XVIII secolo (Turin: 2013); Franck Lafage, Le théâtre de la mort: Lecture poli-
tique de l’apparat funèbre dans l’Europe du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: 2012).
71 Freddy Joris, Mourir sur l’échafaud: Sensibilité collective face à la mort et perception des
exécutions capitales du Bas Moyen Âge à la fin de l’Ancien Régime (Liège: 2005); Pascal
Bastien, Une histoire de la peine de mort:Bourreaux et supplices: Paris, Londres, 1500–​1800
(Paris: 2011).
72 Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany 1600–​1987 (Oxford:
1996).
73 Thea Tomaini (ed.), Dealing with the Dead: Mortality and Community in Medieval and
Early Modern Europe (Leiden: 2018).
74 John R. Decker (ed.), Death, Torture and the Broken Body in European Art, 1300–​1650
(Farnham: 2015).

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Introduction: Dying, Death, and Commemoration, 1350–1700 23

of baroque death and tests its veracity in a study of artistic depictions of the
deaths of martyrs. He finds a relationship between such dramatized deaths
and the rhetoric of love, in particular through the iconography of ecstasy. The
corporeal interest of these studies is clear.
Two essays in the volume focus on “special” bodies, whose earthly remains
elicited distinctive responses from the living. In the first of these, Freddy
Dominguez examines saints and relics, showing how the spiritual energy of
holy bodies and objects remained tangible amid challenges posed by human-
ism and the Reformation. He concludes that it was imperative for the post-​
Tridentine church to reaffirm the place of the holy dead (and their remnants)
and for Rome to control access to sainthood, to maintain its spiritual author-
ity. Yet there remained ambiguities and tensions within the Catholic church
in establishing the parameters of sanctity and holy objects, especially where
it came to “living saints” and contemporary martyrs. Polina Ignatova’s essay
charts different attitudes to the malevolent dead in her essay on ghosts and
revenants. She argues that the undead were employed by narrators to convey
particular messages, with different roles assigned to ghosts and to restless
corpses. Ghosts were used to warn the living about hell and purgatory, and to
ask for help to gain heaven; walking corpses usually appeared in “cautionary
tale” narratives, where an individual was punished for their sins. The actions
taken by the living to get rid of ghosts and wandering corpses such as prayers,
burning a corpse or dumping it into water, and the meaning attached to these
apotropaic items, are discussed. Ignatova shows great continuities of beliefs
about the undead, from the central Middle Ages onwards.

2.3 Materiality, Material Culture and Sacred Space

The third category of analysis prominent in recent historiography and in this
current Companion volume is materiality: the material culture of death and
burial, and the use of sacralised place and space. One of the most important
developments in this scholarship is the integration of archaeology and foren-
sic anthropology into histories of late medieval and early modern death. While
there have been many archaeological reports about burials over the last half
century, their integration into narratives of material and religious culture has
contributed new ways of thinking about the spatial arrangement of the dead,
the ways in which bodies were treated, the history of disease and mortality,
and changing social relationships, values and aspirations. Northern Europe-
an studies are particularly prominent, because of the rate of urban develop-
ment and the consequent archaeological intervention in these regions: En-
gland, the Low Countries, the Baltic states, and Scandinavia have produced
important works on mortuary archaeology. A useful summary of research into

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post-​medieval burial archaeology across Europe is provided by Layla Renshaw

and Natasha Powers. They explore the osteological study of demography and
health; forensic archaeology and technological developments in the study of
the dead; and the ontological and ethical status of the dead in archaeology.75
In the burgeoning field of cemetery studies, two “projects” stand out. One is the
work of Transmortale, an international research group based in the University
of Hamburg and the Museum für Sepulkralkultur in Kassel, engaged in inter-
disciplinary approaches to dying, death, and grief. Their recent conference on
the theme of “Materiality and Spatiality of Death, Burial and Commemora-
tion” has been published in a special issue of the journal Mortality (2019). The
second is the work of Sarah Tarlow and associates at Leicester University. Ini-
tially working on post-​medieval Britain and Ireland, more recently they have
expanded their scope to comparative studies of European regions.76 Interest-
ing documentary work has also come from late medieval Spain, where Ana del
Campo has shown the increasing professionalisation and regulation of funeral
services in Zaragoza, with sextons, professional mourners, and funeral direc-
tors being increasingly employed in the city.77
One long-​standing area of interest, which continues to generate large
amounts of scholarship, is monumental commemoration. Since the new mil-
lennium, studies have expanded out of their art and family history heartland,
to studies of theological and ritual function, social status and power. Every
European region has generated important studies, largely for elites –​because
they left sumptuous monuments to their posterity –​but also for lower social
groups, where evidence survives. The conclusions of these studies are similar
everywhere in Europe. In the Middle Ages, monuments were religious memo-
ria for the good of the soul, “making” intercessory requests, visually and in text,
and also designed to heighten the status of family and individual as well as
to provide legitimacy for their domination of land and power. For England,
Nigel Saul has produced several studies of the monuments constructed by the

75 Layla Renshaw and Natasha Powers, “The Archaeology of Post-​medieval Death and
Burial,” Post-​Medieval Archaeology 50 (2016), 159–​77.
76 Sarah Tarlow, Ritual, Belief, and the Dead in Early Modern Britain and Ireland
(Cambridge: 2011); Annia Cherryson, Zoë Crossland, and Sarah Tarlow, A Fine and
Private Place: The Archaeology of Death and Burial in Post-​Medieval Britain and Ireland
(Leicester: 2012); Sarah Tarlow (ed.), The Archaeology of Death in Post-​Medieval Europe
(Berlin: 2015).
77 Ana Del Campo, “Ceux qui travaillent avec la mort: Professionnalisation et travaux occa-
sionnels de fossoyeurs, pleureuses et organisatrices de funérailles à Saragosse (Royaume
d’Aragon) à la fin du Moyen Âge,” Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome. Italie et
Méditerranée 123 (2011), 81–​90.

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Introduction: Dying, Death, and Commemoration, 1350–1700 25

nobility, for which excellent physical evidence survives: firstly, for the Cobham
family of Kent, whose exceptional mausoleum of monumental brasses offers
a microhistory of the later Middle Ages by itself, then a wider study of the
patronage of the nobility in rural parish churches.78 For the Low Countries,
Douglas Brine has studied wall-​mounted monuments in the churches of the
towns, again highlighting the growing influence of belief in purgatory on de-
sign and inscription.79 In this volume, Robert Marcoux focuses on France to
examine the relationship between the body, funeral liturgy, and the function-
ality of tomb monuments in the later Middle Ages. He looks at ways in which
the memory of the dead invested the liturgical space of churches. He describes
major changes in appearance and setting of tomb monuments as they came
to embody both worldly and spiritual values in the context of “flamboyant”
piety. This included signs of individuality and status such as heraldic devices,
portraiture, and social attributes, as well as the various features used to “trig-
ger” intercession, particularly prayer. Christina Welch pursues some of these
themes across the later Middle Ages and early modern period, in art and litera-
ture. In art, she traces the evolution of the image of death from the skeleton to
the male grim reaper and explores the differential gendering of the “personali-
ty” of death in different linguistic communities; this is accompanied by an ex-
amination of death in vernacular literature, which tends to focus on purgatory.
There was, of course, overlap in themes across texts and images.
The Protestant and Catholic Reformations did not see an end to monumen-
tal memorials, quite the reverse. Iconography changed and more text was used,
but the didactic functions and social display remained. Of particular note are
studies of monuments in central Europe, where confessional cultures came
into close contact. Jeannie Łabno’s Commemorating the Polish Renaissance
Child shows that there was a regionally unique tradition of erecting funeral
monuments to young children and a distinctive iconography of the child as a
sleeping putto with a skull. She concludes that although the putto-​and-​skull
motif later became popular throughout Europe as a memento mori, only in
Poland was it adapted to represent individual children.80 Aleksandra Koutny-​
Jones examines commemoration in early modern Poland-​Lithuania, through a

78 Nigel Saul, Death, Art and Memory in Medieval England: The Cobham Family and their
Monuments 1300–​1500 (Oxford: 2001) and Lordship and Faith: The English Gentry and the
Parish Church in the Middle Ages (Oxford: 2017).
79 Douglas Brine, Pious Memories: The Wall-​Mounted Memorial in the Burgundian Netherlands
(Leiden: 2015).
80 Jeannie Łabno, Commemorating the Polish Renaissance Child: Funeral Monuments and
Their European Context (Farnham: 2012).

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range of baroque artworks such as coffin portraits, funerary decorations, tomb

chapels, and religious landscapes, again discussing the relationship between
intercession, status, and authority.81 For Protestant regions, historians have a
tendency to see exceptionality: the rejection of purgatory and prayers for the
dead changed the way the dead were memorialized. For England, two pioneer-
ing studies showed the decline of intercession and the rise of social and mor-
al virtue as the predominant message of monuments: Nigel Llewellyn’s work
on domestic artefacts and their constant commemorative presence, and Pe-
ter Sherlock’s study of monuments and memory, explore how early modern
people attempted to be remembered, often in deliberately crafted messages
to future generations.82 There has been a particular interest in epitaphs on
post-​Reformation funerary monuments, with their religious and Classical in-
spirations. Scott Newstok has studied English epitaphs in the light of changing
confessional allegiances and national consciousness. He argues that an end
to intercessory functions did not reduce the sumptuousness of display, for he
found that aristocrats spent three times the amount at the end of the Elizabe-
than period than had been spent a century earlier and Puritans spent as much
as other Protestants.83 Monuments bear witness to the conscious crafting of
social priorities, proprieties, and spiritual pieties.
The private sacred space affordable by elite dead with its privileged com-
memorative function was the family mortuary chapel. Initially spaces associat-
ed with personal priestly intercession for the soul, after the Reformation, elites
of both confessions continued to construct and refurbish them in conventual
(Catholic) and parish (Catholic and Protestant) churches. The chantry/​family
chapels of English parishes have been studied in detail by the archaeologist
Simon Roffey.84 Their use as burial and intercessory spaces in the Middle Ages
was changed only by the elimination of their private liturgical function; fami-
lies continued to use them as mausolea with ever more elaborate monuments.
In France, the high-​status Saintes-​Chapelles have been studied by Julien No-
blet. The original, built by Louis ix in Paris, was used to house the great relic
of the Crown of Thorns and to act as a memorial chapel for the king. It was

81 Aleksandra Koutny-​Jones, Visual Cultures of Death in Central Europe: Contemplation and

Commemoration in Early Modern Poland-​Lithuania (Leiden: 2015).
82 Nigel Llewellyn, The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual 1500–​1800
(London: 1991); Peter Sherlock, Monuments and Memory in Early Modern England
(Aldershot: 2008).
83 Scott L. Newstok, Quoting Death in Early Modern England: The Poetics of Epitaphs Beyond
the Tomb (Basingstoke: 2009).
84 Simon Roffey, Chantry Chapels and Medieval Strategies for the Afterlife (Stroud: 2008).

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Introduction: Dying, Death, and Commemoration, 1350–1700 27

adopted as a design scheme by aristocrats claiming descent from Louis, repli-

cated on their domains and legitimised by royal gifts of thorns. This way, family
memorials were combined with a relic providing intercession with Christ.85
The growth in Christology to which chapels were often linked can also be seen
in Italian building projects, for example Robert Maniura shows that the burial
chapel of Giuliano Guizzelmi (1446–​1518), constructed in the crypt of Prato Ca-
thedral below the altar of the great crucifix, demonstrates the use of this space
as a primary intercessory strategy –​one available only to the very wealthy of
course.86 Begoña Alonso Ruiz shows how in late medieval Spain there was a
programmatic design of funerary chapels, covered by vaults of star-​shaped ribs.
Initially used in the great funerary chapels of Toledo and Burgos, they were
imitated in an endless number of smaller chapels throughout the peninsula,
resulting in a highly homogeneous group of structures erected within a limit-
ed span of time.87 Chapel furbishment declined in 16th century, but once the
Reformation turbulence calmed, they reappeared. Vanessa Harding has shown
the growth in private space commandeered in Paris and London churches by
elites as has Elizabeth Tingle for early modern Brittany.88
Confessional conflict over burial place shows in stark terms religious ten-
sions caused by the Reformation. Location of burial was a serious issue in bi-​
confessional communities, for Protestants wanted to be laid to rest with their
families and communities, while Catholics rejected the pollution that heretics
caused in sacred earth. Early work on this subject was carried out in the con-
text of the French Wars of Religion, specifically conflicts within towns, such as
the kingdom-​wide study of Penny Roberts for the 1560s.89 Keith Luria exam-
ined coexistence and conflict in the use of burial space in 17th-​century south-
ern France.90 He found differences between communities, indicative of lev-
els of co-​existences: in some places, rituals continued to be similar and space

85 Julien Noblet, En perpétuelle mémoire: Collégiales castrales et saintes-​chapelles à vocation

funéraire en France (1450–​1560) (Rennes: 2009).
86 Robert Maniura, “The burial Chapel of Giuliano Guizzelmi and the Demands of Devotion,”
Renaissance Studies 19 (2005), 185–​200.
87 Begoña Alonso Ruiz, “Un modelo funerario del tardogótico castellano: Las capillas trebo-
ladas,” Archivo Español de Arte 78 (2005), 277–​95.
88 Vanessa Harding, The Dead and the Living in Paris and London, 1500–​1670 (Cambridge: 2002);
Tingle; Purgatory.
89 Penny Roberts, “Contesting Sacred Space: Burial Disputes in Sixteenth-​Century France,”
in The Place of the Dead. Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern
Europe, eds Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (Cambridge: 2000), 131–​48.
90 Keith P. Luria, “Separated by Death? Burials, Cemeteries, and Confessional Boundaries in
Seventeenth-​Century France,” French Historical Studies 24 (2001), 185–​222.

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continued to be shared; in others, more distinct boundaries were created with

the division of parish cemeteries into separated zones. As persecution of Hu-
guenots increased, Protestant cemeteries were moved outside of communities,
creating a physical separation between the groups. David Luebke has looked at
burial practices in the bishopric of Münster, Germany, specifically at efforts by
the region’s Protestants to obtain churchyard burials in a Catholic-​dominated
city.91 Geert H. Janssen looks specifically at ritual funeral processions of stad-
holders in the Dutch Republic; in this multi-​denominational state, these cor-
teges were deliberately non-​confessional, in order to transcend religious divi-
sions in Dutch society.92

2.4 From Mentalité to Emotion

Finally, studies of attitudes towards death have long flourished as part of a his-
tory of mentalities with which we began, and latterly, as part of a history of
emotions. A central topic has been the means by which individuals prepared
for death, particularly the genre of literature known as ars moriendi and its fate
across the Reformation centuries. By these means, historians have attempted
to access interior piety, changing strategies for salvation, and beliefs about the
afterlife. Again, there is an enormous literature, which covers all European re-
gions and crosses the Reformation divide. Germany and the Habsburg regions
have been particularly rich in studies, with Koslofsky’s discussion of Lutheran
texts and the work by Austra Reinis on ars from the Habsburg territories.93
Germany has been the focus of seminal studies on feelings and emotions, with
Susan Karant-​Nunn’s The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emo-
tions in Early Modern Germany, and Lynne Tatlock’s edited collection Enduring
Loss in Early Modern Germany.94 Karant-​Nunn presents a comparative study of
the role of emotion or feeling in the religious experience of Catholics, Luther-
ans, and Calvinists in early-​modern Germany, taking one of her case studies as
pastoral support of the dying. She sees discernible “emotional scripts” at mo-
ments like this, at least as represented in guidance manuals and sermons, be-
coming integral to confessional identities and cultures. Ronald K. Rittgers’s The

91 David M. Luebke, “Confessions of the Dead Interpreting Burial Practice in the Late
Reformation,” AfR, 101 (2010), 55–​79.
92 Geert H. Janssen, “Political Ambiguity and Confessional Diversity in the Funeral
Processions of Stadholders in the Dutch Republic,” SCJ 40 (2009), 283–​301.
93 Koslofsky, The Reformation of the Dead; Austra Reinis, Reforming the Art of Dying: The ars
moriendi in the German Reformation (1519–​1528) (Aldershot: 2007).
94 Susan Karant-​Nunn, The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early
Modern Germany (Oxford: 2010); Lynne Tatlock (ed.), Enduring Loss in Early Modern
Germany: Cross Disciplinary Perspectives (Leiden: 2010).

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Introduction: Dying, Death, and Commemoration, 1350–1700 29

Reformation of Suffering: Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Late Medieval and
Early Modern Germany relates emotions more directly to religious life, with an
examination of consolation and its disciplinary function.95 A recent project
based in Finland has focused on northern Europe and has been published in
three volumes to date by Anu Lahtinen and Mia Korpiola: a general collection
on cultures of dying and dying in medieval and early modern Europe, a volume
on preparation for death, and one on planning for death, focusing on wills and
property transfer.96 Spain, with its highly visible baroque images of death, is
another centre of important work, for example by Jaime Aurell on attitudes to
death in the Middle Ages and that by Antonio Rey Hazas, Artes de bien morir,
which looks across the Middle Ages and early modern period.97
In this volume, Stephen Bates evaluates the means by which the dying were
comforted and prepared for death in the later medieval Latin west, especially
England. He investigates the range of strategies used by the living and by tes-
tators to provide for the sacraments, good works, and favourable saintly inter-
cession, to build up heavenly credit for their souls. Despite the shock of the
Black Death, Bates argues that the “art” of dying a good Christian death across
the 15th and early 16th centuries was not regarded fearfully, but something to
be approached with practicality and planning. In an essay on the Counter-​
Reformation in Europe, Elizabeth Tingle demonstrates changes in the way in
which the dying were prepared for their journey in post-​Tridentine Europe.
The Council of Trent confirmed the salvatory status of purgatory, good works,
the intercession of saints, and the importance of masses for the dead. How-
ever, the evolution of ars moriendi into devotional works containing personal
meditations on death; the culture of will-​making and testamentary practice;
the sacramental preparation of the sick; and the role of confraternities in as-
sisting the dying, made death more a concern for the individual while giving
a greater role in its mediation to communities and religious groups, especially
the clergy. A study of the emotional history of grieving is provided by Chris-
topher Ocker, as it was understood by theologians and physicians across the
period: the spiritual and physical manifestations of feeling, using vernacular

95 Ronald K. Rittgers, The Reformation of Suffering: Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Late
Medieval and Early Modern Germany (Oxford: 2012).
96 Mia Korpiola and Anu Lahtinen (eds), Cultures of Death and Dying in Medieval and Early
Modern Europe (Helsinki: 2015); Dying Prepared in Medieval and Early Modern Northern
Europe (Leiden: 2017); Planning for Death: Wills and Death-​Related Property Arrangements
in Europe, 1200–​1600 (Leiden: 2018).
97 Antonio Rey Hazas, Artes de bien morir: Ars moriendi de la Edad Media y del Siglo de
oro (Madrid: 2003); Jaime Aurell (ed.), Ante la muerte: Actitudes, espacios y formas en la
España medieval (Madrid: 2002).

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30  Booth and Tingle

literature, popular print, painting, and music. He finds many continuities in

popular and learned responses to death and expressions of mourning, across
the religious controversies of the 16th century and in contemporary changes in
the practice of medicine.
This collection of essays shows, therefore, that within the fundamental,
shared experience of mortality across all human societies, the responses to it
were endlessly variable over space and time. We get new understandings of
that variety, with studies of visual culture, the embodied experience, and emo-
tion. The Black Death did not shatter the religious cultures of medieval Eu-
rope, rather, eastern and western Christianity was rooted and flexible enough
to offer ways of understanding and coping with the catastrophe. The Refor-
mation reshaped beliefs about the afterlife, but not the fact of mourning, or
of verbal and physical commemoration of the dead. All societies continued to
fear the returning dead, although the physical remains of special bodies could
be exploited to the advantage of the living, as with the relics of saints. Above
all, Christians everywhere shared a fundamental belief, even if the means to
achieve it were contested, that the “… the wages of sin is death, but the free gift
of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”98 How they understood, acted
on, and represented that belief, forms the core of this volume.
98 nrsv Romans 6:23.

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 pa rt 1
Dying, Death, Burial and the Afterlife

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 ­c hapter 1

Changing Western European Visions of Christian

Afterlives, 1350–​1700: Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory

Elizabeth Tingle

For Christians of the pre-​modern period, belief in an afterlife was a basic tenet
of faith. The narrative of the New Testament is an exposition of the triumph of
life over death, achieved by Jesus Christ through his passion, crucifixion, res-
urrection, and ascension. Christian soteriology was –​and is –​therefore pred-
icated upon a hereafter, the nature of which is determined by the actions of
the living person, above all, faith in Christ. Such beliefs are restated with each
recital of the Apostles’ Creed, which proclaims the “resurrection of the body,
and life everlasting.” To understand fully the nature of Christianity, it is vital to
comprehend its eschatology for departed souls.
In the last twenty years, there has been a large literature on afterlives as be-
lieved and practised across the Renaissance and Reformation centuries, which
will be drawn upon here.1 What is clear is that during the later Middle Ages
and early modern period, beliefs shifted in western Europe, in terms of how
the soul achieved its eternal rest and where it resided. These changes will be
explored in this chapter. The main body of evidence used consists of the writ-
ings of theologians in France, Spain, and the British Isles, as case studies. It will
be demonstrated that beliefs in judgement, heaven, and hell remained large-
ly constant across the period, but the attack on purgatory that followed the
Reformation led to important transformations in belief and religious practice
concerning the spiritual realms. Ultimately, the resultant debates about after-
lives also led to some questioning of the evidence for a hereafter, among an
educated elite increasingly interested in empirical observation. In this chapter,
changing ideas about the geography of the afterlife, the nature of its compo-
nent realms and the means by which the soul made the journey, will be dis-
cussed. First, we turn to the means by which souls made the transition from
this world to the next.

1 Rather than duplicating references, please see the volume editors’ Introduction.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004443433_003

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34 Tingle

1 Transition to the Afterlife: Particular and Last Judgement

Christian eschatology rests upon a belief that after death each soul is judged
by God and sent to the place in the afterlife which it deserves. Christians of
the later Middle Ages believed that there were two points of judgement: the
first was immediately after death and the second, at the end of earthly time.
The relationship between particular –​that is, individual –​and general, or last,
judgement, has changed in importance over time. Historians have proposed
that over the late medieval and Reformation centuries, particular judgement
became pre-​eminent, while concern with the Last Judgement faded. The thesis
of Philippe Ariès on the individualization of the experience of death in this pe-
riod is important here.2 Ariès argued that as death came to be seen as the fate of
individuals rather than a collective experience, the Christian doctrines of Last
Judgement at the end of time and of the permanency of hell were increasingly
modified. Pierre Chaunu, historian of religious practice in early modern Paris,
took up the argument, stating that “the thought of hell [was] more insupport-
able than that of death itself. Hell [was] total death, a second death.”3 To mod-
ify this dreadful fate, the concept of a particular judgement developed, where
souls would be sent to a “third place” of purgatory to expiate their sins before
achieving heaven. The theological implications of particular judgement were
far-​reaching for religious practice, and persistent over time, as we will see.
The Christian scriptures make clear that at the end of time, there will be
a second coming of the Messiah –​Jesus Christ –​and the destruction of the
earthly realm. This will involve the corporeal resurrection of the dead and a
final or Last Judgement of all people, living and deceased. The good and the
evil will be separated and sentenced to their eternal destination, heaven or
hell. The Last Judgement was described in numerous ways in the New Testa-
ment: Matthew describes it as an allegorical separation of sheep and goats,
while the Epistles and Revelation provide the faithful with an outline as to
what will happen at that time. They state that the skies will open, and the Lord
will appear with a great noise, the voices of angels and the trumpet of God.
Those who have died in faith will rise first, followed by the living. They will be
taken up to where Christ, fully God and man, will appear in his true body to
judge.4 All Christians will have to account for themselves before God the sover-
eign magistrate, without recourse to appeal. He is a stern judge, incorruptible,

2 Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death (London: 1983).

3 Pierre Chaunu, La mort à Paris: XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siècles (Paris: 1978), 139.
4 1 Thess 4:13–​18.

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Changing Western European Visions of Christian Afterlives 35

inflexible, and inexorable.5 Apocalypse or the end of the world will follow and
a new order under the rulership of God will commence. Rapture will lift the
saved to heaven with Jesus Christ and damnation will cast the evil souls forever
into hell. Belief in the Last Judgement as the ultimate fate of all human beings
remained a central part of orthodox Christian belief across the period. It was
the fate which all dreaded and for which all were enjoined to prepare, through
faith and for some, by good works.
But from the time of the early church onwards, when it became apparent
that the expected messiah would not appear immediately, Last Judgement was
clearly going to occur at some time in the future. By the 14th century, there were
seen to be two tribunals, one particular and immediate, and the other general,
at the end of time. At death, souls underwent immediate judgement. In pop-
ular religious culture, they were weighed by the archangel St Michael, then
sent to their spiritual destination until the day of resurrection. At that point,
soul and body would be reunited, judged finally, and then sent to their eternal
home of heaven or hell. There were tensions in this view, admitted by some
theologians –​there was no particular judgement in the Bible –​but there is a
good deal of evidence from late medieval religious practice to show the wide-
spread internalisation of the belief. One example is the large number of advice
guides or ars moriendi widely produced and illustrated with woodcut prints,
showing the necessary preparations one should make for death. Indeed, these
works played a considerable role in propagating the eschatology of particular
judgement.6 Such preparations included calling upon heavenly intercessors,
Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the saints as the essays in this volume by Gray
and Bates show. They required the undertaking of good works in life and after
death such as charitable donations, funding of church construction and deco-
ration, bridge and road building, and the provision of hospitals and alms hous-
es. Above all, appropriate funeral obsequies were important, for it was widely
believed that gaining a favourable judgement from God would be greatly aided
by prayers and masses said for the deceased.7 Thus, during the later medieval
centuries, funerary practice changed. The most striking transformation was

5 François Lebrun, Les hommes et la mort en Anjou aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: Essai de démo­
graphie et de psychologie historiques (Paris: 1971), 445–​6.
6 See for example Roger Chartier, “Les arts de mourir 1450–​1600,” AESC 31 (1976), 51–​76; Daniel
Roche, “La mémoire de la mort: Recherche sur la place des arts de mourir dans la librairie et
la lecture en France aux 17e et 18e siècles,” AESC 31 (1976), 76–​119; Austra Reinis, Reforming the
Art of Dying: The ars moriendi in the German Reformation (1519–​1528) (Aldershot: 2007).
7 Sara T. Nalle, God in La Mancha: Religious Reform and the People of Cuenca, 1500–​1650
(Baltimore: 1992), 194.

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the concentration of masses in the period immediately after death, with the
first year afterwards being particularly important.8 Jacques Chiffoleau argues
that funeral obsequies show that death was less of an instantaneous act than
a process, involving stages which had to be passed through, closing at the end
of twelve months with a year’s mind service. At this point, the deceased passed
definitively into the world of the dead.9 We can see this in the will of Jacques
de la Croix, canon of Notre Dame of Nantes, who founded a mass “because he
would have to give account [of his life] before his Sacred Majesty” and fear-
ing this, he wanted “with all his heart to do something to honour the blessed
Trinity.”10 Medieval writers often described the deathbed scene in terms of a
supernatural battle for the soul of the dying individual in which the heavenly
and infernal hosts vied for possession of the prize.11
With the fracture of western Christianity at the Reformation, Protestant theo-
logians put greater formal emphasis on the Last Judgement, as part of their rejec-
tion of purgatory. In devotional handbooks and consolatory literature, the fate of
the soul immediately after death was often glossed over. Comfort for the just in
anticipation of the day of judgement became the main theme. Thus, Pierre de
Moulin, Huguenot pastor in Paris and Sedan, in Familière, Instruction pour consol-
er les malades, avec plusieurs prières sur ce sujet of 1625 wrote: “The sick need not
fear Judgement: they will not appear before God as before a severe and rigorous
judge, but as a propitious and peaceful father to you through Jesus Christ” and
Christ would be their advocate and intercessor on that day.12 In the East Midlands
of England, a common pictorial theme on Swithland slate gravestones was the
angel of the resurrection, sounding the trumpet so the glorious dead might arise.
Yet in practice, particular judgement remained a core element of Protestant
eschatology. The difference was in their rejection of the function of saintly in-
tercessors at this tribunal, of the role of good works in swaying the decision of
God and in the place of purgatory in salvation. Protestants faced judgement
alone, clothed solely in faith, and God’s decision was independent and abso-
lute.13 John Calvin, the leader of the reformed church in Geneva, took literally St

8 See for example, Arthur Bissegger, Une paroisse raconte ses morts: L’obituaire de l’église
Saint-​Paul à Villeneuve (XIVe–​XVe siècle) (Lausanne: 2003), 80–​1.
9 Jacques Chiffoleau, La comptabilité de l’au-​delà: Les hommes, la mort et la religion dans la
région d’Avignon à la fin du Moyen Âge (c.1320-​c.1480) (Rome: 1980), 147.
10 Archives Départementales de la Loire-​Atlantique (adla) G 46. Diocèse of Nantes.
Visitation 1573.
11 Clodagh Tait, Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550–​1650 (London: 2002), 12.
12 Pierre du Moulin, Familière, Instruction pour consoler les malades, avec plusieurs prières
sur ce sujet (Geneva: 1625), 39.
13 Carlos Eire, A Very Brief History of Eternity (Princeton: 2010), 152.

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Changing Western European Visions of Christian Afterlives 37

Paul’s statement that “when we leave our earthly abode … we wait in heaven.”14
Heinrich Bullinger, the leader of the reformed church in Zurich, in his tract
The Last Judgement (1555), focused on the article in the Creed “I believe in the
forgiveness of sins.”15 As far as Bullinger was concerned, “if one believes one’s
sins to be forgiven, they are indeed forgiven. Christians can be comforted that
there will be no more punishment. The everlasting joy promised by God will
begin immediately at the moment of death.”16 The elect would not stand trial
they will be taken straight to heaven while the damned are judged. Clodagh
Tait argues that amongst Irish Protestants, resurrection was envisaged as a
two-​stage process, with an increasing emphasis laid on the different locations
of body and soul in the period before the day of judgement. This is exemplified
by the will of Sir Edmond Stafford of Mount Stafford, Country Antrim, written
in 1644: leaving his soul in the hands of God, he expressed the hope that “it
shall rest with the blesed trenitie in peace amongst the soule[s]‌of the faithful
departed and at the second coming of my adored Saviour Jesus Christ that my
soul and my bodye be Joyned together and rise againe to Eternall life.”17 James
Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, stated that the dead bodies of those faithful
who “had tasted of the first resurrection of the soul from sin” would be raised
at the sound of the voice of the Son of God at “the second resurrection.”18 We
find similar statements of belief across the Protestant British Isles.
Intertwined with teachings about judgement was the doctrine of predes-
tination, which became very important among Protestant theologians of the
second generation and their successors. The question of God’s selection of
who should be saved and who condemned through judgement, that is, the
composition of the elect and the reprobate, arose from the early church on-
wards. St Augustine’s meditations upon sin led him to the doctrine of predesti-
nation, that God decided who would be saved from the beginning of time. Lil-
iane Crété argues that for him, it was an essential marker of divine initiative in
the destiny of individuals and a sign of the grandeur and justice of God. Luther,

14 2 Cor 5:1–​4; Calvin’s view is discussed in Liliane Crété, Où va-​t-​on après la mort? Le discours
protestant sur l’au-​delà, XVIe–​XVIIIe siècles (Geneva: 2009), 47.
15 Heinrich Bullinger, The Last Judgement (1555), discussed by Bruce Gordon, “ ‘Welcher
nit gloubt der ist schon verdampt’: Heinrich Bullinger and the Spirituality of the Last
Judgement,” Zwingliana 29 (2002), 29–​53.
16 Bruce Gordon, “ ‘In my Father’s house there are many mansions’: Heinrich Bullinger on
Death and the Afterlife,” in A Linking of Heaven and Earth. Studies in Religious and Cultural
History in Honor of Carlos M.N. Eire, eds E. Michelson, S.K. Taylor, and M.N. Venables
(Farnham: 2012), 164, 167.
17 Tait, Ireland, 153.
18 Tait, Ireland, 154.

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with his Augustinian background, accepted predestination as part of a pastoral

assurance of salvation. Calvin used the concept to underline three points: the
absolute sovereignty of God, justification by grace alone without the needs for
works, and the assurance of salvation.19 From Theodore de Bèze onwards, pre-
destination became more prominent in reformed theologies and it came to
be a core concept of Presbyterianism and Puritanism in the British Isles and
the Americas. What was clear, was that the saved were only a small number
compared to the huge number of damned. Some historians have argued that
the growing emphasis on predestination resulted in an increase of Protestant
anxiety about death. The safety net between hell and heaven that was purga-
tory had been removed, and those who may have doubted their membership
of the elect awaited with dread the moment of death and judgement. Others
disputed this conclusion, claiming that the loss of purgatory only served the
render the likelihood of suffering in the next world increasingly remote. Tait
favours the latter, arguing that the tone of funerary monuments and wills from
late 16th and early 17th-​century Ireland, supports an optimistic view of salva-
tion. For example, the Chichester memorial in Carrickfergus Church, (ca. 1625)
declared the hope of the Lord Deputy and his wife that “they … shall here rest
in peace untill the second coming of their crucified Redeemer whome theye
most constantly believe then to behold with their bodily eyes to their end-
less Blessedness and everlasting comfort.” Similarly, Alderman William Ball of
Dublin’s will of 1598 commended his soul,

which I faythfully beleve to be saved by the pretious death and blood

sheddinge of my dear Savior Jesus Christ without any worthinis or merite
of mine owne … to the holy hands of mine Eternall God to receve that
Eternall Crowne of Glory which He hath promised to thos that die in His
favour and fear.20

These were confident statements of those who considered themselves to be

among the saved.
In post-​Reformation Catholic theologies, similar emphasis was laid on Last
Judgement at the end of time, and particular judgement at the moment of
death. In Peter Canisius’s Summa Doctrinae, this dual judgement is spelled
out: “it is appointed to men to die once, and after this the judgement [Heb 9],
to wit, both that particular which everyone hath at his death, and the last and

19 This summary is provided by Crété, Où va-​t-​on après la mort, 26, 38.

20 Tait, Ireland, 152–​3.

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Changing Western European Visions of Christian Afterlives 39

generall judgement, which expecteth all men at the end of the world.”21 While
he spelled out the terrors of Last Judgement, like his Protestant counterparts,
he stressed the mercy of Christ towards the saved, “that we may find Christ
then a gentle judge and that day wherein heaven and earth shall pass, joyful
unto us … To him that feareth our lord, it shall be well at the last, and in the day
of his death he shall be blessed.”22 The difference in Catholic eschatology was
a continuing belief in purgatory as an alternative destination to hell. Chaunu
shows that in Paris, wills increasingly asked for post-​mortem bequests to help
the soul navigate judgement and shorten the stay in purgatory, peaking in the
decades of the mid-​17th century. He argues that there was almost total victory
of particular over final judgement in beliefs about the fate of the soul after
death. The eternal destiny of women and men no longer needed the body, it
was entirely assumed by the fate of the soul, what Chaunu calls a “second es-
chatology.”23 It is to the location of these supernatural destinations, heaven,
hell, and purgatory, that we now turn.

2 Shifting Geographies of the Afterlife, 1350–​1700

The Christian Bible offers no clear description of either the nature of the af-
terlife or where it was located. For the Jews of the Old Testament, the hereafter
was achieved at the end of time, when God would come to earth, raise and
judge the dead, and set up his kingdom, as described in Daniel 12:2: “multi-
tudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake; some to everlasting life,
others to shame and everlasting contempt.” In the intervening period between
death and resurrection, there was obscurity as to whether souls would sleep
or be taken unto the Lord until that time. The New Testament provided a few
more descriptions on the places of everlasting punishment (hell or Hades)
and reward (heaven) and above all, a detailed depiction of the process of Last
Judgement in the Revelation of St John the Divine. Yet concrete detail on place
was lacking, which opened up interpretation to the imagination. As a result,
across the Christian centuries, the nature, location, and process of accessing
the afterlife were elaborated and evolved.
By the beginning of the 14th century, western European Christians had de-
veloped a belief in an afterlife whose landscape comprised three broad realms,

21 For this chapter, the English translation was used: Peter Canisius, A Summe of Christian
Doctrine (St Omer: 1622), 336.
22 Canisius, A Summe of Christian Doctrine, 341.
23 Chaunu, La mort à Paris, 248.

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heaven and hell as described in the Bible, but also a third place, purgatory. The
origins of this geography lay in the central Middle Ages, during which Jacques
Le Goff identifies a “growing spatial conception” of the afterlife, and by the
12th century, the emergence of a new topography of the other world.24 By the
later Middle Ages there was consensus of theological opinion of five distinct
places of the afterlife: heaven, purgatory and hell, and within the latter, limbo
for infants who died without baptism and limbo for patriarchs who died before
Christ was born.25 After death, Christian souls went to hell or to heaven, the
latter usually after a time in purgatory. Hell was for people who died in a state
of mortal sin or for those who were not baptised, including pagans, heretics,
and infidels. Here, the damned spent an eternity of torment by a fire specially
created to burn body and soul, and by the spiritual deprivation of the sight and
succour of God.26 Most medieval Christians considered that their lives were
not so bad as to merit eternal damnation, however. They hoped to attain sal-
vation and to pass eternity close to Christ. But only saints and martyrs were
pure enough to enter heaven immediately, for most individuals lived a lifetime
of sin. Therefore, there emerged a belief in a “third place” in the afterlife, pur-
gatory, where all who died in a state of venial sin or who had not completed
penances imposed in confession were purged of their faults. Once satisfaction
was achieved, the soul would be released to heaven. Purgatory was formally de-
fined by the Councils of Lyons in 1274 and Florence in 1439, although it was pro-
mulgated as doctrine only by the Council of Trent in 1563. The length of time
it took to move from purgatory to heaven was determined by an individual’s
actions in their lifetime but it was also influenced by the ongoing community
of the living through the process of intercession, directly, through Christ, and
through the mediation of the saints and the Church.
The Divine Comedy of the Florentine Dante Alighieri, written in the second
decade of the 14th century, provides a detailed geography of the afterlife as
taught by the Latin Church of the later Middle Ages.27 Dante, guided by the
Roman writer Virgil and then by Beatrice, a childhood sweetheart who died
young, journeyed through the three realms of the afterlife, hell, purgatory, and
heaven, finally seeing God at the summit of salvation. Hell was depicted as a

24 Jacques Le Goff, La naissance du purgatoire (Paris: 1981).

25 Peter Marshall, “ ‘The Map of God’s Word’: Geographies of the Afterlife in Tudor and Early
Stuart England,” in The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and
Early Modern Europe, eds. Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (Cambridge: 2000), 110–​30,
on 112–​13.
26 Georges Minois, Histoire de l’enfer (Paris: 1994), 65–​6.
27 Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. D.L. Sayers, 3 vols (Harmondsworth: 1955).

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Changing Western European Visions of Christian Afterlives 41

deep pit, somewhere under Jerusalem, descending into the core of the earth,
where Lucifer had his domain. Purgatory was above ground, a mountainous
island in the southern hemisphere, cast up by the impact explosion when Sa-
tan’s fall created hell. It was a terraced mountain –​inspired perhaps by the
Tuscan hinterland –​where one ascended upwards, finally achieving the Gar-
den of Eden at the summit. Above was heaven, suffused with light from the
sun and the celestial spheres, with God at the apex. Dante’s imagining of the
afterlife, heavily influenced by the Dominican St Thomas Aquinas’s Summa
Theologia, was reproduced many times in manuscript and then print. It re-
mained influential in literary circles across the Renaissance and Reformation
periods even if Dante’s refined images were not necessarily the imaginings of
the wider population.
The physical location of the spiritual realms was debated, although by the
14th century there was again broad consensus. According to the observant
Franciscan Jacques Suarez writing in the early 17th century, heaven was above
the earth, the celestial sphere, the seat of God, and entry was only allowed to
humans because of the death and passion of Jesus Christ. Then there was hell,
for the damned, underground. As part of the subterranean complex, there was
also limbo. Purgatory was another infernal place, again underground.28 It was
considered by theologians such as Aquinas to be proximal to hell although not
part of the infernal complex.29 There are numerous surviving portrayals of the
geography of the afterlife in church wall-​paintings and glass –​didactic tools
for the laity, especially during Advent and Lent –​and manuscripts. Pictorial
representations mostly take the form of depictions of Doom or the Last Judge-
ment. The chancel arch of Albi cathedral in France and the great west window
of Fairford Church, Oxfordshire, England, are two high-​quality examples from
around 1500. Hell is depicted as a fiery, subterranean region, entered through
the mouth of a great fish or sea monster. Purgatory lies next to it, outside but
warmed by its flames. Heaven is above, where God the father, Christ the son,
and a crowned Virgin Mary, sit in triumph, with angels, saints and the bless-
ed. Angels act as messengers moving souls upward, while demons escort the
damned below.
By tradition, it was possible to enter and experience physically the realm
of purgatory, if one travelled to Ireland. A cave on an island in Lough Derg in
Donegal was believed to be an entrance to “St Patrick’s Purgatory” and a large
body of folklore and literature grew up regarding visions of the torments of the

28 Jacques Suarès, Torrent de feu sortant de la face de Dieu pour desseicher les Eaux de Mara,
encloses dans la chaussée du Moulin d’Ablon (Paris: 1603), 4–​9.
29 Marshall, “ ‘The Map of God’s Word’ ” 112–​13.

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afterlife seen by pilgrims there. The Purgatory began to attract pilgrims from at
least the 12th century, when Henry of Saltry wrote The Purgatory of St. Patrick,
which circulated widely around Europe and inspired a range of other writings
such as Le Purgatoire de saint Patrick of Marie de France.30 The island con-
tinued to attract pilgrim-​visitors across the Middle Ages into the 18th century,
despite, or because of, sporadic attempts to suppress the pilgrimage, firstly by
the papacy in the 1490s then by the civil authorities of the English state in the
1630s and 1640s.31 The literary work by Henry of Saltry continued to be trans-
lated and printed across the Reformation centuries. In the 1545 Paris edition
of Jean Bonfans, for example, a knight relates the details of a pilgrimage to the
monastery and “Purgatory” of Lough Derg in Ireland. Here, penitents took part
in a range of rituals, the culmination of which was confinement for or 24 hours
in an underground cave, fasting, praying, and meditating upon sin.32 Other
authors’ descriptions of purgatory derive from this source. There were some
alternative visions of purgatory. Robert Swanson observes that in late medi-
eval writings on ghosts, souls might mingle together in a general or common
purgatory or they might have an individual purgatory, a specific terrestrial site
associated with their major sins. However, Swanson questions how widespread
such an understanding was.33 For most people, as far as we can tell, the tripar-
tite realms of the spiritual world in their different locations was their chief way
of imagining the destination of the soul after death.
The Reformation of the 16th century saw this eschatology challenged and
the spatial arrangements of the afterlife altered. The main cause was the re-
jection of a belief in purgatory by Protestants. Luther rejected purgatory at the
diet of Augsburg in 1530 and Calvin vigorously condemned it in the first edi-
tion of his Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536.34 Purgatory was denied as
non-​biblical and the intercession of the saints and the living community for
the souls of the dead was rejected, with only faith in Christ leading to redemp-
tion. An afterlife of heaven or hell alone, after final judgement, was accepted.
Peter Marshall argues that English Protestants parodied “the absurdity of the
Catholic geography of the afterlife, its tendency to particularise and localise

30 Myriam White-​Le Goff (ed. and trans.), Le purgatoire de saint-​Patrick de Marie de France;
accompagné des autres versions françaises en vers et du “Tractatus de Purgatorio sancti
Patricii” de H. de Saltrey (Paris: 2019).
31 Tait, Ireland, 150.
32 Jean Bonfans, Le purgatoire de sainct Patrice (Paris: 1547).
33 Robert Swanson “Ghosts and Ghostbusters in the Middle Ages,” SCH 45 (2009), 143–​73,
on 155.
34 Michelle Fournié, Le Ciel, peut-​il attendre? Le culte du Purgatoire dans le Midi de la France
(1320 environ-​1520 environ) (Paris: 1997), 13–​14.

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Changing Western European Visions of Christian Afterlives 43

imaginary realms, to map out the confines and borders of the hereafter.”35
Protestants continued to debate the location of the two other realms of heaven
and hell, however. In England, the mid-​16th-​century “Descensus Controversy”
was a dispute over the meaning of the phrase in the Creed on Christ descend-
ing into hell, raising questions about its location. Some argued that hell really
meant the grave; others, that it was a real place although it was best not to
inquire where it was. Some religious radicals rejected the notion of a localised
afterlife at all, asserting that heaven and hell were spiritual states experienced
in this life. Marshall argues that over the Reformation decades in England, “dis-
tinct cracks in the edifice of conventional belief about a localised afterlife can
be detected spreading slowly” largely because “reformers of all kinds were de-
termined to disassociate themselves irrevocably from the typologies and lan-
guage of pre-​Reformation geographies of the afterlife, in particular the notion
of the third place, Purgatory.”36
In Tridentine Catholicism, the traditional geographical construction of the
afterworld was reasserted, along with long-​standing intercessory and commu-
nicative relationships with the souls contained there. Its spatial location was,
however, debated, particularly as to whether it was a physical place or a meta-
physical state. In France, writings of the early 17th century were particularly
keen to locate purgatory, in defence of the doctrine against Protestant attacks.
Hugues Burlat’s Deux sermons de la resurrection du Lazare of 1603 followed me-
dieval descriptions which located that purgatory at the gates of hell, near to the
upper regions, where punishments were not as severe as in the lower regions.
But the same fire burned in purgatory and hell, although in the former, a soul’s
sentence was of limited duration.37 Yet André Duval, in Feu d’hélie pour tarir les
feux de Siloë, also of 1603, stated that the church had never defined the location
of purgatory, whether it was above or below the earth. Its precise location was
not an article of faith. Duval believed that a soul judged by God after death is
punished in the place that he wishes, above or below ground, for as long or
as little as he pleases.38 Duval supported this with quotes from the text of the
mass for the dead, in which God was implored to “deliver the souls of the faith-
ful departed from infernal punishments, from the deep lake, from the mouth

35 Marshall, “ ‘The Map of God’s Word’ ,” 115.

36 Marshall, “ ‘The Map of God’s Word’ ,” 110–​11, 116.
37 Hugues Burlat, Deux sermons de la resurrection du Lazare Par lesquels est verifiée l’interces-
sion des saints, la confession auriculaire et le Purgatoire (Paris: 1603), 62r-​64r.
38 André Duval, Feu d’hélie pour tarir les faux de Siloë, auquel est amplement prouvé le
Purgatoire contre le Ministre du Moulin and respond aux raisons and allegations contraires
(Paris: 1603), 33, 43–​4.

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44 Tingle

of the lion, from the fear that the pit of hell will swallow them and that they
will fall into darkness.”39 In 1605, Charles Durand published Le purgatoire des
fidelles deffuncts, reiterating the subterranean location, while refuting a series
of other beliefs. He related that some people claimed that purgatory existed in
bad conscience, others, that it must be in the valley of Josephat or at the end of
that place called Tophet, yet others claimed that purgatory was in the air. But
he stated that all of these were false, for it was most likely that purgatory was
situated in the bowels of the earth.40
But over the 17th century, the location and spatial arrangement of purgato-
ry became vaguer, more opaque, and from the 1650s, works devoted solely to
purgatory began to disappear. Théophile Brachet de la Milletière’s work of 1640
denied the “superstition” of purgatory as a harsh place of punishment. Rather,
he was vague about the abode of souls after death but before judgement day,
although conceded that penalties could be exacted in the next life.41 Discus-
sion of the afterlife and salvation were mostly confined to a wider literature of
spirituality and living and dying well. More stress was laid on hell and how to
avoid it, and the inferno remained located in the fiery underworld. The details
of how each of these realms was imagined will be discussed below.

3 The Realms of the Afterlife: The Fall and Rise of Purgatory

3.1 Heaven
All Christians aspire to heaven, to live with Christ in everlasting bliss, yet
biblical descriptions are few. Christian hopes of eternal felicity in a specific
place were based largely on the words of Christ on the cross to the “good thief,”
whom he promised “today you will be with me in paradise.”42 This was sup-
ported by St Paul, who told the Philippian Christians that “for to me, to live is
Christ and to die is gain … I desire to depart and be with Christ” and that “our
citizenship is in heaven and we eagerly await a saviour from there, the Lord Je-
sus Christ.”43 As for the physical experience of heaven, Christians believed that

39 Duval, Feu d’hélie, 57–​8.

40 Charles Durand, Le purgatoire des fidelles deffuncts (Poitiers: 1605), 271. This is a copy of
Anon, Purgatoire des catholiques contre le debordements des eaux du lac de Genève (n.
p.: 1605). All citations here are taken from the Anonymous pamphlet.
41 Théophile Brachet de la Milletière, Response du sieur de la Milletière à la lettre d’un de
ses amis sur son ‘Traité de la nécessité de la puissance du pape en l’église ou la doctrine du
Purgatoire suivant le concile de Trente’ (Paris: 1640), passim.
42 Luke 23:43.
43 Phil 1:21–​23, 3:20.

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Changing Western European Visions of Christian Afterlives 45

it was “above” somewhere, for the apostles had witnessed Christ ascending to
heaven 40 days after his resurrection from the dead, “up before their very eyes,
and a cloud hid him from their sight.”44 They knew that heaven was large with
many parts, for Christ had said that “my father’s house has many mansions.”45
Also, Revelation ­chapter 21 contained descriptions of heaven: it “shone with
the glory of God, and its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel, like
a jasper, clear as crystal”; it was city-​like, God was seated at the centre and it
was illuminated by divine glory. With this outline information, Christians have
imagined heaven and its residents in different ways, which they have illustrat-
ed in painting, glass and manuscripts, and in literature and sermons. Because
there is no doctrinal statement on the nature of heaven, and therefore little po-
tential for heresy, it is difficult to chart changes over time in different Christian
traditions. They are greatly varied.
Two principal visions of the place and its occupants are seen in the peri-
od 1350 to 1700, with much continuity over time and between confessional
groups. Theologians were often reluctant to extend their descriptions beyond
the sparse but canonical words of scripture. As Calvin stated: “For though we
are truly told that the kingdom of God will be full of light, and gladness, and fe-
licity, and glory, yet the things meant by these words remain most remote from
sense, and as it were involved in enigma, until the day arrive on which he will
manifest his glory to us face to face.”46 Thus, Volker Leppin observes that Cal-
vin’s biblical interpretation folds the end-​times into the present time, and his
interest lies less in the depiction of the future as in the means by which we pass
from the present to that future.47 Despite this reticence on the part of biblical
scholars, the period saw two dominant paradigms for describing heaven. One
was the city and the other, the garden.48 In the Middle Ages, argues Alistair
Mcgrath, Christians most commonly visualised heaven as a garden modelled
on that of Eden, “as a place of fertility and harmony, where humanity dwelt
in peace with nature and walked with God.”49 There were strong biblical con-
texts for this simile. Eden was the primal site of the created world, perfect in
all ways, where God walked in the cool of the day. The Song of Songs used the

44 Acts 1:10.
45 John 14.2.
46 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), Book 3, ch. 25, vs 10. English trans-
lation online at https://​www.biblestudytools.com/​history/​calvin-​institutes-​christianity/​
book3/​chapter-​25.html (last accessed 28/​6/​2020).
47 Herman J. Selderhuis (ed.), The Calvin Handbook (Grand Rapids, MI: 2009), 363.
48 Jerry L. Walls, “Heaven,” in The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, ed. Jerry L. Walls
(Oxford: 2008), 401.
49 Alister E. McGrath, A Brief History of Heaven (Oxford: 2003), 43.

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garden as a perfect setting for love, with medieval Christians reading it as an

allegory for Christ and the church. The resurrection scene in St John’s Gospel
is set in a garden, where Mary Magdalen thinks Christ is the gardener. Later
medieval traditions of hortus inclusus are seen in a variety of media, literary,
devotional and artistic.
This imagining persisted after the Reformation. Paula Mendes cites a num-
ber of examples of Portuguese Counter-​Reformation hagiographies, which de-
scribe the mystical experiences of holy men and women, who visit heaven in
their trances.50 For example, Sister Mariana do Rosário (d. 1649), a nun of the
order of St Clare from the Convent of the Saviour of the World in Évora, had
a number of visits to Paradise as related in her Life of 1694 by Fr. António de
Almada. She

found herself in spirit upon a field most beautiful … for there the sight
was enchanted by myriad hues fashioned together by Spring herself, and
a gracious variety of wildflowers, gentle blossoms, which would surely
win the jealousy of the most superb of gardens. The trees, alluring sight,
their branches all in equal height, were decked in lovely leaves: some of-
fered cool retreats to inhabitants beneath their shadows, others tanta-
lised the senses with fruits.51

Many such examples could be given.

The most common motif for describing the Christian afterlife across the pe-
riod was, however, the heavenly city, or the New Jerusalem, based closely on
Revelation 21. This was an ancient view of paradise, perhaps best exemplified
by St Augustine’s great work The City of God. An English text compilation of the
14th century called The Pearl, includes a meditation on the nature of heaven: a
redeemed people must live in a redeemed city, which takes the form of a per-
fect New Jerusalem, although whereas earthly society is rigorously stratified,
there are no such distinctions in heaven.52 Again, this allegory of heaven con-
tinues in all regions of western Europe in the Reformation centuries, perhaps

50 Paula Almeida Mendes, “Spiritual Experiences in Portuguese Hagiographies in the

Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries,” in Soul Travel: Spiritual Journeys in Late Medieval
and Early Modern Europe, eds Jennifer Hillman and Elizabeth Tingle (Oxford: 2019),
207–​34.
51 António de Almada, Desposorios do Espirito celebrados entre o Divino Amante, e sua
Amada Esposa a Ven. Madre Soror Mariana do Rozario Religiosa de veo branco no Convento
do Salvador da Cidade de Evora (Lisbon: 1694), 301–​2. Translation to English is by Mendes,
“Spiritual Experiences,” 218.
52 McGrath, A Brief History of Heaven, 25.

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Changing Western European Visions of Christian Afterlives 47

the most famous in English literature being the celestial city of John Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress, discussed below.
A third allegory sometimes employed was the house or castle paradigm, af-
ter John ­chapter 14. Bullinger, writing in the 1550s, used the image of a “man-
sion” with many rooms to explain the nature of heaven in a series of sermons
and works on “last things.” While Bullinger was clear that God could not be
confined to any specific physical space, the Bible explained abstract concepts
using descriptions of familiar material objects, so humans could understand
them in their own, limited terms. Thus, heaven was described as God’s seat
or castle with many parts or spheres. It was a lovely place for the soul and the
body, ethereal and celestial in a way that people cannot perceive. Beyond that,
Bullinger was not prepared to speculate.53 Tait shows that some Irish poets
described heaven as a dwelling owned by the supreme king, “where mirth and
feasting were presided over by the Virgin Mary, who even had the power to
snatch souls from the devil as a reward for devotion to her.”54 Contemporaries
expected to be invited to share in the grandeur of the greatest lord.
Whatever the setting of heaven, whether in a garden, house, or city, there
were two broad ways of imagining the experience of the soul there. The first
was theocratic, focused on a direct relationship with God; the second was re-
lational, based on reunion with friends and family in a perfect continuation of
aspects of this world.55 Clergy, both Catholic and Protestant, tended towards
a theocratic and strictly biblical view of heaven. Aquinas’s influential opinion
was of a perfect stasis before God. For him, the afterlife comprised contem-
plation of God, a perfect form of the earthly monastic existence.56 This view
finds its echo in 16th-​century Catholic writing. The Spanish mystics believed
the soul would merge with God in divine purity. St Teresa of Avila described
heaven as comprising the vision and knowledge of the divine mystery. Here,
the soul is united with God “like the bright light entering a room through two
different windows: although the streams of light are separate when entering
the room, they become one.”57 St John of the Cross shared the Teresian mys-
tical vision. For him, the soul would unite with God and thus be transformed

53 Bullinger wrote a series of tracts on judgement and the afterlife in The Last Judgement
(1555), Compendium of the Christian Religion (1556), Concerning the Right Hand of God
(1561). They are discussed in Gordon, “ ‘In my Father’s house,’ ” 157–​73.
54 Tait, Ireland, 151.
55 McGrath, A Brief History of Heaven, 142ff.
56 The view of Bernhard Lang, Meeting in Heaven: Modernising the Christian Afterlife 1600–​
2000 (Frankfurt am Main: 2011), 42.
57 Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle, trans. M. Starr (New York: 2003), 270.

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into the divine.58 Lay devotional writers could be equally theocentric but were
more inclined to believe in the continuance of the soul as an individual being.
Pedro de Medina, cosmographer and philosopher, conceptualised a highly or-
dered and hierarchical heaven in Libro de la Verdad of 1555.59 The blessed are
spatially arranged in a rigid hierarchy where everyone has their proper station
for eternity. At the summit of the court, God reigns as the supreme monarch.
Below the trinity, the Virgin Mary reigns as queen of heaven, clothed in glo-
rious garments. Under Mary, the angelic hosts are set out like a squadron of
military or government officials. Below the angels, the saints are also arranged
according to their merit. Medina’s heaven was one of order and stasis, with
each being given a defined role.60 Lope de Vega, in his religious play Las cortes
de la muerte of the 1550s, wrote that “God lives eternally within walls of sap-
phire that are speckled with topaz. In his palace the Thrones and Powers shout
forever their cry ‘Holy, Holy’, while the blessed spirits in their glory see and love
that undivided essence, of which each attribute radiates immeasurable splen-
dour.”61 There was a reluctance to move too far beyond the words of Revelation.
Protestant clerical authors were also closely biblical and theocentric in their
view of heaven, as one might expect. Charles Drelincourt, 17th-​century Hugue-
not pastor of Charenton near to Paris, author of Les consolations de l’âme fidèle
contre les frayeurs de la mort of 1651, described heaven as a “glorious palace.”
“When,” he wrote,

will I be in the glorious company of the triumphant saints, who have

palms in their hands, crowns on their heads and praises in their mouths?
When will I find myself with the thousands of angels resplendent with
light and glory? And with the seraphim who burn with a holy flame and
fly continually around Your throne?62

The English Puritan Richard Baxter, in The Saints’ Everlasting Rest of 1649 ar-
gued that in heaven, the saints worshipped God perpetually, adoring God who
had created and redeemed them. There would be never-​ending songs of praise

58 John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle of the Soul and the Bridegroom Christ, trans. online at
http://​www.ccel.org/​ccel/​john_​cross/​canticle.html (last accessed 28/​6/​2020).
59 Pedro de Medina, Libro de la Verdad (Seville: 1549).
60 Lang, Meeting in Heaven, 62.
61 See for the text of the poem http://​www.cervantesvirtual.com/​obra-​visor/​las-​cortes-​de
-​la-​muerte-​-​0/​html/​fee84108-​82b1-​11df-​acc7-​002185ce6064_​2.html (last accessed 28/​
6/​
2020). Discussed in Lang, Meeting in Heaven, 62.
62 Charles Drelincourt, Les consolations de l’âme fidèle contre les frayeurs de la mort
(Paris: 1650), 585.

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Changing Western European Visions of Christian Afterlives 49

to God’s glory.63 John Bunyan again followed Revelation 21 closely in his de-
scription of the heavenly city:

In that place you must wear crowns of gold and enjoy the perpetual sight
and visions of the holy one, for there you will see him as he is. There also
you shall serve him continually with praise, with shouting and thanksgiv-
ing, whom you desired to serve in the world … There your eyes shall be
delighted with seeing and your ears with hearing the pleasant voice of
the Mighty One … There also you shall be clothed with glory and majesty
and put into an equipage fit to ride out with the King of Glory.64

The soul has an independent and conscious existence, and an eternal function
of extended praise of God.
An alternative model, although not necessarily mutually exclusive was of
a perfect existence where one would be reunited with loved ones. Again, this
is an ancient paradigm, with its origin in classical antiquity and the third cen-
tury writing of Cyprian. It increased in importance in the post-​Reformation
period, shared across confessions. Spanish Catholic writers such as the Jesuit
Martín de Roa described the social world of heaven in Estado de los Bienaven-
turados en el Cielo (1630): “Fathers, sons, and friends in particular will travel to
the place of the beloved, where they will be welcomed with holy kisses. Hold-
ing each other in holy embrace, they will exchange compliments, and hold-
ing hands, they will converse, discussing the sublime ways by which divine
providence has brought them to the world of everlasting joy.”65 English Prot-
estants certainly internalised this view. The early 17th-​century lawyer and dia-
rist Bulstrode Whitelocke described his mother’s response to her realisation of
her imminent death in 1631, as a “passage to a better life,” confident “that they
should meet again in heaven and there partake of everlasting joys.” His father,
James Whitelocke, “was cheerful, yet would frequently say, that his time was
but short in this world, and that he should hasten to meet his beloved compan-
ion in heaven, whither she was gone before, and he should soon follow after.”66
Bunyan also imagined personal reunions: “There you shall enjoy your friends

63 Richard Baxter, The Saints’ Everlasting Rest, or A treatise of the blessed state of the saints in
their enjoyment of God in glory (London: 1649).
64 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (Ware: 1996), 128. Discussed in Lang, Meeting in
Heaven, 44.
65 Martín de Roa, Estado de los Bienaventurados en el Cielo (Barcelona: 1630) fol. 49.
66 Bulstrode Whitelocke, The Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke, ed. Ruth Spalding (Oxford: 1990),
49, 62.

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again, that are got thither before you; and there you shall with joy receive, even
every one that follows into the holy place after you.”67
Reunion with family was problematic for those people who had remarried
or had multiple and complex relationships on this earth. Jesus, when asked by
Sadducees about marriage partners in heaven, responded: “the sons of this age
marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy to at-
tain to that age and the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given
in marriage, because they cannot die anymore and are equal to angels, and are
sons of God, being sons of the resurrection.”68 Despite this denial of the per-
sistence of personal relationships in heaven, this view of what Bernhard Lang
calls “a heaven of friendly discourse” was to become the dominant paradigm
by the 18th century.69

3.2 Hell
Hell is the oldest and most clearly delineated realm of the Christian afterlife. In
the Old Testament, there is no defined concept of hell, but there emerges over
time a consideration that souls, especially wicked ones, will end up in a hor-
rible place. This destination became linked with a place called “Sheol,” trans-
lated into Greek as Hades. It was an indeterminate place of shadows whose
function varied from the unseen realm of the dead to the place where evildoers
are punished. In the New Testament and the early church, a theology of an
eternal, awful hell quickly developed. Jesus used the term “Gehenna” to refer
to a dreadful place of everlasting pain. The Gospel of Matthew mentions hell
in his relation of conversations between Jesus and Pharisees and Sadducees
about “the wrath to come” and in other contexts of divine retributive justice.70
It was a place linked with heat, as in Matthew’s description of end times, when,

just as the weeds are gathered and burned with fire, so it will be at the end
of the age. … The son of man will send his angels, and they will gather out
of his kingdom all causes of sin and all law breakers and throw them into
the fiery furnace.71

More details of eternal punishment were provided by St John in Revelation.

Again there was emphasis on perpetual, fiery torment for the damned: “And

67 Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 128.

68 Luke 20:34–​36.
69 Lang, Meeting in Heaven, 62.
70 For example, Matthew 5:29–​30, 18:9, 9:43–​47.
71 Matthew 13:40–​42.

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Changing Western European Visions of Christian Afterlives 51

the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever; they have no rest day and
night.”72 Thus, for the reprobate, defined as “the cowardly and unbelieving and
abominable and murderers and immoral persons and sorcerers and idolaters
and all liars” their fate “will be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone,
which is the second death.”73 The early church confirmed the existence of hell
in Christian soteriology and elaborated on its eternally fiery punishments. The
Apostles’ Creed stated that Christ descended into hell after the crucifixion.
St Augustine articulated a judicial view of hell as a realm of punishment for
crimes committed against God. Following the Gospels, he described a lake of
fire in which the damned experience everlasting and unceasing torment, the
unbearable spiritual and corporeal pain of being burned forever.74 The Augus-
tinian view had enormous, continuing influence on the doctrine of hell in the
Middle Ages and early modern period.
Georges Minois argues that the doctrine of hell as it was understood in the
Middle Ages reached a developed form in the 12th century.75 For contemporar-
ies of the 14th and 15th centuries, the best-​known articulation of the Augustin-
ian view was by Aquinas. In the Summa Theologiae he wrote that the damned
are punished by eternal fire which was of a different order to that of the mortal
world, for it was dark and perpetual; hell was capacious, likely to be in the mid-
dle of the earth, and its experience was corporeal as well as spiritual.76 Satan
as the ruler of hell and the role of demons as tempters and torturers became
increasingly present in the Middle Ages. Dante placed Lucifer at the centre of
hell while increasing numbers of saints’ lives and devotional tales included
demons, such as we find in the Lives of Jacob de Voragine’s Golden Legend.77
The dreadfulness of a demonic, sulphurous hell, clearly played on the minds of
many contemporaries of the later Middle Ages.
The theologians’ descriptions and admonitions were disseminated and
adopted in the towns and parishes of medieval Europe through devotional
writings for clerical and literate elites, and through sermons and artistic rep-
resentations for all Christians. Preachers of the mendicant orders gave vivid

72 Rev. 14:11.
73 Rev. 21:8.
74 Augustine, City of God, Bk. 21, Ch. 9. An English translation is available at http://​www.
newadvent.org/​fathers/​120121.htm (last accessed 28/​6/​2020).
75 Minois, Histoire de l’enfer, 77.
76 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, supplement to the third part, question 97, “On the
punishment of the damned” online at http://​www.newadvent.org/​summa/​5097.htm#
article6 (last accessed 28/​6/​2020).
77 Many stories contain demons. See for an English version, Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden
Legend, trans. and ed. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton: 1993).

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52 Tingle

hell-​fire sermons, such as those of the Catalan Dominican Vincent Ferrer, the
“angel of the apocalypse.” Visual representations of hell and its demons were
widespread and portrayed the suffering of souls there by all sorts of hideous
tortures. Romanesque tympanums of 12th-​century churches such as Conques,
Corbeil, Saint-​Denis, Laon and Chartres, show the separation of the just and
the damned on the day of judgement, the latter being led off to hell. By the lat-
er Middle Ages, this was an image found in most churches, even in remote ru-
ral areas, for example, in the western French province of Brittany, Alain Croix
has located around fifty surviving sculptures and images of hell in churches
that date before 1700.78 Traditionally depicted in Doom or Last Judgement
scenes, hell is usually portrayed at the bottom of the tableau, its entrance in
the form of a large fish’s mouth. Ruled over by Satan, demons carry people off
into its depths, where they are subjected to all manner of boiling, flaying and
other punishments. Churches from Trogir cathedral in Dalmatia to Wenhaston
in Norfolk, England, had depictions of inferno. Kate Giles has suggested that
wall paintings and other images ubiquitous in medieval churches were an im-
portant way of teaching doctrine, “visual sermons” explained by clergy, used as
preaching exemplars and the focus of personal devotions.79 As Minois states,
all imagined punishments were permissible, for they could only ever give an
outline of the horrors that really awaited the damned. Such descriptions were
supposed to be for pastoral purposes, to warn people how not to end up there.
By such visual means, ordinary Christians learnt about hell.80
Humanist scholars of the 15th century began a questioning of the afterlife
that would ultimately lead to its reshaping in the Reformation. In Devotio mod-
erna writings, such as the Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, the role of
hell in soteriology began to shift, away from a threat of fire and brimstone,
to a more pastoral concept, to console people through present troubles and
to aid in the combat against sin.81 Erasmus went so far as to deny the reality
of punishment in hell, seeing it instead as an interior state, of perpetual an-
guish which accompanies the habit of sin.82 In practice, however, it seems that
before the early 16th century, most Christians dwelt little on hell, which they

78 Alain Croix, La Bretagne aux XVIème et XVIIème siècles: La vie, la mort et la foi, 2 vols.
(Paris: 1981), 2:1049.
79 Kate Giles, “Seeing and Believing: Visuality and Space in Pre-​Modern England,” World
Archaeology 39 (2007), 105–​21.
80 Minois, Histoire de l’enfer, 76.
81 Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ, book 1, c­ hapter 1, available at http://​catholicarchive.
org/​thomas_​a_​kempis/​the_​imitation_​of_​christ/​1/​24.html (last accessed 28/​6/​2020).
82 He was, however, forced to recant this view by the Sorbonne in 1526 and to confirm his
belief in eternal fire. Minois, Histoire de l’enfer, 83.

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Changing Western European Visions of Christian Afterlives 53

hoped to avoid, and instead focused on managing purgatory, before achiev-

ing heaven. One of the outcomes of the Reformation was criticism and even
rejection of purgatory by some groups, the ramification of which was a great-
er emphasis on hell across all confessional traditions. Piero Camporesi argues
that “over no other age did hell exert such an attraction and repulsion and in
so spasmodic and obsessive a form.”83
Fear of judgement and hell was a major cause of Augustinian monk Mar-
tin Luther’s new theology of grace, developed in the early 1520s. Jane Strohl
comments that Luther’s theology was permeated by eschatological struggle
throughout. He believed that the Last Day was near, but that God would pro-
tect the faithful in the battle with Satan and that fear of the shadow of death
is liberated by the gospel of Christ.84 Yet Luther devoted few of his writings to
hell fire and damnation and was reluctant to describe it in any detail. Thus, he
wrote in his commentary on Jonah,

I am not so sure what hell is like before the Day of Judgement. The notion
that hell is a specific place, now tenanted by the souls of the damned, as
artists portray it and the belly servers preach it, I consider of no value, for
we know that the devils are not yet in hell, but as Peter declares, they are
“in ropes of nether gloom.”85

For most of the first and second generations of Protestant reformers, hell was
a biblical concept, over which Christ had triumphed and from which he would
protect his faithful. They devoted few of their writings to elaborating its nature.
Calvin mentions hell only in terms of redemption in Institutes of the Christian
Religion (1536).86 Bullinger based his view of hell on Isaiah 30, the account of
Topheth. He described hell as deep and wide, perfectly able to accommodate
all the godless. The darkness of hell is illuminated by fire as the damned cry
out. It is the fire of God’s wrath, prepared by the devil and his angels. This fire
is lit by the breath of God and there is sufficient wood to keep it burning for
eternity.87 But beyond the strictly biblical image he was not prepared to go,

83 Piero Camporesi, The Fear of Hell: Images of Damnation and Salvation in Early Modern
Europe (Cambridge: 1990), 28.
84 Jane E. Strohl, “Luther’s Eschatology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther’s Theology,
eds. Robert Kolb, Irene Dingel, and L’ubomír Batka (Oxford: 2014), 353–​63.
85 Martin Luther, The Commentaries of Martin Luther, Vol. 19. Minor Prophets II. Jonah and
Habbakuk (St Louis, MO: 1974).
86 Calvin, Institutes, online at https://​archive.org/​details/​institutesofchr01calv/​page/​n6 and
https://​archive.org/​details/​institutesofchr01calv/​page/​n6 (last accessed 28/​6/​2020).
87 Discussed in Gordon, “ ‘In my Father’s house’,” 172.

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54 Tingle

emphasising instead God’s redemptive grace. Hell was a warning to the sinner,
but beyond that, not for speculation.
The Protestant hell of the later 16th century onwards was little different
from that of the medieval inferno, although fiery preachers elaborated on the
horrific fate of the damned. Written descriptions and published sermons con-
tinued to follow closely the biblical details, with elaboration. To the tradition-
al blistering realm and endless, imaginative torture, was added a developed
and personalised view of Lucifer as tempter of souls. For example, in the Irish
Annals, good deaths were often described as victories over “the world, death
and the devil,” who lay in wait to drag the dying into hell.88 A typical “sermon-​
pamphlet” description of hell is that of Drelincourt, in Les consolations de l’âme
fidèle of 1650:

Imagine a man being gnawed by worms and burning in a fire, being con-
stantly tortured and pinched with pliers, with wounds made from burn-
ing sulphur, molten lead and boiling pitch, and if it is possible to imagine
crueller and more sorrowful torments, you will have only the slightest
picture and broadest image of the torments of hell.89

There was also stress on the despair provoked by the unbreachable distance
from God. Agrippa d’Aubigné, author of Les Tragiques, devoted his fifth book
to “Fire.” In it, he described the worst experience of the damned, who were
able to see what went on in heaven, to hear the divine music, but unable ever
to join the blessed, for there were no bridges between heaven and hell.90 Yet
despite the fire-​and-​brimstone tracts and sermons, as with older traditions, the
intention was not to elicit despair but rather a reformation of life, to encourage
the sinner to repent.
The most famous Protestant representations of hell were literary, with En-
glish works being particularly prominent. Christopher Marlowe described Lu-
cifer, his demons, and damnation in The Tragical History of the Life and Death
of Doctor Faustus (ca. 1592), performed frequently in the 1590s and in the first
decades of the 17th century.91 Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass (1616), followed
medieval miracle play traditions of comic representations of Satan and his

88 Tait, Ireland, 136.

89 Drelincourt, Les consolations de l’âme, 28.
90 Agrippa d’Aubigné, Les Tragiques (Paris: 1995) discussed in Crété, Où va-​t-​on après la
mort? 57.
91 Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus
(London: 1604).

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Changing Western European Visions of Christian Afterlives 55

realm.92 The most famous depiction of hell in English literature is John Mil-
ton’s Paradise Lost, first published in 1667. It tells the parallel tales of the expul-
sion of Lucifer from heaven and the Fall of Adam and Eve. Book ii describes
the court of Lucifer and his demons. Darkness, fire, and pain predominate.
Thus, it is

this dark opprobrious den of shame … [l. 59]

Black fire and horror …
Mixed with Tartarean sulphur and strange fire,
His own invented torments.93

The punishment of the damned takes the traditional form of a burning lake:

At certain revolutions all the damned

Are brought: and feel by turns the bitter change
From beds of raging fire to starve in ice …
Periods of time, thence hurried back to fire.94

The hell of the English Puritan of the 17th century had much in common with
its medieval forebears. Hell was solid, terrible, a site of physical corruption and
dreadful smell, with a fearsome capacity to terrorise.95
Catholic Reformation visions of hell had much in common with those of
Protestantism. Hell-​fire sermons, devotional tracts meditating on eternal pun-
ishment and literary description of the underworld, all had parallels in Cath-
olic religious culture. Jean Delumeau estimates that guilt/​judgement sermons
made up between 61 and 84 percent of known published works of preachers.96
François Lebrun writes in his study of religious culture in Anjou that the most
frequently used theme of late 16th and 17th-​century catechists and preachers,
was that of hell. In the catechism, a ubiquitous tool of religious learning from
the late 16th century onwards, children learnt early on that the pains of hell
were corporeal and spiritual.97 The catechism of the diocese of Bourges, by

92 Ben Jonson, The Devil is an Ass, ed. William Savage Johnson (New York: 1905), available at
https://​www.gutenberg.org/​ebooks/​50150 (last accessed 28/​6/​2020).
93 Version used here: John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Philip Pullman (Oxford: 2005), book 2,
lines 59, 68–​69.
94 Milton, Paradise Lost, book 2, lines 598–​603.
95 Camporesi, The Fear of Hell, 69–​70, 101–​102.
96 Jean Delumeau, La Peur en Occident (Paris: 1978).
97 Lebrun, Les hommes et la mort en Anjou, 445–​6.

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way of example, stated that hell was the place for those who die in a state of
mortal sin; that souls suffered eternal punishments of the senses; and it was “a
horrible prison, a frightful dungeon, excavated in the centre of the earth … the
master of this sad place is Lucifer and the devils … [there is] a lake filled with
fire and sulphur, into which they are plunged, where they burn for ever.”98 Even
the saintly bishop of Geneva François de Sales, in his hugely influential Intro-
duction to the Devout Life (1609), wrote that the fear of hell was the last rampart
against the forces of evil:

The damned are in the depth of hell … where they suffer unspeakable tor-
ments, in all their senses and members; because as they have employed
all their senses and members in sinning, so shall they suffer in them all
the punishments due to sin. The eyes for lascivious looks shall be afflicted
with the horrid vision of hell and devils. The ears for delighting in vi-
cious discourses shall hear nothing but wailings, lamentations, desperate
howlings; and so of the rest. Besides all these torments there is another
greater, which is the loss and privation of God’s glory, from the sight of
which they are excluded forever.99

However, this eschatological stress on hell had a pastoral function, to incul-

cate a fear of God in order “to renew affection for the suffering Christ and to
bring about a change of conduct in the lives of the audience.”100 Moral trans-
formation was the goal, not fear for its own sake. This may not have been
the result. In Paris, Chaunu observes that preaching discourse was domi-
nated by the God of Judgement. While the son mitigated this judgement by
his redeeming death, it was fear of God rather than love, which was widely
taught.101
Depictions of hell are particularly rich in Iberian Catholic writings of the
16th century. St Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, composed from the 1520s
and first published in 1548, offers a systematic meditation on hell in the fifth ex-
ercise of the first week. The participant is invited to consider the sight, sound,
smell, taste, and feel of the awfulness of inferno and to recall the persons

98 Joachim de la Chétardie, Catéchisme de Bourges, 6 vols. (Paris, 1708).

99 François de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life, seventh meditation ‘On Hell’, at
https://​t hevalueofsparrows.com/​2 014/​0 7/​2 8/​p rayer-​ten-​m editations-​by-​f rancis-​d e
-​sales/​ (last accessed 28/​6/​2020).
100 John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death Among
Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-​Century France (Oxford: 1981) 228–​9.
101 Chaunu, La mort à Paris, 376.

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Changing Western European Visions of Christian Afterlives 57

lodged there.102 For St Teresa of Avila, hell was internalised. Teresa describes
being plunged into hell in ­chapter 32 of her Life; the experience was granted
to enable her to “understand that the Lord wished me to see the place that the
devils had ready for me there, and that I had earned by my sins.”103 Hell was a
lived reality at the interior of the soul, for which human language was incapa-
ble of explaining the intensity of its awfulness. Carlos Eire argues that atten-
tion to the ego rather than the body marks a new departure in concepts of hell,
which developed across the 17th century. For example, the Jesuit Juan Eusebio
Nieremberg’s The Difference Between the Temporal and the Eternal, first pub-
lished in 1640, states that the powers of the soul –​will, reason, and memory –​
will suffer the worst torments. The will shall suffer eternal self-​abhorrence, and
undying anger toward God and all of creation, eternally subject to “insufferable
sadness.” The memory will remind one constantly of what one did wrong, and
of what opportunities were missed.104 For others, however, hell remained vivid
and material. In Desposorios do Espirito, the Life of Sister Mariana do Rosário
of Evora of 1694, she is described as taken to a place “due to its rigours of fire,
but dissimilar in the horrendous clamours, and dissonant confusion,” which
she assumed was hell, on account of “the blasphemies, the ire, the desperation,
clearly shown it to be the place of the damned. Fear gripped the soul at the
sight of the demons who, possessed by unquenchable hatred, tormented those
poor wretches.”105 For Loyola, the vision of hell was to “keep before me my wish
to grieve and feel sorrow, and remind myself more of death and judgement.”106
So we see again, hell used as a means of bringing the soul to God, ultimately
merciful and compassionate.
Towards the later 17th century, there was some attenuation of interest in
hell-​fire punishment, evident among radical groups and some elite theolo-
gians. Rejection of hell was not new in the Reformation, for universalism –​the
belief that all would be saved, and none damned, by a merciful God –​was long
attributed to Origen. Radical groups emanating from Protestantism developed
particular ideas about eternal punishment. For example, in the later 16th cen-
tury, Socinian anti-​trinitarians in Poland denied hell, stating instead that the

102 Ignatius Loyola, “Spiritual Exercises,” in Personal Writings, trans. J.A. Munitiz (London:
1996), 298–​9.
103 The Life of Teresa of Avila by herself, trans. J.H. Cohen (London: 1958, 1987), 235.
104 Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, De la diferencia entro lo Temporal y Eterno (Madrid: 1640), dis-
cussed in Eire, A Very Brief History of Eternity, 160.
105 Mendes, “Spiritual Experiences,” 227, and her translation of Almada, Desposorios do
Espirito, 308–​9.
106 Loyola, “Spiritual Exercises,” 300.

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wicked were annihilated.107 Certain Anabaptists such as Hans Denck in the

early 16th century and some Quakers such as Gerrard Winstanley, leaned to-
wards universalism.108 They considered God to be perfectly benevolent, so all
must be reconciled with him and saved. But even among more mainstream
Catholics and Protestants, Georges Minois comments that the ideas of Origen
resurfaced, quietly at first, but quickly spread within the clergy. For example,
Jacques-​Bénigne Bossuet did not describe hell at all in any of his numerous
works. His was a more spiritual conception of the afterlife, where hell is sin it-
self, it exists in each of us when we trespass and Christ descended permanently
into our individual hells to offer us salvation.109 The Jansenist Pierre Nicole saw
hell as a place where souls were deprived of the love and sight of God. Despair
was the real punishment of hell and physical elements were downgraded.110
Minois argues that the visualisation of hell which underpinned the teaching
of the middle ages, also disappears in the 17th century. The Fall of the Damned
of Rubens (ca. 1620) was about the last great artistic depiction, as the Counter-​
Reformation church put more dignity and order into portrayals of the afterlife,
and greater emphasis on depictions of redemption.111 Across the 18th century,
there was a transformation of God the Judge into the God of Mercy, which
attenuated the fear of hell.112
By the time Denis Diderot and his collaborators were putting together the
Encyclopédie in the 1750s, elite scepticism about hell was increasing. In the en-
try on “Enfer” or Hell by Edmé-​François Mallet, he stated that the belief ex-
isted among all people and that it was “employed by law-​makers as the most
powerful brake to stop licence and crime, and to contain men in the bounds of
duty.” In the end, whatever the evidence from scripture and doctrine, he wrote
ironically, “this only proved that reason alone was not sufficient to decide the
question, it was necessary to have recourse to revelation to demonstrate the
existence of eternity and just punishment in the future life.”113 Yet for the ma-
jority of Christians of all denominations, hell remained a real, powerful, bibli-
cal destination. It was to remain part of the cosmography of belief for centu-
ries thereafter.

107 Hugh Pope, “Socinianism,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 14 (New York: 1912) at http://​
www.newadvent.org/​cathen/​14113a.htm (last accessed 28/​6/​2020).
108 See for example Gerrard Winstanley, The Mysterie of God (London: 1649).
109 Discussed in Minois, Histoire de l’enfer, 102.
110 Discussed in Michel Vovelle, La mort et l’Occident de 1300 à nos jours (Paris: 1983), 306–​7.
111 Minois, Histoire de l’enfer, 79.
112 Camporesi, The Fear of Hell, 47.
113 Denis Didérot, Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné, des sciences, des arts et des métiers,
17 vols (Paris: 1751–​1765), 5:667–​70.

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Changing Western European Visions of Christian Afterlives 59

3.3 Purgatory
A central theme of histories of the afterlife in the Christian West is the impor-
tance of the emergence of beliefs in purgatory in the central Middle Ages.114
The significance of purgatory was that it reduced the finality of eternal damna-
tion and made redemption “contingent on the efforts of both the living and the
dead.”115 Jacques Le Goff, Pierre Chaunu, and Michel Vovelle have proposed a
history of purgatory, with a rise in its belief up to the early 16th century, a sub-
sequent ‘fall’ with the Reformation, followed by even greater prominence in
the 17th century of Catholic/​Counter reformation, until its undermining by the
Enlightenment of the 18th century.116 This model has proved durable in many
local and regional studies of death and mortuary practice, although it is more
nuanced than has been stressed in an historiography which has privileged the
later Middle Ages and the “century of saints.” Polemical literature, for example,
shows that significant developments in Catholic theology and practice con-
cerning concepts of purgatory, emerged during the later 16th century in the
context of the wars of religion. Also, there existed a variety of ideas about the
nature of purgatory and the most efficacious means of aiding souls, even in the
17th century.
The origins of purgatory in the central Middle Ages have been ably charted
in numerous studies, most notably by Jacques Le Goff, and will not be repeated
here.117 The timing of the adoption of purgatory as a popular belief is debat-
ed and it appears that it appeared at different times in different places. For
France, Chaunu argues that the doctrine remained that of elites during the
central Middle Ages and that it exploded into a tenet of popular piety in the
15th century, in northern France at least.118 Jacques Chiffoleau argues for an
earlier appearance of purgatory in the papal territories of Comtat Venaissin
and Avignon, and in Provence and Languedoc. He dates it to the 13th or early
14th centuries, brought in by mendicant preachers and disseminated by sec-
ular priests. Here, bequests for prayers multiplied among the laity from 1330–​
40, becoming widespread in the 14th and 15th centuries.119 Michelle Fournié

114 A more detailed discussion can be found in Elizabeth Tingle, Purgatory and Piety in
Brittany 1480–​1720 (Farnham: 2014), ­chapter 3.
115 Richard K. Fenn, The Persistence of Purgatory (Cambridge: 1995), 47.
116 Le Goff, La naissance du purgatoire; Chaunu, La mort à Paris; Michel Vovelle, Piété baroque
et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1973); Vovelle, La mort et l’Occident;
Michel Vovelle, Les âmes du purgatoire ou le travail du deuil (Paris: 1996).
117 Le Goff, La naissance du purgatoire. See also Paul J. Griffith, “Purgatory,” in The Oxford
Handbook of Eschatology, ed. Jerry L. Walls (Oxford: 2008), 427–​45.
118 Chaunu, La mort à Paris, 38, 976.
119 Chiffoleau, La comptabilité de l’au-​delà, 390, 408.

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argues that in south-​west France it was the second half of the 15th century
when belief became widespread, shown by the frequency of church wall paint-
ings depicting purgatory and an increase in the numbers of priests to serve obit
masses.120 Whenever its origins, in most regions purgatory was established as a
fundamental religious belief amongst all social groups by 1500.
The dissemination of ideas was probably mainly through sermons, especial-
ly by mendicant preachers, and in teachings about indulgences. For example,
two Paris doctors of theology, Nicolas Cappelly and Nicolas Payen, were cen-
sured by the Sorbonne in 1518 for preaching that donations to the crusade they
were promoting, would directly deliver a soul from purgatory to paradise.121 An
important medium for contemporaries was devotional works. The popular ars
moriendi handbooks on how to “die well” contain little discussion of the nature
of the afterlife, however, beyond warning of the “pains of purgatory” and rec-
ommending suffrages to shorten time spent here. The best guides to the nature
of purgatory and advice on how to manage the experience of souls there, were
popular saints’ lives and stories, read and recounted, at home and as exem-
plars in sermons. Many of these works had long lives. Bernardino da Siena’s
published sermons included several short discussions of the fires of purgato-
ry.122 Raymond of Capua’s 14th-​century Life of St Catherine of Siena detailed
her earthly purgatory, taken upon herself to save her father from post-​mortem
torment.123 Catherine of Genoa’s purgatory, written down ca. 1514, circulated
in manuscript and was printed in 1551.124 Collections of miracle stories of the
Blessed Virgin Mary frequently contained accounts of individuals in purgatory
who had been released after their appeal to Our Lady’s intercession. Above
all, the Golden Legend of Jacob de Voragine provided examples of saints who
had experienced purgatory. His Lives of Saints Gregory, Patrick, Martial, and
Dominic all mention the pains of purgation and some of the printed editions
contain a section on the commemoration of All Souls, with discussion of the
importance of suffrages for their relief.125

120 Fournié, Le Ciel, 528.

121 Larissa Taylor, Soldiers of Christ: Preaching in Late Medieval and Reformation France
(Oxford: 1992), 19, 95.
122 For example, Bernadino da Siena, The chirche of the euyll men and women wherof
Lulyfer [sic] is the heed, and the membres is all the players dyssolute and synners reproued
(Paris: 1511).
123 Written in Latin, an English-​language version is Raymond of Capua, Here begynneth the
lyf of saint katherin of senis the blessid virgin (Westminster: 1492).
124 Catherine de Gênes, La Vie et les oeuvres spirituelles (Lyons: 1610).
125 Voragine, The Golden Legend.

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Changing Western European Visions of Christian Afterlives 61

Saltry’s The Purgatory of St Patrick gave highly detailed descriptions of the

experience of purgatory and was translated numerous times across the later
Middle Ages and early modern period. In the 1545 Paris edition of Jean Bon-
fans, the narrator-​pilgrim describes the awful noises, horrible visions of devils,
and terrible fires of punishment. He travelled through a field of sorrows, where
men and women lay naked, nailed to the ground by their hands and feet, tor-
mented by a dragon, while being beaten by demons. In a second field, serpents
gnawed and toads ate the souls’ “flesh.” Souls were attached to a wheel of fire
and plunged into a river of stinking, molten metal. But the souls thus tormented
were alleviated of their pains by prayers and good works performed for them
by the living. The pilgrim himself was delivered from the clutches of demons
on several occasions by invoking the name of Jesus Christ.126 A century later,
in a version produced in 1643, the description had changed little, although the
editor added a great freezing lake, with ice and snow, for sinners.127 While the
image of purgatory was one of dreadful torment, it was not meant to inspire
fear for its own sake, but to cause serious attention to personal salvation. The
best way to avoid purgatory was by living a virtuous life while on earth: pen-
ance, almsgiving, good works, avoiding sin, these were far more easily achieved
in life than after death. But even after death, the length of time souls spent in
purgatory could be reduced by the intercession of the living community of the
faithful. Underpinning purgatory was a belief in the effectiveness of suffrage
and the solidarity of the living and the dead.
As Clive Burgess states, a more instructive source of evidence and one that
occurred more widely than text, is the services and good works commissioned
by individuals to achieve post-​mortem satisfaction and thus liberation from
purgatory.128 The enormous number of spiritual bequests found in the wills of
the later Middle Ages show that the need for intercession for departed souls
was widely internalised across the continent. By far the most important form
of intercession was the mass. In the Avignon region, in the 13th century there
were no such bequests but between the second half of the 14th century and the
early 16th century, 65 to 70 per cent of testators requested masses to be said for
their souls.129 Popular religious culture was suffused with prayers for the dead.
For example, in 1495, the bishop of Nantes in France ordered the appointment
of a réveilleur or “awakener” in each parish, to rouse the faithful at midnight

126 Bonfans, Le purgatoire de sainct Patrice.

127 François Boüillon, Histoire de la vie et du purgatoire de S. Patrice (Paris: 1643).
128 Clive Burgess, “An Afterlife in Memory: Commemoration and its Effect in a Late Medieval
Parish,” SCH 45 (2009), 196–​217, on 196.
129 Chiffoleau, La comptabilité de l’au-​delà, 341.

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with a handbell and a loud reminder to the faithful to pray for the departed.130
Confraternities had as one of their main associational activities post-​mortem
intercession for former members and Duffy estimates that as many as one in
three adults were member of such groups before the 1520s.131 Some were even
set up solely to pray for souls: in the Breton diocese of Vannes, the founding
statues of the Confraternity of the Departed (Trépassés) of 1543 stated the mo-
tive of the founders to be to relieve “the souls of the departed tormented by the
burning flames of purgatory.”132 A key desire was for remembrance, so that the
living would not forget the founder’s name and his/​her continuing spiritual
need. In the words of the foundation of Gillet Barbe in Sainte-​Croix of Nantes
in 1529, it was made “so that the parishioners and their successors would have
memory and remembrance of the souls of Gillet, his mother and father … to
recommend them to God in their prayers.”133 In 1581, Symon Le Goff of Auray
linked a foundation with a bequest for maintenance of the chapel of Notre
Dame in the cemetery of Saint-​Goustan, “so that he, his predecessors and suc-
cessors will be participants in the masses, prayers and devotions that will be
said and made in the chapel.”134
Indulgences, giving remission from time spent in purgatory, were also firmly
part of religious and devotional life. Thus, in 1503, Bishop Guégen of Nantes
consecrated several altars in Saint-​Saturnin parish church and granted an in-
dulgence of a year and a day to those who visited these altars on the first an-
niversary of their dedication.135 The fraternity of Notre-​Dame-​des-​Carmes in
the Carmelite convent of Nantes obtained forty days’ pardon for its members
from Bishop d’Acigné, when he confirmed the guild in 1475; further indulgenc-
es were gained in 1478, 1484, and 1500, and in 1518 Queen Claude obtained a
bull of indulgences from Leo x in favour of the confraternity.136 Individuals
acquired indulgences when alive and after death. In 1481, Jean Spadine the
younger of Nantes left 120 livres for cathedral rebuilding and papal indulgenc-
es.137 Indulgences for projects such as these were widely hawked by questors in

130 Croix, La Bretagne, ii, 1133.

131 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional religion in England c.1400–​c.1580
(New Haven and London: 1992).
132 Archives Départementales du Morbihan (adm) 57 G 3. Chapitre cathédrale de Vannes.
Fondations.
133 adla G 461. Sainte-​Croix de Nantes. Fondations.
134 adm 6 E 2182. Notaire Kermadec. Auray 1561–​82.
135 Nicolas Travers, Histoire civile, politique et religieuse de la ville de Nantes (c.1750), 3 vols
(Nantes: 1836–​41), 2:256.
136 Yves Durand, Un couvent dans la ville: Grands Carmes de Nantes (Rome: 1997), 92.
137 adla G 466. Sainte-​Croix. Fondations.

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Changing Western European Visions of Christian Afterlives 63

Europe. In 1494 the statutes of Bishop Jean d’Epinay of Nantes forbade rectors
and vicars to allow pardoners to preach their indulgences more than once a
year and then only after having seen their licences.138
It was a dispute over the operation of indulgences that led to Luther’s crit-
icism of the Church. As a result, from 1517 onwards, the doctrine of purgatory
was rejected by Protestant reformers and the institutions of intercession were
abolished where states adopted the new churches. Reformed criticisms also
undermined confidence in post-​mortem intercession even among many Cath-
olics. Erasmus’s essay “The Exorcism or Apparition” in The Colloquies of 1518
showed scepticism about elaborate post-​mortem intercession along with crit-
icism of all elaborate forms of intercession.139 Later, this view emerged from
other Catholic reformers as well. For example, at a Privy Council meeting at
Blois in August 1562, the Cardinal of Lorraine put forward five proposals for
adoption as policy by the French delegation at the Council of Trent, including
trimming the canon of the mass by omitting prayers for the dead.140 Regional
studies of popular practices show that adherence to the doctrine of purgato-
ry may have declined in the mid-​and later 16th century, at grassroots level.
The most striking feature of 16th-​century French post-​mortem foundations
is their mid-​century decline. Nicole Lemaitre’s work on the Rouergue shows
that mass requests and foundations were at their height in the years 1530–​1550
and declined thereafter.141 Philip Hoffman’s study of the Lyonnais also shows
a similar decline in post-​mortuary intercession after 1530; in the Lyons parish
of Saint-​Nizier, the chapel of Notre-​Dame-​de-​Grace recorded five foundations
between 1481 and 1530, but no more thereafter until the 17th century. Hoffman
argues that the evidence “points to a stunning shift in religious attitudes”; in
his view, the conclusion is inescapable that people from all social classes came
to question the efficacy of Catholic ritual for the dead.142 Stéphane Gal argues
for Grenoble that by the 1580s, wills make no mention of purgatory at all; tes-
tators saw eternity in terms of heaven and hell.143

138 Travers, Histoire civile, 2:226.

139 Desiderius Erasmus, “The Exorcism or Apparition,” in The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans.
N. Bailey, 2 vols. (London: 1878), 2:391–​401.
140 Stuart Carroll, “The Compromise of Charles Cardinal of Lorraine,” JEH 54 (2003), 469–​83,
on 474.
141 Nicole Lemaitre, Le Rouergue flamboyant: Le clergé et les fidèles du diocèse de Rodez 1417–​
1563 (Paris: 1988), 351.
142 Philip T. Hoffman, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon 1500–​1789 (New Haven,
CT: 1984), 28–​30.
143 Stéphane Gal, Grenoble au temps de la Ligue: Étude politique, sociale et religieuse d’une cité
(vers 1562-​vers 1598) (St Martin d’Hérès: 2000), 248.

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64 Tingle

But with the onset of religious conflict in the 1550s, Catholic theologians
turned to the defence of purgatory, along with other doctrines, to distinguish
the faith from Protestantism and to rally the faithful in traditional practices. In
the proliferation of tracts that emerged in the early religious wars in France,
there was more emphasis on the infernal nature of purgatory and on judge-
ment while the best way of saving souls was through the application of the
sacrifice of the mass, to the living and the dead. One example is the writing
of Melchior de Flavin, an observant Franciscan from Toulouse, who published
two works in the 1560s: De l’estat des âmes après le trépas, comment elles vivent
estans du corps séparées et des purgatoires qu’elles souffrent … in 1563, then De
la préparation à la mort en trois traitez in 1566.144 He argued that purgatory ex-
isted so that God could render reward or punishment to everyone, according to
their merits: “we see in this world the wicked prosper … On the other hand, we
see the wise poor, persecuted and afflicted … Therefore there needs to be an-
other place where the wicked are punished according to the quantity of their
faults.”145 Purgatory was thus a grace bestowed by God on Christians to allow a
time and place for penitence, after death, for those who had not accomplished
it during their lifetimes and who therefore really deserved to go to hell.
Of even greater significance to the resurgence of purgatory were the rul-
ings of the Council of Trent. The first decree to uphold purgatory was that on
justification, of Session vi in 1547, and the decree on the doctrine of the mass,
of Session xxii in 1562, which upheld the sacrifice as propitiatory for the liv-
ing and the dead, that is, for those departed who are not yet fully purged. Fi-
nally, in Session xxv of December 1563, a decree concerning purgatory was
issued, upholding that “there is a purgatory and that the souls there detained
are helped by the suffrages of the faithful, but principally by the acceptable
sacrifice of the altar.”146 Dissemination of the doctrine came through the Tri-
dentine catechism. Designed to instruct clergy, it was widely taught from the
pulpit and copied in derivative publications throughout Catholic Europe.
Chapter vii comprised a discussion of the destinations of the soul in the after-
life. Purgatory was the place “in which the souls of the pious are purified by a
temporary punishment, that they may be admitted into their eternal country

144 Melchior de Flavin, De l’estat des âmes après le trépas, comment elles vivent estans du corps
séparées et des purgatoires qu’elles souffrent en ce monde et en l’autre après icelle séparation
(Toulouse: 1563; edition used here: Paris: 1579) and De la préparation à la mort en trois
traitez (Paris: 1566, edition used here: Paris: 1578).
145 De Flavin, Des âmes, 9v.
146 Norman P. Tanner ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols (London and
Washington: 1990), 2:796–​7.

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Changing Western European Visions of Christian Afterlives 65

into which nothing defiled entereth.”147 In line with the Tridentine decrees, the
catechism mentions purgatory again in the article on the eucharist, for “the
sacrifice of the mass is also available to the dead … such is the efficacy of this
sacrifice that it is profitable … to all the faithful, whether living with us here on
earth or already numbered with those who are dead in the lord, but whose sins
have not yet been fully expiated.”148 Further mentions occur in the sections
on the Decalogue and on prayer, where exhortations are made for prayers for
the dead, “that they may be liberated from the fires of purgatory.”149 Together,
the decrees of Trent and the Roman Catechism were vital in rehabilitating the
doctrine and its suffrages. In Spain, for example, Sarah Nalle argues that in La
Mancha, before 1555, only one third of testators made provision for souls in
purgatory, usually for their relatives. By 1565, most men and women among all
social groups were setting aside some money for the souls in purgatory and two
thirds of these provided masses for anonymous souls.150
What is notable about early Tridentine publications is their lack of details
on the location and punishments of purgatory. Peter Marshall observes that
early continental Counter-​Reformation catechisms and commentaries gave
purgatory minimalist treatment.151 This was to be the work of other authors.
One of the greatest works on purgation, the Dark Night of the Soul of St John
of the Cross, was written in the later 1570s. It emphasises despair and purifi-
cation in this life as a sort of anti-​chamber to purgatory. The author describes
the mental torment of the soul who despairs of finding God, but who once
purged, is illuminated by divine light and achieves union with its creator.152
In France, we see the beginnings of the detailing of purgatory in the 1580s and
1590s, in tracts produced in the context of a new wave of militant Catholicism
in the kingdom. One of the most interesting is by the Franciscan Noël de Tail-
lepied, Psichologie ou traité de l’apparition des esprits … published in 1588.153
The central paradox of the doctrine of purgatory, acutely criticised by Protes-
tants, was that it appeared to negate the redemptive act of Christ’s death on
the cross for all sins. Taillepied explained the relationship between the two
succinctly: while Christ has made satisfaction for our sins, for us to participate

147 Jeremiah Donovan (ed.), The Catechism of the Council of Trent (London, 1854), 59.
148 Donovan (ed.), Catechism, 248.
149 Donovan (ed.), Catechism, 403, 480.
150 Nalle, God in La Mancha, 191–​2.
151 Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford: 2002), 119.
152 St John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul (London: 2009).
153 Noël Taillepied, Psichologie ou traité de l’apparition des esprits à scavoir des âmes séparées,
fantosmes, prodigies et accidents merveilleux qui precedent quelquefois la mort des grands
personages ou signifient changements de la chose publique (Paris: 1588).

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in his merit we have to receive baptism and have faith. Also, so that sins might
be pardoned, we must show penitence through tears, fasts, prayers, alms, and
good works, the “fruits” of penitence.154 Physical descriptions of purgatory had
changed little since the early 16th century. Taillepied claimed that apart from
the “normal place,” there were rivers and mountains where some souls would
be purged, and special places where the living had sinned, that could also be
used for purgation.155
Michel Vovelle argues that the 17th century was the “great century” of pur-
gatory. It was with the “classic” Counter Reformation in France that the doc-
trine once more became prominent as a driver of religious practice.156 It was
underpinned by an enormous number of publications, which combined anti-​
Protestant polemic and spiritual advice. Traditional views of the purposes and
place of purgatory re-​emerge, justified with reference to biblical texts. One of
most influential was Pierre Victor Palma Cayet. For many years a Protestant
and officer in the household of Catherine de Bourbon, sister of Henri of Na-
varre, in 1595 he converted to Catholicism and became a prolific writer and
publicist for Henri iv. In 1600, he published Le purgatoire prouvé par la parole
de Dieu, an examination of the scriptural evidence for purgatory, and in 1603,
La fournaise ardente et le tour de reverbere, pour évaporer les prétendues eaux de
Siloé et pour corroborer le Purgatoire, a refutation of the Reformed interpreta-
tion of these passages.157 Palma Cayet upheld the traditional view of the func-
tion of purgatory but gave the role of sinful flesh greater stress: souls have to be
purged because they are infected by the contagion of the body and have to be
free of stains before they can appear before God. Although Christ’s sacrifice on
the cross remitted all sins, the individual still erred because of its connection
with the body.158 However, purgatory came from God’s love. If he wanted to
submit us to the full rigour of his justice for our sins, he would commit us to
eternal damnation. But God remits our sins and gives us life, allowing the soul
the opportunity to be cleansed in purgatory so that it might become pure and
return to him.159

154 Taillepied, Psichologie, 235.

155 Taillepied, Psichologie, 261.
156 Vovelle, La mort, 308.
157 P. V. Palma Cayet, Le purgatoire prouvé par la Parole de Dieu (Paris: 1600); P. V. Palma Cayet,
La fournaise ardente et le four de reverbere, pour évaporer les prétendues eaux de Siloé et
pour corroborer le Purgatoire, contre les heresies, erreurs, calomnies, faussetez et cavilla-
tions ineptes du pretend minister du Moulin (Saint-​Germain lez Paris: 1603).
158 Palma Cayet, Le purgatoire, 6r.
159 Palma Cayet, Le purgatoire, 7v, 26v.

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Changing Western European Visions of Christian Afterlives 67

Works on purgatory of the 1620s and 1630s began to leave behind polem-
ic debate and to concentrate increasingly on sin and suffrages, blending into
more general literature on the Christian life and death. The greatest develop-
ment was a move from emphasising purgatory as a place of judgement and
justice where satisfaction was achieved for sins committed, to charity as the
motive for punishment and for its remission. Good works became increasingly
privileged as the best suffrage for souls in purgatory. The Jesuit Étienne Binet’s
tract of 1635, De l’estat heureux et malheureux des âmes suffrantes en Purgatoire
et des moyens souverains pour n’y aller pas ou y demeurer fort peu has as its cen-
tral premise that “there is no satisfaction more important in this world than to
comfort suffering souls.”160 Binet proposed that of all the works of brotherly
love and mercy, the most sublime, purest, and most advantageous was the ser-
vice rendered to souls in purgatory.161 Hope as well as punishment was stressed,
as purgatory became a means of pastoral consolation. From the second quarter
of the 17th century, perhaps the most powerful and widely disseminated infor-
mation about purgatory came in catechisms. Jean-​Pierre Camus published an
Instruction Catholique du Purgatoire in 1641 solely on the doctrine, in catechet-
ical style. The first question, “what do you understand by the word purgatory?”
was clearly answered with:

the purgation of souls by Jesus Christ, the tribulations and afflictions

which purified the good, as gold was purified in a furnace and a ‘third
place’ between paradise and hell where souls of the faithful paid tempo-
ral penalties due for their sins, once remitted of their sins and of eternal
damnation.162

Catechisms for children, youths, and ordinands also had developed sections on
purgatory as part of a pedagogy of the afterlife.
Evidence for increasing preoccupation with purgatory among ordinary
Catholics is the rising demand for intercession, shown in numerous studies
across Europe.163 Chaunu shows that in later 17th-​century Paris, 70 per cent of

160 Étienne Binet, De l’estat heureux et malheureux des âmes suffrantes en Purgatoire et des
moyens souverains pour n’y aller pas ou y demeurer fort peu (Rouen: 1635), 1.
161 Binet, De l’estat heureux, 9–​21.
162 Jean-​Pierre Camus, Instruction Catholique du Purgatoire (Paris: 1641), 30.
163 For example Chaunu, La mort à Paris; Hoffman, Church and Community, ­chapter 4; Lebrun,
Les hommes et la mort en Anjou; Carlos Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory (Cambridge: 1995);
Trevor Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles: The Counter Reformation in the
Upper Palatinate (Farnham: 2009).

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68 Tingle

testators demanded masses, more than half stating “as soon as possible after
death.”164 Similarly, Catherine Marle’s study of Valenciennes in the later 17th
century, after it had been incorporated into the French kingdom, shows that
around 50 per cent of testators asked for masses and 90 per cent of these asked
for short-​term cycles, with a figure of 100–​299 most frequently demanded.165
These were testators such as Adelice Nuz, who in 1601 founded an obit in the
Cathedral of St-​Pol-​de-​Léon “to pray God for her soul … and to participate in
the merits of the masses, prayers, orations and suffrages which will be said
there.”166 Similarly, in 1657, Ollivier Bottin gave money to the hospital-​general
of Nantes, “desiring to participate in the prayers, merits and sufferings of the
poor.”167 The motives were clear, as for example in a foundation document of
1662, where David Le Cléguerec and Jeanne du Mur founded an obit in the
parish church of Cléguer in Vannes diocese, “for the remission of their sins and
for the prosperity of their family. … to pity them and exempt them from the
flames of purgatory.”168
Purgatory was also the concern of communities, for it was dependent on
mutual aid. Thus, in 1657 in the parish of Languidic in the diocese of Vannes,
Henriette Colle was moved to found a mass in perpetuity “by the spirit of God,
by charitable zeal and by commiseration for the pains which the faithful de-
parted suffer in the flames of purgatory, where they are held until full satis-
faction and perfect expiation is achieved for the sins they committed through
weakness or otherwise during their lives.”169 Parish devotions included the
bourse des defunts in Rannée and a boîte des trépassés, that is, charity boxes for
souls, in Saffré and Châteaubriant, all in Nantes diocese, to assure a minimum
of regular prayers in memory of those who were too poor to pay for their own
masses or who lacked family members to pray for them.170 Devotional, parish,
and craft confraternities were concerned to provide decent funerals, prayers
for the dead, and continuing perpetual intercession, as they had in earlier de-
cades. They commissioned requiem services, provided lights and decorations
for altars and chapels. Specialist confraternities focused on intercession for
the dead increased in number, Trépassés, Agonisants of various dedications,

164 Chaunu, La mort à Paris, 424, 427.

165 Catherine Marle, “Le salut par les messes: Les valenciennois devant la mort à la fin du
XVIIe siècle,” Revue du Nord 79 (1997), 45–​67, on 54.
166 Archives Départementales de Finistère (adf) 9 G 7. Confrérie des Trépassés. Fondations.
167 adla H dep 3/​1 B3. Hôtel Dieu de Nantes. Dons.
168 adm G 878. Cléguer. Fondations.
169 adm 6 E 1815. Notaire Cadic. Hennebont 1654-​44.
170 Croix, La Bretagne, 2:1135.

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Changing Western European Visions of Christian Afterlives 69

and of Bonne Mort (the Good Death). The new, widely popular, rosary and
holy sacrament confraternities also had intercession for dead members at the
heart of their activity. The 1661 statutes of the rosary confraternity of Aradon
in Vannes diocese stated that there would be four anniversaries held a year for
deceased confreres; following the death of a member, the others undertook to
say a rosary or, if wealthy enough, to have a mass said for them at the rosary
altar, within 40 days of the death.171 The collectivity guaranteed post-​mortem
intercession, with its annual services and regular prayers with an assured
congregation.
After 1600, indulgences also re-​emerged as a popular part of the economy
of salvation, most commonly in three forms: masses said at privileged altars,
church pardons, and confraternity membership. Privileged altars possessed in-
dulgences for masses said before them which, in the words of the Jesuit Marc
de Bonnyers, gave the sacrament “double the strength” for souls.172 They were
extremely popular: Ollive Godart’s bequest of 1639 for two weekly masses in
the Carmelite church of Nantes “at the altar privileged for the deceased” and
Jeanne Gillot’s foundation of 1648 of an anniversary in the Minimes’ church at
the “privileged altar” are examples.173 Individual parish churches also sought
papal indulgences, to attract visitors and their donations on feast or pardon
days. In 1670, the parish church of Saint-​Gonnéry in Vannes diocese received
a plenary indulgence from Clement x for seven years “for the augmentation of
the religion of the faithful and the salvation of souls” for visitors to the church
on their feast of the Assumption.174 There were also indulgenced activities.
Participation in the Forty Hours’ devotion, for example, gave pardons to the
participants; we see examples in Martigné-​Ferchaud in 1622 and Blain in 1665,
both in Nantes diocese.175 The greatest consumers of indulgences, however,
were confraternities. Plenary indulgences were granted on condition that on
the first day of their entry members would repent, confess, and receive the
holy sacrament. Plenary remission was also granted to the dying if they con-
fessed and received the sacrament, if they could support it, or at least had con-
trition in their hearts. A plenary indulgence was also granted for visiting the
chapel or altar of the confraternity on its principal feast day.

171 adm G 1143. Arradon. Fondations.

172 Marc de Bonnyers, L’advocat des âmes de purgatoire ou moyens faciles pour les aider
(Lille: 1640), 62.
173 adla H 227, H 321. Carmes de Nantes. Fondations.
174 adm 48 G 5. Cathédrale de Vannes. Fondations.
175 Alain Croix (ed.), Moi, Jean Martin, recteur de Plouvellec: Curés journalistes de la
Renaissance à la fin du 17e siècle (Rennes: 1993) 91, 190.

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70 Tingle

From the 1650s in France at least, published works devoted solely to pur-
gatory began to decline. Discussion of the afterlife and salvation were most-
ly confined to a wider literature of spirituality and living and dying well. The
management of a soul’s destination was increasingly the work of the living
individual. With Jansenism and other influences from the mid-​17th century,
the details of purgatory became more muted. Jansenists attacked “the frivolous
concept of a God whose punishment could be bought off so cheaply, by human
intercessions.”176 Théophile Brachet de la Milletière’s work of 1640 stressed the
need to pray for the dead and to perform charitable acts in their name, but
denied the “superstition” of purgatory as a harsh place of punishment. He was
vague about the abode of souls after death but before judgement day, although
conceded that penalties could be exacted in the next life. Stress was on prayer
and good works rather than purgation.177 Even among mainstream Catholics,
there was a downplaying of purgatory in the later century. McManners shows
that devotional writers systematised the intercessory duties of the Christian
year, with individuals counselled to make petitions for the dead on the anniver-
saries of their death, one day a month and on All Souls’ Day. In 1695, Guillaume
Amfrye de Chaulieu wrote that “my God is not a cruel god” and for Pierre Bayle,
the notion of infernal suffering was completely incompatible with the good-
ness of God.178 This decline in purgatory continued into the Enlightenment,
a part of the process which Vovelle calls “de-​Christianisation.” Again, we can
see the popular response in France in changing religious practices. After 1660,
there is clear evidence of decline in post-​mortem foundations. In Normandy,
new foundations fell by 75 per cent after 1700, where Philippe Goujard argues
for changing conceptions of eternity, an idea of time more rooted in history.179

4 Conclusions

The Christian who prepared for death in the 14th century was ready to face
immediate judgement and for his/​her soul to be sent, in all probability, to pur-
gatory. This would be unpleasant, but of temporary duration –​even if the con-
cept of time was different in the afterworld –​because once their debt to God
had been expunged, souls would be released to heaven. At the end of time,

176 McManners, Death and the Enlightenment, 127.

177 Brachet de la Milletière, Response, passim.
178 McManners, Death and the Enlightenment, 127.
179 Philippe Goujard, Un catholicisme bien tempéré: La vie religieuse dans les paroisses rurales
de Haute-​Normandie 1680–​1789 (Paris: 1996), 363.

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Changing Western European Visions of Christian Afterlives 71

they expected to be reunited with their body, then to pass eternity with Christ
in paradise. Hell was a possibility, but one which most people hoped to avoid,
with a bit of pious effort in this life and some well-​placed investments for post-​
mortem intercession. Of course, there were some independent thinkers who
had their own versions of the afterlife, as well as dissenting sects such as Lol-
lards and Hussites who denied purgatory. But for most Christians in the late
Middle Ages, the afterlife depicted on their parish church wall helped them
to visualise the spiritual realm, with heaven above, hell below and purgatory
somewhere in between.
The Protestant rejection of purgatory at the Reformation had a significant
impact on religious practice for those who belonged to a reformed tradition.
Predestination of the elect to heaven or hell, without intercession or media-
tion, became orthodoxy. In practice, most Protestants took comfort from the
view that faith in Christ would save them, and they would pass directly to heav-
en, to await the last day and final judgement. Catholics maintained a tripartite
afterlife, with purgatory as the initial destination for most. The widespread
adoption of plenary indulgences meant for many that their stay would be of
short duration, if at all.
So, the terrors of hell and even of purgatory receded over time. The afterlife
was increasingly seen as a blissful place where friends and family were reunit-
ed, possibly as angels, in the bosom of Christ. Hellfire sermons and anticipa-
tion of Last Judgement were still widespread, but as calls to repentance and
the living of a right life, whether as a form of good work or a sign of election,
whatever one’s confessional allegiance. So, as with Sir Walter Raleigh, faith
bought consolation,

And from which Earth, and Grave, and Dust,

The Lord shall raise me up I trust.180
180 Epitaph of Sir Walter Raleigh, written by himself (1618), from John Hayward (ed.), The
Penguin Book of English Verse (Harmondsworth: 1956), 38.

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 ­c hapter 2

Preparations for a Christian Death: The Later

Middle Ages

Stephen Bates

The later Middle Ages are frequently characterised, even denigrated, as a peri-
od obsessed with death. Its art was replete with innovations such as the danse
macabre and the cadaver tomb; its literature likewise abounded in stories of
the dead interrupting the living with warnings of the afterlife and, of course,
there is ample evidence for the popularity of books on the art of dying a “good
death”.1 In 1965, Johan Huizinga asserted that “no other epoch has laid so much
stress as the expiring Middle Ages on the thought of death”.2 Subsequently,
Thomas Boase wrote of the period’s “morbid indulgence in disgust which an-
swered some need now hard to understand”.3 Allan Galpern concluded that
“Catholicism at the end of the Middle Ages was in large part a cult of the living
in the service of the dead”, but Natalie Zemon Davis, writing in the same col-
lection of essays, stressed that “the connection was not just one of the living
serving the dead, but was reciprocal. The living did for the souls in purgatory;
the saints in paradise did for the living.”4 Eamon Duffy was also critical of Galp-
ern’s formulation. “It won’t quite do”, he wrote, “late medieval responses were
more complex and more varied”. Duffy argued that the diverse preparations
found in parishes reflected “a means of prolonging the presence of the dead
within the community of the living.”5 In order to achieve this, contemporaries

1 As discussed in ­chapter 11 of this volume, by Christina Welch.

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 Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, trans. F. Hopman
(Harmondsworth: 1965), 134.
3 T.S.R. Boase, Death in the Middle Ages: Mortality, Judgement and Remembrance (London:
1972), 106.
4 A.N. Galpern, “The Legacy of Late Medieval Religion in Sixteenth-​Century Champagne,” in
The Pursuit of Holiness, eds Charles Trinkaus and Heiko A. Oberman (Leiden: 1974), 141–​76,
on 149; Natalie Zemon Davis, “Some Tasks and Themes in the Study of Popular Religion,” in
The Pursuit of Holiness, eds Charles Trinkaus and Heiko A. Oberman (Leiden: 1974), 307–​38,
on 328.
5 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–​1580, 2nd ed.
(New Haven and London: 2005), 302–​3.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004443433_004

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Preparations for a Christian Death: The later Middle Ages 73

adopted what Robert Swanson called “a complex amalgam of strategies to

speed progress through purgatory to eternal bliss”.6 This chapter argues that, in
this context, the “obsession” proves on examination to be entirely reasonable,
both in the sense of being judicious (contra Boase) and moderate (an import-
ant qualifier to Huizinga’s assertion). It reveals the “innovations” of the period
to be a development of existing cultural trends, often with clear precursors.
The essay has a geographical slant towards English religious culture but makes
telling comparisons with other regions and draws on transnational texts such
as Elkerlijc and L’Ordinaire des chrétiens. In doing so, it connects local prepa-
rations for death to a more homogeneous set of “European” beliefs about, and
responses to, mortality. Consequently, the analysis of the relationship between
popular understandings of the afterlife, and lifetime investments and be-
haviours, offers illumination on how late medieval society ended up with such
a macabre culture.

1 Remember to Die

Preparing for a Christian death was a lifelong preoccupation. In scripture, Ec-

clesiastes affirmed that “the heart of the wise was in the house of mourning”.7
The Wisdom of Ben Sira, known in the contemporary canon as Ecclesiasticus,
advised “in all you do, remember the end of your life, and then you will never
sin”.8 St Paul had written that those who set their minds on “the flesh”, as op-
posed to “the spirit”, were hostile to God and consequently could not please
him (with obvious soteriological implications), a principle affirmed by Christ’s
parable of the rich fool who stored up his goods with no thought to the af-
terlife.9 This wisdom was a touchstone of the monastic tradition of quotidie
morior, “dying daily”, and was repeated in literature throughout the late medi-
eval period.10 In his Secretum, written between 1347 and 1353, Petrarch advised
“think of death which is certain, the hour of death which is uncertain, but in all
times and in all places imminent”.11 Around 1420, Thomas à Kempis asserted in

6 Robert N. Swanson “Praying for Pardon: Devotional Indulgences in Late Medieval En-
gland,” in Promissory Notes on the Treasury of Merits: Indulgences in Late Medieval Europe,
ed. Robert N. Swanson (Leiden and Boston: 2006), 215–​40, on 215.
7 Ecclesiastes 7:5 in the Vulgate (7:4 in nrsv).
8 Sirach 7:40 in the Vulgate (7:36 in nrsv).
9 Romans 8:6–​8; Luke 12:13–​21.
10 Cf. 1 Corinthians 15:31.
11 Francesco Petrarca, Prose, eds G. Martellotti, P. G. Ricci, E. Carrara, and E. Bianchi (Milan
and Naples: 1955), 187.

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74 Bates

the Imitation of Christ that “very soon the end of your life will be at hand: con-
sider, therefore, the state of your soul … If you are not ready to die today, will
tomorrow find you better prepared?” Subsequently Thomas asked “why do you
not prepare yourself against the Day of Judgement?”12 In 1496 the first print-
ed Latin edition of Catherine of Siena’s Il Dialogo introduced a new prologue
lamenting that, if only men “wolde sadly ponder those ylles that be prepared
for them that shall be exyled” from “that heuenly Hierusalem”, they would sure-
ly lose themselves “frome all erthely affeccyons, and full faste renne vnto it, and
all thynges contrary and letttynge, exchewe as dethe, as truly they be moche
worse than dethe indede”.13 The rhetoric of these exhortations moved beyond
the potential for earthly comforts to distract good Christians from right liv-
ing, to impose a dichotomy between selfishness and holiness through lifetime
behaviours.
The long-​standing message of memento mori, literally “remember [you are
going] to die”, was driven home to ordinary people by the liturgy, sermons,
and morality plays. The lengthy fast of the Lenten quadragesima subordinat-
ed the “flesh”, while the season of Advent foregrounded preparations for the
Second Coming. In his homily for septuagesima Sunday, which traditionally
addressed the meaning of Lent, the Augustinian canon John Mirk (d. ca. 1414)
summoned parishioners “to thynke on deth Inwardly”, while in that for the
first Sunday of Advent he cautioned, “he that wyll not trauayle his body in
good werkes … shall trauayle euer with fendes in helle. And for drede of deth
he must make hym euer redy to god, whan he wyll sende for hym”.14 Popular
preachers such as Bernardino of Siena (d. 1444) believed that “constant med-
itation upon death and its aftermath” would make audiences flee sin, despise
the world and the desires of the flesh, and pursue good works.15 In the Dutch
drama Elckerlijc, translated into German and Latin as well as English, the pro-
tagonist finds he cannot take his goods with him, complaining, “alas I haue the
loued & had great pleasure, all my lyfe dayes on good and treasure”, to which
his goods reply:

12 Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, trans. Leo Sherley-​Price (Harmondsworth: 1952),
57, 60.
13 Raymond of Capua, The Orcharde of Syon in the whiche is conteyned the reuelacyons of
seynt Katheryne of Sene (London: 1519), 2r; Catherine of Siena, Dialogus Seraphice ac Diue
Catharine de Senis cum nonnullis aliis orationibus (Brescia: 1496), A2r.
14 John Mirk, The festyuall (London: 1508), 3v.
15 Franco Mormando, “What Happens to Us When We Die? Bernardino of Siena on ‘The
Four Last Things’,” in Death and Dying in the Middle Ages, eds Edelgard E. DuBruck and
Barbara I. Gusick (New York: 1999), 109–​42, on 110–​11.

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Preparations for a Christian Death: The later Middle Ages 75

That is to thy dampnacyon without lesynge

For my loue is contrary to the loue euerlastynge
But yf thou had me loued moderately durynge
As to the poore to gyue parte for me
Than shouldest thou not in this doloure be.16

Such sentiments were a call to Christian virtue and sociability, and it would
therefore be a mistake to see only a contempt for the world in the late medieval
emphasis on the macabre.
In contrast to modern culture, which marginalises both death and the dead,
the immanence of the afterlife could be a banal reality for the medieval mind.
Philippe Ariès, the doyen of studies on death in western Europe, saw it as
death “tamed”, that is, calmly accepted and ritually prepared for as a collective
experience. Ariès suggested that Christian iconography from the 12th centu-
ry revealed a changing emphasis from the Second Coming to the Last Judge-
ment with a concomitant shift from salvation to damnation.17 This transition,
thought Ariès, instilled a new individual consciousness into the dying person,
but that seems an odd conclusion. The ars moriendi, for example, offered both
clergy and laity a guide to collective deathbed ritual and emphasised the im-
portance of their contribution in facilitating the passing of the soul of moriens,
the dying man (or woman), to glory. Donald Duclow goes so far as to call the
genre “a guide for ‘taming’ death”.18 The ars moriendi literature drew on the
liturgical office for the visitation of the sick, De visitatione infirmorum. Yet, as
Duffy points out, Ariès did not deem this official text on preparations for death
worth discussing.19 More significantly, Ariès was dismissive of purgatory as a
“dogma that was limited to a small elite of theologians”.20 This is demonstrably
false and, indeed, it is the “birth” of purgatory that initiates and undergirds
the cultural changes in representations of death that take place in the half-​
millennia before the Reformation.

16 A treatyse how the hye fader of heuen sendeth dethe to somon euery creature to come and
gyue a counte of theyr lyues in this worlde and is in maner of a morall playe (London: 1535?),
B2v; Den spieghel der salicheit van Elckerlijc (Antwerp: 1501?), B7r.
17 Phillippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (Harmondsworth: 1983), 99.
18 Donald F. Duclow, “Dying Well: The ars moriendi and the Dormition of the Virgin,” in
Death and Dying in the Middle Ages, eds Edelgard E. DuBruck and Barbara I. Gusick
(New York: 1999), 379–​429, on 396.
19 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 313.
20 Ariès, Hour of Our Death, 306; cf. Carlos Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft
of Dying in Sixteenth-​Century Spain (Cambridge: 1995), 4–​5.

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2 Mapping the Eschatological Landscape

In truth, the New Testament is only slightly less vague than the Old on the
“last things” and it left considerable room for developments in response to
theological or pastoral pressure. Consequently the eschatological schema of
the Middle Ages evolved and was a good deal more complex than the simple
binary of “going to heaven” and “going to hell” explicit in Christ’s story of the
sheep and the goats.21 Jacques Le Goff located the transition of purgation
from a process to a place in the late 12th century, though the development
was not as revolutionary as he proposed, and had more to do with consolidat-
ing existing theological speculation.22 In fact the main fault in Le Goff’s the-
sis lies in a misreading of Augustine’s Enchiridion (written after 420), which
presented a tripartite division of souls divided between the valde boni, valde
mali, and an intermediary group, the non valde boni (“the not very good”).
Le Goff reads a fourth category, the non valde mali (the “not very bad”), into
Augustine and suggests that the 12th-​century transition involved a reduction
from a fourfold to a threefold scheme.23 Le Goff also located the concept of
limbo to around the same time in what he calls “the great reworking of the
geography of the hereafter”.24 Purgatory’s impetus was rooted in the pasto-
ral reassurance that polluted souls really could find their way into the puri-
ty of heaven. Thereafter, its existence transformed the afterlife from a final
destination to a transformative sojourn. Limbo was the temporary state of
justified souls who had died before Christ, and therefore had to wait for his
redeeming work on the cross to make their entry into heaven possible, but
it also remained the state of the unbaptised dead, bound by Original Sin,
in the popular imagination (it never became a doctrine of faith). Medieval
theologians can be found dividing limbo to distinguish limbus patrum (the
limbo of the Fathers) from limbus infantium, (the limbo of infants), Thomas
Aquinas (d. 1274) concluding, for example, that “the limbo of the fathers and
the limbo of infants are without doubt different”.25 This situates the urgency
of child baptism, usually just a couple of days after birth, as a preparation for

21 Matthew 25:31–​46.
22 Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (London: 1984), 4.
23 Graham Robert Edwards, “Purgatory: ‘Birth’ or Evolution?” Journal of Ecclesiastical History
36 (1985), 634–​46, on 639; Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Paradise, Death, and Doomsday in
Anglo-​Saxon Literature (Cambridge: 2001), 29, 91.
24 Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, 45.
25 “Limbus patrum et limbus puerorum absque dubio differunt”: Thomas Aquinas, Super
quarto libro Sententiarum Petri Lombardi (Venice: 1481), B3r.

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Preparations for a Christian Death: The later Middle Ages 77

death, and goes a long way to explaining the contempt for anabaptists in the
16th century.
The eschatological waters of the early Middle Ages were opaque: further ad-
ditions to the landscape of the afterlife came directly from Christ’s tale of the
rich man, “Dives”, and Lazarus, in which the latter was taken after death not to
heaven but to “the bosom of Abraham”, and from his assurance to the crucified
thief that “today you will be with me in paradise”.26 In Second Temple Juda-
ism these two places were equated as one of the divisions in the underworld
of sheol (the other, the destination for Dives, being gehenna). This equation
was followed by some Christian theologians in late antiquity.27 Patristic escha-
tology such as Augustine’s introduced ambiguity, however, by creating space
for purgation. This sort of thinking required a first or particular judgement at
death as opposed to the Last Judgement, and transitory places for the habita-
tion of disembodied souls. So, for example, Tertullian (d. ca. 225) regarded the
temporary repose of the righteous as Abraham’s bosom, in what he called an
“interim refrigerium”, while paradise was the refuge of the perfect, such as mar-
tyrs.28 While some writers, for example Julian of Toledo (d. 690), subsequently
persisted with a three-​part otherworld, others including Gregory the Great (d.
604), Isidore of Seville (d. 636), Bede (d. 735), Boniface (d. 754), and Goscelin
(d. ca. 1107) presented four-​parts.29 Their cosmologies were supported by mo-
nastic visions of the afterlife such as that of the Irish monk Fursey (d. 650) and
German Benedictine Wetti (d. 824). Bede recorded that of the Melrose monk
Dryhthelm; Boniface that of a monk from Much Wenlock in Shropshire. Bede
would subsequently write of those who “after death, consoled in the bosom
of Abraham in blessed rest, await the beginning of heavenly peace with joyful
hope”.30 The culmination of these developments was that at death moriens’
soul either went to purgatory and thence to Abraham’s bosom to await the Last

26 Luke 16:19–​31, 23:43.

27 Cf. Augustine, “ergo post hanc vitam etiam sinus ille Abrahae paradisus dici potest”,
and Pseudo-​Chrysostom, writing no earlier than the 5th Century: “sinus Abrahae, par-
adisus est”; Augustine, “De Genesi ad Litteram Libri Duodecim,” in PL, vol. 34 (Paris: 1861),
482; Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea in Quatuor Evangelia, ed. P. A. Guarienti, vol. 2
(Turin: 1953), 228. Helen Foxhall Forbes misattributes the latter quote to Aquinas him-
self: Helen Foxhall Forbes, “Dividuntur in Quattuor: The Interim and Judgement in Anglo-​
Saxon England,” The Journal of Theological Studies 61 (2010), 659–​84, on 680, n. 108.
28 Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem, trans. Ernest Evans, vol. 2 (Oxford: 1972), 454–​55; Isabel
Moreira, Heaven’s Purge: Purgatory in Late Antiquity (Oxford: 2010), 25.
29 Foxhall Forbes, “The Interim and Judgement in Anglo-​Saxon England,” 662, 670, 674, 678;
Moreira, Heaven’s Purge, 149, 261 n.33.
30 “In sinu Abrahae post mortem beata requie consolati supernae pacis ingressum spe felici
exspectabunt”: Bede, “Homiliae X, In Die Circumcisionis Domini,” in PL, vol. 94 (Paris: 1850),

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Judgement, the receipt of a new heavenly body and entrance into heaven for
all eternity; or to limbo if he or she were unbaptised; or to hell where, at the
Last Judgement, the damned would also receive new bodies before embarking
on a fresh phase of eternal agony.
In spite of all this, in the 13th century Aquinas could still write of some au-
thors identifying five “receptacula animarum”, refuges of the soul, not counting
the earthly paradise from which Adam and Eve had been ejected.31 The arrival
of purgatory as a noun in the 12th century, officially defined in 1274 at the Sec-
ond Council of Lyons and reaffirmed in 1439 during the Council of Florence,
therefore offered clarity for those preparing for a Christian death in the lat-
er Middle Ages. Then, in the 14th century, a controversy erupted concerning
when souls could attain the beatific vision and “see” God.32 This culminated in
the papal constitution Benedictus Deus, issued by Benedict xii in 1336, which
enshrined in dogma the belief that the visio beatifica was available to the souls
out of purgatory. Benedictus Deus asserted that all souls shortly after death and
purification, but before the Last Judgement and the receipt of new resurrection
bodies, would be with Christ in heaven, in paradise, and joined to the company
of the holy angels.33 “Paradise” and “the bosom of Abraham” were affirmed
as synonyms for heaven, hence the absence of an interim Abraham’s bosom
from either Dante’s Divine Comedy or images of the sphaerae of the Ptolemaic
universe such as that in the de Lisle psalter.34 Nevertheless the relevance of
the sinus Abrahae to late medieval understanding was reflected in its place in
the breviary, offices for the dead praying that angels would lead the soul of the
departed there (the Suscipiat), and in art as on the 13th-​century tympanum of
Rheims Cathedral which showed angels physically carrying souls to Abraham,

54; cf. Peter Lombard, Sententiae in IV Libris Distinctae, ed. Ignatius Brady, vol. 2
(Grottaferrata: 1981), 236.
31 Aquinas, Super quarto libro Sententiarum, B3r. The posthumous supplement to the
Summa Theologicae comprises this same material; cf. Thomas Aquinas, Sancti Thomae
de Aquino opera omnia iussu Leonis XIII P.M. edita, vol. 12 (Rome, 1906), Supplementum
Tertiae Partis, 146.
32 Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (London: 1996), 212–​14; Virginia
Brilliant, “Envisaging the Particular Judgment in Late-​Medieval Italy,” Speculum 84 (2009),
314–​46, on 316.
33 “Mox post mortem suam et purgationem praefatam in illis qui purgatione huiusmodi
indigebant, etiam ante resumptionem suorum corporum et iudicium generale, post
ascensionem Salvatoris nostri domini Iesu Christi in caelum, fuerunt sunt et erunt in
caelo, caelorum regno et paradiso caelesti cum Christo, sanctorum Angelorum consor-
tio aggregatae”: Benedict xii, Acta Benedicti XII (1334–​1342), ed. Aloysius L. Tautu, vol. 8
(Rome: 1958), 10–​13.
34 BL Arundel 83 ii, 123v.

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Preparations for a Christian Death: The later Middle Ages 79

who held them in a sheet. In an intriguing development, above the memorial

brass of Laurence de St Maur (d. 1337) at Higham Ferrers in Northamptonshire,
it is Christ who holds the sheet receiving his soul although the accompanying
text reads “in sinu Abrahe angeli deducant me” (angels carry me to the bosom
of Abraham). This innovation may reflect revised wording in monastic brevia-
ries: “may Christ, who has called you, receive you, and may the angels raise you
up to Abraham’s bosom”.35 These tropes testify to a popular conception that
angels waited around the deathbed to receive the soul from the mouth of the
dying and carry it to the patriarch “as a small childlike naked eidolon held in
a cloth”.36 There are fine 14th century examples of this motif sponsored by the
noble Durazzo family at both Santa Chiara (ca. 1344) and San Lorenzo (ca. 1381)
in Naples.37 Overall though, this elaboration and extension of the post-​mortem
passage of the soul put distance between the death of the individual and their
resurrection at the last day, shifting the emphasis from the general to the par-
ticular judgement.
The advent of purgatory as a place may have encouraged the repentant to
know that they could still find redemption in a merciful God but, in doing so, it
risked diminishing the retributive threat of God’s justice for those anticipating
sinful behaviour. Consequently, it evolved. In the 14th century, Dante consid-
ered the souls in purgatory to be “content within the fire” (color che son contenti
nel foco) of purification or, in Mark Musa’s translation, “those who rejoice while
they are burning”, and this same understanding can be found in Catherine of
Genoa’s writing at the turn of the 16th century.38 Catherine’s vision was of souls
placed in “God’s burning love” and who, even in the midst of suffering, “behold
only the goodness of God”. She can even write of their joy as incomparable,
“except the joy of the blessed in paradise”, concluding, “the souls in purgatory
at the same time experience the greatest happiness and the most excessive
pain”.39 Purgatory could therefore invoke both fear and hope in late medie-
val mentalities but in the hands of reform-​minded preachers and writers the

35 Maria R. Grasso, “The Ambiguity in Medieval Depictions of Abraham’s Bosom in the

Areas and Spaces of the Christian Afterlife,” in Place and Space in the Medieval World, eds
Meg Boulton, Jane Hawkes, and Heidi Stoner (New York: 2018), 103–​113, on 108.
36 Binski, Medieval Death, 110; Peter Marshall, “Angels around the Deathbed: Variations
on a Theme in the English Art of Dying,” in Angels in the Early Modern World, eds Peter
Marshall and Alexandra Walsham (Cambridge: 2006), 83–​103, on 85.
37 Brilliant, “Envisaging the Particular Judgment in Late-​Medieval Italy,” 323.
38 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Volume I, Inferno, trans. Mark Musa (New York:
2003), 71.
39 Catherine of Genoa, Treatise on Purgatory, trans. H. E. Manning, 4th ed. (London: 1858), 1,
3–​4, 6, 36.

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emphasis shifted towards the former. As Ralph Houlbrooke has remarked, “if
purgatory was not to seem a soft option for the rapidly swelling numbers of
prospective inhabitants, it had to be depicted as a fearsome place”.40 Contem-
porary assessments and texts such as the anonymous Revelation of Purgato-
ry (1422) imagined a breadth of punishments apposite to specific sinful acts,
though making use of flames in particular.41 This repositioned purgatory to be
closer to Dante’s inferno than his purgatorio. Indeed the author of L’Ordinaire
des chrétiens, a treatise written around 1468, asserted that every man ought to
understand that purgatory “is one parte of hell & the place of ryght maruaylous
payne”.42 There is a diversity and ambiguity in these readings that probably
falls short of the guilt culture that Jean Delumeau has sought for in this period.
However bleakly it was painted, purgatory remained the lesser of two evils.
Preparing for a Christian death meant navigating this complex topography,
largely through prayer. It was a truism understood by all, from ploughman to
pope, that the living were but one third of Christendom, the church militant,
and that the broader ecclesia embraced in fellowship those in purgatory, the
church suffering, and those in heaven, the church triumphant. Together they
formed a single and cohesive communion of saints, a mystical body with Christ
as their head, conceived from the metaphor established by St Paul in his letter
to the Corinthians, and reinforced by an article of the Apostles’ Creed.43 This
was a universal extension of social relations, which the Golden Legend called
“the dette of entrechaungynge neyghbourhede” and is the vital context for un-
derstanding late medieval memorial culture.44 In theory, through purity and
propriety in life, all could store up a repository of “merits”; in practice nobody
was likely to accrue sufficient resources to pay off their sinful debt. Yet that
debt did not define the relationship with God, theologians distinguishing ab-
solution of guilt from the remission of punishment. It was therefore possible
to die as friends with God, in a “state of grace” to use the contemporary pasto-
ral language, if one had received the absolution contained in the sacrament
of penance: this meant dying contrite and confessed. The saints, however, had
by definition been in credit when they had died and consequently had merit

40 Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England 1480–​1750 (Oxford: 1998), 35.
41 See the descriptions in John Fisher’s sermon on Psalm 6 in his exposition on the seven
penitential psalms: John Fisher, The fruytfull saynges of Dauyd the kynge and prophete in
the seuen penytencyall psalmes (London: 1508), aa2r-​cc1r.
42 The Ordynarye of crystyanyte or crysten men, trans. Andrew Chertsey (London: 1502), LL2r;
L’Ordinaire des chrétiens (Paris: 1494), sig. s5r.
43 1 Corinthians 12, passim. The communion of saints forms part of the ninth article of the
Apostles’ Creed.
44 Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea sanctorum (Westminster: 1483), 346r.

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Preparations for a Christian Death: The later Middle Ages 81

to spare, which they had added to the inexhaustible fund generated by Christ’s
sacrifice on the cross. The metaphor of the body merged with the mercantile
image to produce what Robert Shaffern has called the “communion of suffrag-
es”.45 The church militant mediated for the suffering, while the triumphant,
in their turn, interceded in both the world of the living and in the process
of purifying those souls already in purgatory. The author of The Ordinary of
Christian Men believed that “they of purgatory praye for theyr benefactors as-
wel”.46 As Diarmaid MacCulloch puts it, “the dead in purgatory, with a good
deal of time on their hands, could be expected to reciprocate with their own
prayers”.47 This was a far more complex set of exchanges than that portrayed
by Galpern.

3 The Cultural Turn to the Macabre

Popular piety in the later Middle Ages should therefore be read in the context
of lives that did not end with death. Parishioners were reminded of this from
the pulpit on feast days, in the moralising sermons of the friars, by dramatists,
and by the art of their churches. Buonamico Buffalmacco’s Triumph of Death
in the Camposanto in Pisa (ca. 1340) is a pictorial homily situated along the
route for funerary processions, and therefore “seen at a moment when view-
ers’ thoughts would have turned naturally toward its theme”.48 The earliest
fully-​formed Last Judgement is probably that on a 12th-​century tympanum
above the west portal of the abbey church of Sainte-​Foy in Conques; the most
famous, that of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, was completed in 1541.49
Other important medieval examples included Giotto’s fresco on the west wall
of the Capella degli Scrovegni in Padua, painted around 1305, and the large
fresco in the basilica of Sainte-​Cécile at Albi, prepared by Flemish artists in
the 1480s. The “doom”, as it was known locally, was a ubiquitous adornment
of English parish chancel arches. As the largest and (in combination with the
“rood” scene) the most central piece of art in the church, it was an impos-
ing reminder to parishioners that they should live each day with their own

45 Robert W. Shaffern, “The Medieval Theology of Indulgences,” in Promissory Notes on the

Treasury of Merits: Indulgences in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Robert N. Swanson (Leiden
and Boston: 2006), 11–​36, on 19.
46 The Ordynarye of Crystyanyte, H2r; L’Ordinaire des chrétiens, e3r.
47 Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided (London: 2004), 13.
48 Brilliant, “Envisaging the Particular Judgment in Late-​Medieval Italy,” 327–​28.
49 Ariès, Hour of Our Death, 100.

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­f igure 2.1 
The weighing of souls, with the Virgin Mary intervening, mid-​14th century, St
Botolph, Slapton, Northamptonshire. Logically the Virgin does not practice the
rosary, so the beads used in her intervention here reflect the lifetime pieties of
the devotee in preparation for judgement.
source: © stephen bates

inevitable judgement in mind. There are several surviving examples, including

fine paintings at St Thomas and St Edmund Church, Salisbury, and Holy Trin-
ity Church, Coventry.
Another common trope was the psychostasia or weighing of souls, typical-
ly conducted by St Michael with the prayerful soul in one scale-​pan and an
amorphous mass or demon in the other, representing sin. These might appear
on tympanums as at Bourges Cathedral (13th century), or on the wall of the
nave as at All Saints church, Catherington in Hampshire (early 14th century).
The intrinsic weight of the soul in such images was implicitly its good deeds
which had accrued merit. The weighing had scriptural precedent: Job says, “let
me be weighed in a just balance, that God may know my integrity”; Daniel
tells Belshazzar, “you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting”.50

50 Job 31:6; Daniel 5:27.

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Preparations for a Christian Death: The later Middle Ages 83

To contemporaries, however, it represented the particular judgement that oc-

curred at death and provided motivation for the faithful to accrue merit in life
while trying to avoid filling the counterweight with sins. There were important
interactions in these images with devilish figures pulling at the scale-​pan of sin
in an attempt to secure a conviction, while saints mediated in a spiritual tug-​
of-​war. At the hospital of St Wulfstan in Worcester, a painting from around 1500
shows the Virgin Mary interceding in a weighing of souls; the words “Maria ora
pro nobis” (Mary, pray for us) are discernible above her head, reminding the
viewer that her help was not normative but rather a consequence of a lifetime
of devotion, developing a personal relationship with the saint. Indeed, The my-
racles of our blessyd lady described the Virgin as advocating against irreverent
monks and even, in one instance, petitioning her son to convict an entire mon-
astery during a scene of psychostasia:

The moder of god came & kneled byfor her sone complaynynge & sayd
O moste ryghtwyse Iuge, thys mannes bretheren ful neglygently & breue-
ly & vnreuerently saye myn houres & therfore commaunde Iugement to
passe ayenst theym.51

More innovative art depicted Death personified, an early example being found
in the late 13th-​century Westminster Abbey bestiary.52 A more imaginative ex-
ample is that of Death playing chess with a man in the church at Täby near
Stockholm, a fresco dated to around 1490. In literature, the cautionary tale of
the three living and the three dead was fairly widespread by the end of the 13th
century.53 “Ich wes wel fair; such schel tou be; for godes love bewer by me” warn
the corpses.54 These motifs were concerned with the living and intended to
provoke them into preparing for death.
Significantly, nearly all of these tropes are found before the great demo-
graphic disaster of the mid-​14th century: the Black Death. The plague is often
singled out as the origin of the macabre in late medieval culture, but should
be better thought of as a catalyst affecting pre-​existing trends. Certainly there
were innovations in the following century: the decorating of tombs with
carved cadaver sculptures; the ars moriendi literature; the danse macabre. Yet
these were additions to an established and vibrant culture of memento mori

51 The myracles of oure blessyd lady (Westminster: 1496?), C2v.

52 Rosemary Horrox, “Purgatory, Prayer and Plague: 1150–​1380,” in Death in England: An
Illustrated History, eds Peter C. Jupp and Clare Gittings (Manchester: 1999), 90–​118, on 93.
53 Binski, Medieval Death, 135.
54 bl Arundel 83, 127v.

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84 Bates

­f igure 2.2 
The three living and the three dead, 15th century, St Giles, Packwood,
Warwickshire. The figures are unusually positioned here on either side of the
chancel arch, making them a central feature of the painted scheme of the church
and (probably) associating them with a scene of the Last Judgement.
source: © stephen bates

designed to confront the laity with the relationship between life and afterlife
in an age, lest we forget, already familiar with higher mortality rates. “That
which I am now, they once were, and that which I shall be, they are now” ap-
peared in the funeral epitaph of Peter Damian (d. 1072), while the macabre is
readily found in monastic writings of the 12th century.55 Among the poems of
the Franciscan Jacopone da Todi (d. 1306) is “On the contemplation of death
and the grave to counter pride”.56 Indeed there is a genre of poetry known as
vado mori which has its genesis in a hymn contained in De contemptu mundi,
a treatise written around 1195 by the future Innocent iii, and which would in-
fluence poets well into the 15th century including François Villon and William
Dunbar:

On to the ded gois all estatis,

Princis, prelotis, and potestatis,

55 Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, trans. Eric
Nicholson (New York: 1990), 42, 44–​6.
56 Binski, Medieval Death, 132.

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Preparations for a Christian Death: The later Middle Ages 85

Baith riche and pur of al degre;

Timor mortis conturbat me.57

Although the relationship between the two is uncertain, vado mori literature
shares some characteristics with the danse macabre including the list of rep-
resentative characters and the anthropomorphism of Death. There may also
have been dramatic antecedents to the dance of death, but as art it originated
from a fresco decorating the wall of the cloister of the Cemetery of the In-
nocents in Paris, completed in 1425.58 That painting was destroyed by 17th-​
century building work but by then this extraordinarily popular motif had been
reproduced in manuscript and, from 1485, in print. An adaptation by John Ly-
dgate was painted on the walls of old St Paul’s Cathedral in London around
1430. It was a largely northern European phenomenon although there are sur-
viving frescos in St Mary on the Rocks in Beram, Istria, and in several churches
across Lombardy and Trento. The characters and number of dances vary but
encompass the whole of humanity: pope, emperor, knight, merchant, and even
a child. A separate women’s dance appeared in 1482.59 Death is represented as
an emaciated corpse speaking in a sarcastic and sometimes threatening tone,
with more than a hint of social criticism aimed at rich bishops and fat-​bellied
abbots, underlining the central message that he was no respecter of persons.60
Death was the great leveller. The anticipated impact of word and image were
recorded by Lydgate in his prologue:

O ȝee folkes, harde herted as a stone

Which to the world haue al your aduertence
Like as hit stolde, laste euere in oone
Where ys ȝowre witte, where ys ȝowre prudence
To see a forne the sodeyne vyolence
Of cruel dethe that ben so wyse and sage
Whiche sleeth, allas, by stroke of pestilence
Bothe ȝonge and olde, of low and hie parage.61

57 William Dunbar, “Lament for the Makaris”; R.T. Davies (ed.), Medieval English Lyrics: A
Critical Anthology (Evanston: 1964), 251.
58 Phoebe S. Spinrad, The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance English Stage
(Columbus: 1987), 6–​7.
59 Ann Tukey Harrison (ed.), The Danse Macabre of Women: Ms. fr. 995 of the Bibliothèque
Nationale (Kent, Ohio, and London: 1994), 6.
60 Cf. Acts 10:34, Romans 2:11.
61 Huntington Library Ellesmere 26/​A.13, 1r.

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­f igure 2.3 
The cadaver monument to Bishop Richard Foxe (d.1528), Winchester Cathedral.
The striking image of a disintegrating body intentionally contrasts with the
reputation of the wealthy statesman and cleric in an act of abjection designed to
unsettle the viewer.
source: © stephen bates

Such scenes were, as Duffy asserts, not the articulation of despair but “part
of a concerted attempt by religious and moral teachers to persuade the la-
ity of the transience of earthly pleasures and goods, and the need to seek
eternal salvation at all costs”.62 The same can be said of the cadaver tomb,
known as a transi (after the Latin imperative, “go across!”), although these
semi-​decomposed effigies primarily served the purpose of fostering memo-
rialisation and encouraging prayer for the soul of the occupant.63 The transi
was, again, an almost entirely northern European trend, emanating out of
late 14th-​century France.64 In the 1420s, Masaccio incorporated a painted

62 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 307.

63 Kathleen Cohen, Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol: The Transi Tomb in the Late Middle
Ages and the Renaissance (Berkeley and London: 1973), 3–​4.
64 Binski, Medieval Death, 140; Christina Welch, “Exploring Late-​Medieval English Memento
Mori Carved Cadaver Sculptures,” in Dealing with the Dead: Mortality and Community in
Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Thea Tomaini (Leiden: 2018), 331–​365, on 332.

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Preparations for a Christian Death: The later Middle Ages 87

version below his Trinity in the Basilica di Santa Maria Novella, in Florence
with the accompanying text, “Io fui già quel che voi siete e quel ch’io son voi an-
cor sarete” (“I was what you are and I am what you will be”). Transi images oc-
casionally made their way into books of hours such as the Grandes Heures de
Rohan (ca. 1420) and even ars moriendi texts.65 Yet two-​tier transi tombs have
a striking similarity to the layout of a typical saint’s shrine, which allowed
for an “ingress of limbs” at the cadaver level, imposed below the traditional
gisant.66 These developments testify to an evolution rather than a revolution
in the presentation of death, which suggests continuity in the underlying
rationale.
Importantly, Christianity embraced a long-​standing impulse toward laici-
sation, emboldened through the reforming efforts of the friars, and evidence
for this can be seen in the establishment of chantries and guild chapels from
as early as the 12th century, foundations that appropriated the public role
of the Church in order to shorten the stay in purgatory.67 Such was the im-
pact of lay investment in unbeneficed clergy that Duffy concluded that it re-
shaped the organisation of the late medieval Church.68 The Avignon papacy
from 1309 offered one ready explanation not only for the chastisements of
the plague but of the Great Famine of 1315–​22, as well as more prosaic calam-
ities such as the Hundred Years War. Hence, in Gabriele de Mussis’ Istoria de
Morbo, written around 1350, God asks a sinful humanity “What are you doing,
held captive by gangs of worthless men, soiled with the filth of sinners? Are
you totally helpless?”69 The traditional, sanctifying protection of the Church
from the demonic forces that brought epidemics and famines was seen to fail,
increasing the demands of the laity upon the clergy (a set of expectations
labelled by older historiography as “anticlericalism”) and inclining some con-
temporaries to greater spiritual self-​reliance. Subsequently they perceived
those demons shifting their threat from the community to the individual
soul.70 One important impact the Black Death did make, however, was that it
decimated the priesthood, the clergy presumably putting themselves at risk

65 bnf Latin ms 9471, 159r; Ariès, Hour of Our Death, 114.

66 Binski, Medieval Death, 147–​9.
67 Howard Colvin, “The Origin of Chantries,” Journal of Medieval History 26 (2000), 163–​73,
on 165; David Crouch, “The Origin of Chantries: Some further Anglo-​Norman Evidence,”
Journal of Medieval History 27 (2001), 159–​80, on 177–​8.
68 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 301.
69 Rosemary Horrox, The Black Death (Manchester: 1994), 14.
70 Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-​Hunt
(London: 1975), 73.

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of this most contagious of diseases by attending its victims to administer the

last rites. Infamously, at the height of the epidemic, the Bishop of Bath and
Wells authorised confession to a layman or “even to a woman if a man is not
present”.71 This instruction reveals the profound importance of the sacra-
ments to the dying, but it is also suggestive of a new age of lay proactivity in
preparing for death.

4 Practical Planning

Confronted with the purgatorial system, parishioners moderated their be-

haviour and spent handsomely on relevant investments. They were guided
by mnemonics such as the seven corporal works of mercy and the seven
virtues, preached in sermons and often represented in church art such as the
stained-​glass scheme in All Saints, North Street in York and the polyptych
originally situated in an almshouse in Alkmar and now in the Rijksmuseum
of the Netherlands.72 These publicly displayed tropes promoted active par-
ticipation in the Christian community. The works of mercy comprised six
acts encouraged by Christ’s teaching on the judgement of the nations: feed-
ing the hungry, giving water to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing
the naked, caring for the sick and visiting prisoners.73 To these was added
the burial of the dead, derived from the then canonical book of Tobit, which
explains its absence from the north transept rose window in Freiburg Mün-
ster and its low priority in English wills.74 Amusingly, Mirk’s “syxe werkes of
mercye” comprise all seven, “to gyue mete & drynke clothe herberowe [i.e.
harbour] vysyte prysones, comforte the syke blynde lame, and to burye them
that ben deed”, and are said to have “comen oute of the ten commaunde-
mentes”.75 That people acted literally on these exhortations is borne out by
Lady Margaret Beaufort, who housed twelve poor, sick folk and ministered
to them personally.76 “Almes delyuereth ye soule from deth” reads Mirk’s
homily for the first Sunday in Lent, but the previous week’s sermon offered
a caveat:

71 Horrox, The Black Death, 272.

72 Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum SK-​A-​2815.
73 Matthew 25:35–​6.
74 Tobit 1:16–​18; Christopher Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England, 1066–​1550
(London and New York: 1997), 20.
75 Mirk, The festyuall, 10r.
76 Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family, 69.

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Preparations for a Christian Death: The later Middle Ages 89

­f igure 2.4 
Faith, St Mary & All Saints, Willingham, Cambridgeshire, early 16th century. The
virtue is anthropomorphised as a woman holding a chalice in one hand and a
cross in the other. The image forms part of a scheme in which the biblical virtues
on the south wall of the nave face the cardinal virtues painted on the north wall.
source: © stephen bates

Though a man praye & do almes dedes, go a gylgremage haue full fayth &
byleue, teche & preche, fast & suffre penaunce neuer soo moche, crye &
wepe neuer so lowde, & be out of charyte god hereth hym not.77

The seven virtues comprised the three given by St Paul, faith, hope, and charity,
with four cardinal virtues drawn as much from Plato as from scripture: pru-
dence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. Virtues were often personified in
morality plays. They acted as a counterpoint to the use of the seven deadly sins
in confession: a positive rather than a negative exhortation that encouraged
proactivity in preparing for judgement.78 This is borne out in Everyman, where
the protagonist is deserted by his friends, kinsmen, and property and, at the

77 Mirk, The festyuall, 17r, 13v. Cf. 1 Corinthians 13:1–​3.

78 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 58–​9.

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end, by Beauty, Strength, Discretion, and Five Wits (his senses). Good Deeds or
Virtue (“Duecht”) alone stays with him, commenting:

All ertly thynge is but vanyte

Beaute strength and discrecyon do man forsake
Folysshe frendes and kynnesmen that fayre spake
All fleeth saue good dedes and that am I.79

This point is reinforced by the doctor attending the deathbed, who brings the
play to a close:

Remembre beautye, fyue wyttes, strength, and discression

They all at ye last do eueryman forsake
Saue his good dedes there dothe he take
But beware, for and they be small
Before god, he hath no helpe at all.80

A life of vice was expected to shorten life. Obviously, sinful behaviours could
result in illness from cirrhosis for the intemperate to venereal disease for the
lustful. But more than this, medieval mentalities distinguished between a “nat-
ural” death and one that was untimely, basing their understanding largely on
Avicenna’s 11th-​century Canon of Medicine. They understood from the Psalms
that everyone was endowed with a set length of life, though this varied from
person to person.81 Natural expiry was regarded as painless, calm, and mor-
ally neutral, while a premature death was painful, riddled with anxieties and
the consequence of sin.82 Richard Oram speaks of the “fundamental medieval
belief in the moral or spiritual nature of disease” to emphasise the tension in

79 How the hye fader of heuen sendeth dethe to somon euery creature, C3v; Den spieghel der
salicheit van Elckerlijc, D6r-​v.
80 How the hye fader of heuen sendeth dethe to somon euery creature, D4r; Den spieghel der
salicheit van Elckerlijc, D7v.
81 “The days of our life are seventy years, or perhaps eighty, if we are strong”: Psalm 89:10 in
the Vulgate (90:10 in nrsv). Karine van ’t Land observes that “the common people said
that a dog lived for nine years, a horse three times as long as a dog, which made 27 years,
while a man lived three times the life span of the horse: 81 years”; “Long Life, Natural
Death: The Learned Ideal of Dying in Late Medieval Commentaries on Avicenna’s Canon,”
Early Science and Medicine 19 (2014), 558–​83, on 572.
82 Philip Morgan, “Of Worms and War: 1380–​1558,” in Death in England: An Illustrated History,
eds Peter C. Jupp and Clare Gittings (Manchester: 1999), 119–​46, on 121; van’t Land, “Long
Life, Natural Death,” 582–​3.

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Preparations for a Christian Death: The later Middle Ages 91

finding a medical cure for a spiritual malady.83 Some paid large sums for advice
from physicians on how to attain the ideal, natural death, advice that largely
focussed on diet in old age.
One obvious response to the apotropaic anxieties of the 14th century and
subsequent increased laicisation was to pray more at home. Contemporaries
brought monasticism and the liturgy into the household, following the wis-
dom that contemplative Marys were superior to worldly, distracted Marthas.84
Thereafter, no other book was produced in such numbers as books of hours,
whether in manuscript or print, which included within its texts both the Hours
of the Virgin (known as the Little Office) and the most efficacious means of
reducing time in purgatory, the Office for the Dead.85 The latter comprised
the readings for vespers, matins, and lauds, and were evidently read together
corporately as well as individually.86 Owners marked obits in the calendar that
opened horae as reminders to pray for their dead relatives on the anniversary
date and no doubt anticipated the same service from their heirs. One partic-
ularly touching and prosaic example is where a 15th-​century hand, possibly
belonging to a man named Nicholas from Bury St Edmunds, has added ‘my
moder departyd to god’ against 27 November.87 Books of hours were also em-
ployed during mass: parishioners were agents in their own participation of
the liturgy and made the service less of a passive spectacle for themselves. An
extension of this personal piety was self-​mortification, which was advocat-
ed by some writers as a means of taming the flesh.88 Public flagellation was
condemned by Clement vi in 1349, but this was to do with an act considered
as an atonement for sins and which therefore challenged the efficacy of the
sacrament. By contrast it remained a legitimate act of private contrition. It
is only after Everyman scourges himself that Good Deeds (Virtue) is able to
mediate for him:

83 Richard Oram, “Disease, Death and the Hereafter in Medieval Scotland,” in A History
of Everyday Life in Medieval Scotland, eds Edward J. Cowan and Lizanne Henderson
(Edinburgh, 2011), 196–​225, on 202, 211.
84 Luke 10:41–​42.
85 Roger S. Wieck, “The Death Desired: Books of Hours and the Medieval Funeral,” in
Death and Dying in the Middle Ages, eds Edelgard E. DuBruck and Barbara I. Gusick
(New York: 1999), 431–​76, on 431–​2.
86 Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers, 1240–​1570 (New Haven
and London: 2006), 57.
87 Cambridge University Library Ee.1.14, 8r, reproduced in Duffy, Marking the Hours, 47; Paul
Binski and Patrick Zutshi, Western Illuminated Manuscripts: A Catalogue of the Collection
in Cambridge University Library (Cambridge: 2011), 180–​1.
88 Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family, 64.

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In the name of the holy trynyte

My body sore punysshyd shalbe
Take this body for the synne of the flesshe
Also thou delytest to go gaye and fresshe
And in waye of dampnacyon yu dyd me brynge
Therfore suffre nowe strokes and punysshenge.89

When the thrust of personal piety was not focussed on self or the object of the
works of mercy, contemporaries directed it toward specific saints and objects.
Local icons were obvious targets of veneration, but people were prepared to
travel long distances to visit far-​off shrines, relics, and significant cities such
as Rome and Jerusalem. The latter might offer indulgences: Margery Kempe
was moved to go “vysyten serteyn places for gostly health”.90 But travelling to
see the blood of Christ at Hailes Abbey or the body of St James at Compostela
entreated the help of the communio sanctorum, for there were sacred spac-
es where saints were more amenable. Some pilgrimages were made by those
seeking help with a particular affliction, perhaps trying to avoid the deathbed
altogether. Cardinal Wolsey’s journey to Walsingham in August 1517 got him out
of London during an outbreak of sweating sickness.91 Often, however, pilgrim-
ages were made with the end in mind; either one’s own or that of a deceased
relative or friend. That many were closely associated with eschatological angst
is revealed by the number of posthumous, vicarious peregrinations provided
for in wills. In this context the most important saint by far was the Virgin Mary.
As the mother of Christ she was considered particularly effective at getting
a soul in and out of purgatory promptly and the growth of her cultus during
the later Middle Ages displaced many local and merely thaumaturgic saints.92
Local Marian icons embraced a breadth of tropes including the Mater dolorosa
under the rood and the enormously popular image of the Pietà. These were
empathetic simulacrum for the grieving and the thanatologically anxious.
The most important way of securing communal suffrages was a place on the
bede-​roll, a parish register of the departed read out publicly in full at least once
a year, and in an abbreviated form every Sunday at the bidding of the bedes
during Mass. The latter incorporated a general intercession for all the souls in

89 How the hye fader of heuen sendeth dethe to somon euery creature, B5v. Den spieghel der
salicheit van Elckerlijc, C5r.
90 bl Additional ms 61823, 11v.
91 J.S. Brewer (ed.), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII,
Volume 2, Part II (London, 1864), 1154.
92 Patrick J. Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca and London: 1994), 175.

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Preparations for a Christian Death: The later Middle Ages 93

purgatory, but the roll itself was reserved for “theym that fynde ony lyght in this
chirche or gyue ony behestes boke belle chalyce or vestemente, surplys, awter-
cloth or towayle. londes rentes, lampe or light, or ony other adournementes”.93
Wills often provided for a “month’s mind”, a requiem mass for the deceased one
month after death, and a “year’s mind” or “obit”, an annual repetition of the fu-
neral. Wealthier testators might establish almshouses populated by bedesmen
who had the responsibility to pray for the soul of their benefactor. The less
well-​off typically made provision for a fund to maintain a votive light before
a saint’s image. Similarly, enrolling in a prayer fraternity was a clever strate-
gy since inscription in the register of members ensured one was prayed for
while in purgatory. So, for example, when the Hanseatic merchant Hinrik Ke-
menade drafted his will in the mid-​15th century, he left a gift to Bergen’s Corpus
Christi guild specifically that they might sing masses for his soul and include
his name in their denkelbuch (notebook).94 Consequently guilds, which were
once understood primarily in economic terms, are now recognised to have had
an important religious role. Their statutes often required members to attend
recitations of the Office for the Dead for deceased members, although Philip
Morgan has suggested that “weight of numbers drove further commemoration
into a subsumed collective identity in which prayers were directed on behalf of
all dead members”. He concluded, “there were clear physical limits to the com-
munity of the dead”.95 Guilds could, however, take practical steps to encour-
age participation in commemorative services: in 1515, the London Company of
Drapers decided to divide the livery in half, in order to alternate attendance at
funerals and obits.96 In 1409, in another innovative move, the Oslo shoemak-
ers’ guild made an agreement for local Dominicans to sing masses for deceased
guild members in return for an annual donation.97 It was also common for
guilds to pay the funeral expenses of poorer members or of merchants and
craftsmen working away from their families.98 While membership of a guild
was commonplace, a more distinctive means for securing communal suffrages

93 Mirk, The festyuall, 204r.

94 Håkon Haugland, “ ‘To Help the Deceased Guild Brother to His Grave’: Guilds, Death and
Funeral Arrangements in Late Medieval and Early Modern Norway, ca. 1300–​1900,” in
Cultures of Death and Dying in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds Mia Korpiola and
Anu Lahtinen (Helsinki: 2015), 152–​83, on 163.
95 Morgan, “Of Worms and War,” 133.
96 Laura Branch, “Fraternal Commemoration and the London Company of Drapers, c.1440-​
c.1600,” in Dying, Death, Burial and Commemoration in Reformation Europe, eds Elizabeth
C. Tingle and Jonathan Willis (Farnham: 2015), 96–​111, on 97.
97 Haugland, “ ‘To Help the Deceased Guild Brother to His Grave’,” 164–​5.
98 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 153.

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was through affiliation with the mendicant orders. Some entered orders at the
point of death or sought to be buried in a friar’s cowl.99 The popularity of belief
in the sanctifying power of the cowl was such that Erasmus chose to satirise
it, in passing, in his colloquy The Shipwreck (1523).100 These preparations to be
prayed for corporately offer further evidence against the new individualism
perceived by Ariès.
Beyond the desire for inclusion on the bede-​roll, considerable investment
was made towards the material culture of parish churches both through life-
time gifts and testamentary bequests. These included the building and ex-
tending of churches and private chapels, and the purchase of vestments or
plate for the clergy. Spending on the decoration of these structures accounted
for the significant impact on artistic representation, as well as architectural
forms, and the multiplication and diversification of macabre tropes. Masses
were endowed in monasteries and chantries. Lifetime donations were supple-
mented by alms at the funeral, purchasing the particularly efficacious prayers
of the poor. Likewise some testators provided doles for prisoners or hospitals,
dowries for poor maidens or maintenance of parish roads and bridges, char-
itable acts which they expected to impact on the weighing of their soul.101
Testators regularly made plans for the location of their bodies, especially af-
ter the Black Death where they were concerned to avoid being interred in a
plague pit with relative anonymity.102 Burial in one’s parish church or church-
yard was normative but not always possible if death had taken place far away,
a particular concern for merchants and explorers, and was prohibited for
certain types of criminal, suicides, unbaptised children and the excommu-
nicate.103 Lepers were also excluded.104 Members of the gentry and nobili-
ty might have a family crypt or mausoleum; the practice of dismemberment

99 Daniell, Death and Burial, 155–​6.

100 Desiderius Erasmus, The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago and
London: 1965), 145.
101 Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family, 114.
102 Samuel K. Cohn Jr, “The Place of the Dead in Flanders and Tuscany: Towards a
Comparative History of the Black Death,” in The Place of the Dead: Death and
Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds Bruce Gordon and Peter
Marshall (Cambridge: 2000), 17-​43 on 26, 29.
103 Michael Tymowski, “Death and Attitudes to Death at the Time of Early European
Expeditions to Africa,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 54 (2014), 787–​811, on 800–​1; Anthony
Perron, “The Medieval Cemetery as Ecclesiastical Community: Regulation, Conflict and
Expulsion 1000–​1215,” in Dealing with the Dead: Mortality and Community in Medieval and
Early Modern Europe, ed. Thea Tomaini (Leiden: 2018), 253–​73, on 262–​3.
104 R.N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, c.1215–​c.1515 (Cambridge: 1995), 298;
Morgan, “Of Worms and War,” 130.

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Preparations for a Christian Death: The later Middle Ages 95

among high-​ranking nobility to proliferate prayers at multiple sites of inter-

ment was abolished, albeit ineffectively, by a papal bull of 1299.105 Some tes-
tators specified burial in a cathedral or religious house. Others sought burial
near the high altar where they might benefit from the sanctifying power of
the mass, or in a dedicated space such as a lady chapel, which brought them
into proximity with their patron and advocate, physically under the cloak of
the Mater misericordiae. In the Lady Chapel of St Peter’s Abbey in Ghent, for
example, lie five Flemish counts and the original tomb of Isabella of Austria,
sister of Charles v.
All these posthumous prayers and memorial activities were the product
of careful preparations in life although, curiously, most wills and testaments
remained nuncupative, that is, directed verbally from the deathbed. Techni-
cally the will dealt with land (and might be subject to more onerous legisla-
tion), while testaments dispensed with personal property including the soul. It
was part of the responsibility of the priest performing the last rites to remind
moriens of the duty to make proper provision, usually orally to the witnesses
around the deathbed where it would be written down and read back for confir-
mation, and usually before receiving absolution, encouraging bequests to the
church and the poor.106 The result was often “the strategic ventilation of sev-
eral pious gifts to ascertain the suffrages of a wide variety of beneficiaries”, the
culmination of a lifetime of targeted bequests.107 Typical testamentary gifts
included offerings to the parish church, such as forgotten tithes, livestock, and
produce, and vestments and plate for the clergy. Lorraine Attreed’s study found
that 45 per cent of pre-​Reformation English wills included donations to friaries
or monasteries.108 Because it was situated alongside confession, will-​making
was a spiritual duty and the intestate was regarded with a sort of infamy.109
A critical decision was the appointment of reliable executors; Dives and Pauper
cautioned against the “fals executoures that wolden make themself riche with

105 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), 221–​270, on
264–​65.
106 Charles Gross, “The Medieval Law of Intestacy,” Harvard Law Review 18 (1904), 120–​31,
on 120.
107 Francine Michaud, “Wills and Testaments,” in Death in Medieval Europe: Death Scripted
and Death Choreographed, ed. Joëlle Rollo-​Koster (London and New York: 2017), 114–​29,
on 122.
108 Lorraine Attreed, “Preparations for Death in Sixteenth-​Century Northern England,” The
Sixteenth Century Journal 13 (1982), 37–​66, on 48.
109 Eugene A. Haertle, “The History of the Probate Court,” Marquette Law Review 45 (1962),
546–​54, on 547.

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dede mennys godes”.110 Consequently the Church encouraged lifetime giving

and written testaments.

5 The Hour

To the late medieval mind, a good death took place peacefully in a bed follow-
ing confession, absolution and receipt of the eucharistic host (known collec-
tively as “shrift and housel” in England). It was an oft repeated truism, however,
that while death was certain the hour was unknown. This was perceived as
God’s encouragement to daily readiness for judgement; people might post-
pone reforming their lives in preparation for death if they knew when it would
happen. “O deth thou cummest what I had ye leest in mynde”, laments Every-
man, “I may saye deth geueth no warnynge”.111 In the English debate poem, A
disputacioun betwyx þe body and wormes, the once beautiful lady complained
to the creatures devouring her corpse, “when þou leste wenes, venit mors te
superare”.112 Considerable effort was made to avoid a sudden death (known
variously as mors subita, mors improvisa or mors repentina), including a prolif-
eration of pieties which specifically claimed to protect against it. Prayer to St
Erasmus, for example, ensured the devotee would receive the sacraments in
the hour of death, that “he shal haue to his levyng, resonable substance to his
endyng”:

And sothely, or þe soule fro the body twyne,

He shalle haue contricion & shrift of his syn,
And he shalle receyue, or he be ded,
Cristes owne body in forme of bred.113

Daily protection from sudden death was afforded by seeing an image of St

Christopher who was, as a consequence, regularly made the subject of wall
paintings directly opposite the church door, facilitating a sighting; likewise,
beholding the consecrated host, in other words, the actual body of Christ,
guaranteed preservation that day. There was a sharp increase in the number of
prayer promises included in books of hours, such as the so-​called Charlemagne

110 Henry Parker, Dives and Pauper (London: 1493), G6v.

111 How the hye fader of heuen sendeth dethe to somon euery creature, A3r, A4r; Den spieghel
der salicheit van Elckerlijc, A8r.
112 bl Additional ms 37049, 32v.
113 Carl Horstmann (ed.), Sammlung Altenglischer Legenden (Heilbronn: 1878), 198.

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Preparations for a Christian Death: The later Middle Ages 97

prayer, which again guaranteed the sacraments on the deathbed.114 Owners

copied in additional prayers such as Deus propitious esto mihi, which promised
its user “he schall never die in sodeyn deth”.115 A German woodcut of Christ’s
wounds circulating in the 15th century claimed to protect anyone kissing it
“with devotion” from sudden death or misfortune.116 A compilation of prayers
probably completed by the Herefordshire priest John Graseley in 1441 added
a rubric to a prayer of Bede’s that “whoseuer seith this preyor folowyng euery
day knelyng on his knees … he shall not dye without confession and xxx dayes
afore his deth he shall seen oure lady aperyng to hym”.117 Priests were instruct-
ed to tell their parishioners to kneel down at the consecration of the host in
mass, “whenne they here the belle rynge”, and to pray:

Schryfte & howsele, lord, þou graunte me bo,

Er that I schale hennes go.118

Since unexpected expiry did not allow proper preparations for the afterlife,
there was often concern that the restless body or soul might return as a reve-
nant or ghost respectively, and there is evidence of communities engaging in
rituals to prevent this.119 Such fears may have transformed images of the three
living and the three dead into those of the hunters hunted in which the cadav-
ers physically attack rather than verbally engage the princes.120 Examples of
this can be seen in the hours of Joanna of Castile (ca. 1500), probably made in
Ghent, where the corpses carry lances in the style of Death, and in the Stuart
de Rothesay Hours, made in early 16th-​century Italy, where they are shown in
combat with three knights.121 This can only have added urgency to the need
to prepare for one’s own death properly, but must also have contributed to a

114 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 275.

115 Duffy, Marking the Hours, 105.
116 Jill Hamilton Clements, “Sudden Death in Early Medieval England and the Anglo-​Saxon
Fortunes of Men,” in Dealing with the Dead: Mortality and Community in Medieval and Early
Modern Europe, ed. Thea Tomaini (Leiden: 2018), 36–​67, on 37–​8.
117 Bodleian Library Oxford. Lyell 30, 49v.
118 John Mirk, Instructions for Parish Priests, eds Edward Peacock and F. J. Furnivall, revised
ed. (London: 1902), 10.
119 Kirsi Kanerva, “Restless Dead or Peaceful Cadavers? Preparations for Death and Afterlife
in Medieval Iceland,” in Dying Prepared in Medieval and Early Modern Northern Europe,
ed. Anu Lahtinen and Mia Korpola (Leiden: 2018), 18–​43, on 29–​30.
120 Christine Kralik, “Dialogue and Violence: The Three Living and the Three Dead,” in
Mixed Metaphors: The Danse Macabre in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds Sophie
Oosterwijk and Stefnie Köll (Newcastle Upon Tyne: 2011), 133–​54, on 154.
121 bl Additional ms 35313, 158v; bl Additional ms 20927, 119v.

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sense of communal responsibility in ensuring the good death of individuals

within that community.
Sudden deaths might occur in a variety of ways: by fatal accidents, espe-
cially drowning in an age dependent on water-​borne transport, or (as Martin
Luther could testify) being struck by lightning. Death might result from a fight,
perhaps at the hands of robbers. Barbara Hanawalt characterised late medieval
society as one where all men carried weapons and settled trivial arguments
with violence, reading this as a consequence of the low value placed on human
life.122 If this is a fair assessment then it reflects something of the failure of mor-
alists to “Christianise” behaviour in the parishes. Yet a violent end was not nec-
essarily a “bad” death as many a martyr could testify.123 During wartime, those
preparing for combat might expect to be confessed beforehand, as were the
English before Agincourt, and battlefield chantries were sometimes construct-
ed afterward, such as St Mary Magdalen built in 1406 on the site of the battle
of Shrewsbury.124 Erecting such chapels was seen as a penitential act by their
patrons. Although condemned criminals at least knew the hour of their death
and could make some preparations, their attendance by a confessor prior to
execution was typically hurried (hence the English expression to receive “short
shrift”). The refusal of the sacraments to condemned prisoners was censured
by the papacy in 1317, but was often the practice as communities attempted
to extend the sentence passed in life to the hereafter.125 Of course confession
to a priest involved admitting the crime. This created a perverse dynamic if
a sentence was unjust, though, as Nicholas Terpstra has pointed out, unfair
executions were more and not less meritorious because they emulated how
the martyrs had died.126 Indeed, James Davis has highlighted the potential for
imitation of the martyrs, especially with decapitation.127 By concentrating the
mind of the offender on their impending demise however, capital punishment

122 Barbara A. Hanawalt, “Violent Death in Fourteenth-​and Fifteenth-​Century England,”

Comparative Studies in Society and History 18 (1976), 297–​320, on 316.
123 Binski, Medieval Death, 44.
124 Raphael Holinshed, The chronicles of England (London, 1585), 552.
125 Adriano Prosperi, “Consolation or Condemnation: The Debates on Withholding
Sacraments from Prisoners,” in The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in
Renaissance Italy, ed. Nicholas Terpstra (Kirksville, MO: 2008), 98–​117, on 111.
126 Nicholas Terpstra, “Theory into Practice: Executions, Comforting, and Comforters in
Renaissance Italy,” in The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy,
ed. Nicholas Terpstra (Kirksville, MO: 2008), 118–​158, on 132.
127 James Davis, “Spectacular Death: Capital Punishment in Medieval Towns,” in Death
in Medieval Europe: Death Scripted and Death Choreographed, ed. Joëlle Rollo-​Koster
(London and New York: 2017), 130–​48, on 133.

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Preparations for a Christian Death: The later Middle Ages 99

could also bring about contrition and repentance. In Italy, fraternities of lay
comforters would prepare the condemned during the final night. On the jour-
ney to the place of execution, these “confoterie” would sing laudes and hold an
image of Mary, Christ or the martyred saints on a tavoletta before the prison-
er in an attempt to maintain devotional focus and obscure the sound of any
crowd.128 The use of executed saints such as Catherine of Alexandria and John
the Baptist on tavolette is particularly striking and suggests that condemned
prisoners were encouraged to appropriate the hagiographical experience and
see themselves as Christian victims. Nevertheless, where public confessions
were made before the scaffold, the felon was expected to hold themselves up
as an immoral example not to be followed in a sort of inverse sermon; a ritual
that “allowed reintegration into society before being despatched from it”.129 Of
course, none of this applied if the crime was heresy.
Theoretically, those who spent their lives preparing for death need not fear
the mors improvisa.130 Agnes Paston recorded the sudden demise of Sir John
Heveningham in these terms: he “herd iij. massys, & cam hom agayn nevyr
meryer, & seyd to hese wyf that he wuld go sey a lytyll devocion in hese gar-
deyn & than he wuld dyne, and forth wyth he felt afeyntyng in hese legge &
syyd don”.131 This was both a sudden and a “good” death and, as Duffy remarks,
must have been a comfort to his wife.132 Erasmus, writing to Joost Vroye in 1523,
shared this sentiment:

It is strange to recount the abhorrence with which ordinary people regard

sudden death, to such an extent that there is nothing they pray God and
the saints to deliver them from more frequently or with more feeling than
from death sudden and unforeseen. To die suddenly is common to good
men and bad alike. Herod suddenly perished when smitten by an angel.
Eli the high priest, who was a good old man, dies by a fall from his chair.
The dreadful thing is not to die suddenly but to die the death of the wick-
ed. And this superstitious fear that mortals have invents for itself vain

128 Pamela Gravestock, “Comforting with Song: Using Laude to Assist Condemned Prisoners,”
in The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy, ed. Nicholas Terpstra
(Kirksville, MO: 2008), 31–​51, on 40; Massimo Ferretti, “In Your Face: Paintings for the
Condemned in Renaissance Italy,” in The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in
Renaissance Italy, ed. Nicholas Terpstra (Kirksville, MO: 2008) 79–​97, on 79.
129 Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family, 214.
130 Horrox, “Purgatory, Power and Plague,” 95.
131 bl Additional ms 34888, 88r.
132 Duffy, Marking the Hours, 64.

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100 Bates

remedies, an image of St Christopher, some particular brief prayers to

the blessed Virgin, certain words and signs akin to those used in magic.133

For those who survived to the deathbed, final preparations were idealised and
based in part on the character exhibited by Christ as he died on the cross and
in part by the stylised Dormition of the Virgin Mary.134 This latter exemplar
was publicly reproduced in mystery plays such as the York cycle, as well as in
parish art.135 Often, only when the family were sure that death was inevitable
would they summon the priest: there was a widespread but misguided belief
that the last rites imposed a penitential lifestyle thereafter.136 The responsibil-
ity of preparing moriens for the last hours clearly fell on the immediate family
and friends, and explains the turn to texts like the ars moriendi (this com-
munal solidarity is even more evident during the death of a monk). Earlier
compendia of faith such as Henry Suso’s Booklet of Eternal Wisdom (ca. 1328)
included sections on how to die, and following these precedents Jean Gerson
included a layman’s ritual drawing on the deathbed liturgy in his Opusculum
tripartium.137 This seems to have been developed by local Dominicans follow-
ing the Council of Constance in 1418 into the Speculum artis bene moriendi, and
then contracted into the famous illustrated block-​book on deathbed tempta-
tions. There were other important texts in this genre including the Cordiale
quattuor novissimorum (usually attributed to either Gerardus de Vliederhoven
or Denis the Carthusian). The Speculum drew short of offering certainty of
salvation, and its consolations have therefore been regarded as paradoxical.138
It asserted that:

None oughte to haue despayre in noo wyse, how moche felon and euyll
he hath ben, though that he had commyted as many murthers and theft-
es as there ben dropes of water and smalle grauell in the see … god dys-
pyseth neuer a contryte herte and humble, and also the pyte and mercy
of god is moche more than ony iniquyte or wyckednes.139

133 Collected Works of Erasmus: Volume 9, the Correspondence of Erasmus, letters 1252 to 1355,
1522 to 1523, trans. R.A.B. Mynors and D.F.S. Thomson (Toronto, 1989), 414–​15.
134 Duclow, “Dying Well,” 395.
135 Sue Niebrzydowski, “Secular Women and Late Medieval Drama,” The Yearbook of English
Studies 43 (2013), 121–​39, on 137.
136 Horrox, “Purgatory, Prayer and Plague,” 96.
137 Mary Catherine O’Connor, The Art of Dying Well (New York: 1966), 17–​24.
138 Austra Reinis, Reforming the Art of Dying: The ars moriendi in the German Reformation
(1519–​1528) (Aldershot: 2007), 17.
139 The arte and crafte to knowe well to dye (Westminster: 1490), A3r.

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Preparations for a Christian Death: The later Middle Ages 101

­f igure 2.5 
Death of the Virgin, alabaster panel, 37.6 x 24.2 cm, late 15th century. A.9-​1946.
Mary passes a palm branch to the beardless apostle John. It symbolised her
victory over sin and death: like the martyrs, who also carry palms, her soul will go
directly to heaven. Her deathbed is a pious, serene, and communal event.
source: © victoria and albert museum, uk. reproduced with
permission

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102 Bates

This message was consistent with that of stories from the Golden Legend and
Miracles of the Virgin that the most un-​Christian scoundrels were capable of
redemption, even at the last, so long as they were contrite.
As moriens lay dying, a host of demons gathered by with temptations to de-
spair of salvation or deny the faith. No living person could counter the unseen
hoard, but they could draw on that broader community of saints to whom so
much of their piety had been focussed. The ars moriendi clearly makes the dy-
ing the central actor in the ensuing drama, it is their responses to the demonic
temptations that determine his or her fate, but as they declined into irrational-
ity and unconsciousness the onus fell increasingly on their supporters to in-
voke intercession. They were to pray the rosary, and “hertly beseke oftentymes
that blessyd moder of mercy, to praye for them & that she wyl be with them at
the houre of dethe”.140 They were to hold up a crucifix or an image of the Virgin
or other favoured saint as a devotional focus. Now into the death-​room came
saints, angels, the Virgin and even Christ himself. Alison Beringer is keen to sit-
uate the Passion as the central deathbed devotion, but such is the Virgin’s im-
portance in these matters that Edward Muir posits her as the “only hope” of the
expiring, “less a judge than a kind referee in the cosmic contest”, while Duffy
affirms, “Mary was above all the saint of the deathbed”.141 John Mirk recorded
something of the conflict that one might encounter at the end in narrating the
death of the scholastic theologian Robert Grosseteste in one of the homilies
in his Liber festivalis. As Grosseteste lay on his deathbed a “grete multitude of
fendes” engaged him in disputation, such that they “nyghe tourned hym out of
the byleue and put hym into dyspayre”. Though the intellectual prowess of this
renowned scholar availed him little, the Virgin’s timely arrival dispersed the
malignant fiends allowing the safe escort of the bishop’s spirit into everlasting
bliss.142 Consequently, the ars moriendi instructed those supporting moriens to

call into his helpe þe right glorious virgyn marie, whiche is þe veray
means of all synners & she þat adressith them in ther necessyte; say-
eng to hir in this maner, Quene of heuen moder of mercy & refuge of
synners I mekeli the byseche that thou wolte reconsile me to thi dere

140 A lytyll treatyse schortely compyled and called ars moriendi that is to saye the craft for to
deye for the helthe of mannes sowle (Westminster: 1491), A1r; The Doctrynalle of dethe
(Westminster: 1498), 6r.
141 Alison L. Beringer, “The Death of Christ as a Focus of the Fifteenth-​century Artes moriendi,”
The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 113 (2014), 497–​512, on 505–​6; Edward Muir,
Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: 1997), 46; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 318.
142 Mirk, Festial, 15r. Cf. Myracles of oure blessyd lady, E1r.

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Preparations for a Christian Death: The later Middle Ages103

sone, in callynge his worthi goodnes for me vnworthi synner that for
the loue of the he wyll perdone and forgyue me my synnes and brynge
me in to his glorye.143

This is, of course, exactly the drama represented in images such as the psy-
chostasia in Worcester, which encouraged Marian devotion for precisely
this moment. With her power over the Devil as Empress of Hell, it is the
Virgin who is most important in this spiritual battle. The priest walked to
this scene with the host in a pyx, preceded by his clerk carrying a candle and
ringing a bell, so that the community might know a death was imminent
and pray for the soul. The dying person was sprinkled with holy water and
then interrogated on the articles of the faith and their sorrow for their sins.
Thereafter the priest heard confession, pronounced absolution, and anoint-
ed those areas of the body that had likely commissioned sin (notably those
relating to the five senses). If the dying were able to receive it, the priest
offered the host, known in this context as the viaticum. For those unable to
ingest it, merely viewing the consecrated wafer had a salvific effect.144 This
completed the preparations for a good death.

6 Conclusion

Preparation for death in the later Middle Ages was, according to Ralph Houl-
brooke, “the most important business of earthly existence”.145 Jean Delumeau
saw in these preparations “the transformation of the natural fear of death into
a religious fear of judgement”, but this seems to miss a fundamental problem
that the “good news” of Christ has always had to carry with it: it comes with a
certain amount of bad news too.146 Salvation was from the human condition,
separated from God and prone to sinful behaviour, and that could not be de-
scribed in affirming terms. Yet as Mirk pointed out, the Church was a mother
and “taketh good hede to the chyldern as a good moder ought to do”.147 Chris-
tianity sought to “free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear
of death”.148 For Julian of Norwich, a woman who had received the last rites in

143 Arte and crafte to knowe well to dye, A7r-​v.

144 Wieck, “The Death Desired,” 436.
145 Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family, 57.
146 Delumeau, Sin and Fear, 55.
147 Mirk, The festyuall, 5v.
148 Hebrews 2:15.

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104 Bates

anticipation of death, all fear other than “reverent dread” was simply wrong.149
The answer was to speak the truth with love.150 Philippe Ariès thought the
macabre was an expression of “a passionate love for this world and a painful
awareness of the failure to which each human life is condemned”.151 Perhaps,
but it was fundamentally an expression of the need to re-​order one’s moral pri-
orities in line with Christian eschatology. Life was transient whereas eternity,
as the name suggests, was not.
Following the ars moriendi, the sick person was asked, “art thou joyfull
that thou deyest in the faith of our lorde Ihesu cryste”.152 This was an ex-
hortation to move away from fear, and even guilt. A good death in the later
Middle Ages was a joyful death. Undoubtedly some preachers emphasised
both guilt and fear in an attempt to jolt their audiences into self-​reforma-
tion; indeed his study of Bernardino of Siena’s sermons on the quattuor no-
vissima led Franco Mormando to speak of “the role of terror in Christian
pastoral practice”.153 Yet Bernardino also thought death was a release from
the prison of life, a sentiment that (presumably) unwittingly echoed the old
man in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale:

Ne deth allas wol not haue my lyf

Thus walke I lik a recheles caytiff
And on the grounde whiche is my modris gate
I knocke with my staf erly and late
And say leue modir lete me yn
Lo how I vanyssh flesh blood and skyn
Allas whan shal my bonys be at reste.154

In preparing for such a rest, medieval culture created an environment that en-
couraged moral conformity, several forms of piety, social integration, parish
investment, and the active remembrance of deceased members of the com-
munity. Though they must have experienced an understandable measure
of anxiety, the well-​developed eschatological schema and the availability of

149 Amy Appleford, “The ‘Comene Course of Prayers’: Julian of Norwich and Late Medieval
Death Culture,” The Journal of English and German Philology, 107 (2008), 190–​214, on 199.
150 Ephesians 4:15.
151 Ariès, Hour of Our Death, 129–​30.
152 Arte and crafte to knowe well to dye, A5r.
153 Mormando, “What Happens to us When we Die?” 131.
154 Geoffrey Chaucer, Whan that Apprill with his shouris sote (Westminster: 1477), 244v.

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Preparations for a Christian Death: The later Middle Ages 105

practical works on the art of dying well meant that the terminally sick were
not approaching the unknown. Consequently, the laity were not conditioned
to approach death fearfully, but as practically as they would when guided by
any other conduct literature.

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 chapter 3

Deathbed and Burial Rituals in Late Medieval

Catholic Europe

Madeleine Gray

Death is both an event and a process: a truism which is reflected in later medie-
val rituals surrounding the deathbed and the subsequent disposal of the body.1
There is a clear tension between the prayer that the dead may rest in peace
and the practicalities of disposing of the body –​disposal which may result in
fragmentation in the case of saints, or the embalmed bodies of the elite. In
understanding this tension, Arnold Van Gennep’s tripartite analysis of death-
bed and burial rituals as celebration of the dead, liminal rituals of purification,
and the burial ceremony as a process of reintegration still has its relevance,
but the overt focus in most later medieval rituals was on the need to ensure
salvation.2 This focus responded to heightened levels of concern about the fate
of the soul and the development of ideas about purgatory. Meanwhile, recent
research has focused on the body itself as a material object, a “social resource”
which could be deployed by the living to articulate ideas about belief, power
and social position, while the body also retains a social presence.3
Much of our source material for this study comes from liturgical texts, espe-
cially those with illustrations showing the deathbed, preparation of the body,
and funeral. Wills frequently made provision for the funeral. These sources
are of course heavily weighted towards the élite, though the Avignonese wills
studied by Jacques Chiffoleau even included testamentary dispositions made
by beggars and vagabonds.4 Woodcuts from the ars moriendi tradition and

1 On the ambivalent status of the corpse, see Liv Nilsson Stutz, “A Proper Burial: Some
Thoughts on Changes in Mortuary Ritual, and how Archaeology can begin to understand
them,” in Death and Changing Rituals: Function and Meaning in Ancient Funerary Practices,
eds J. Rasmus Brandt, Marina Prusac, and Håkon Roland (Oxford: 2014), 1–​16, on 2–​7.
2 Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee
(London: 1960), esp. 146–​65.
3 For discussion of these issues see Joanna R. Sofaer, The Body as Material Culture (Cam-
bridge: 2001), esp. 19–​20; Romedio Schmitz-​Esser, Leichnam im Mittelalter: Einbalsamierung,
Verbrennung und die kulturelle Konstruktion des toten Körpers (Ostfildern: 2014).
4 For details see Roger S. Wieck, “The Death Desired: Books of Hours and the Medieval Fu-
neral,” in Death and Dying in the Middle Ages, eds Edelgard E. DuBruck and Barbara J. Gu-
sick (New York: 1999), 431–​76; Gloria Fiero, “Death Ritual in Fifteenth-​Century Manuscript

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004443433_005

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Deathbed and Burial Rituals in Late Medieval Catholic Europe 107

representations of deathbeds and funerals as part of the Seven Sacraments and

the Seven Corporal Acts of Mercy can give a better idea of the deaths and fu-
nerals of the lower and middling orders of people, especially the laity. Books of
advice for priests supplement the liturgical sources. Archaeological evidence
for burial practices is invaluable though mainly confined to monastic sites: ex-
cavating graveyards in current use is problematic. For Wales (a country part of
the British Isles but quite distinct from England), the survival of a considerable
body of elegiac poetry in the Welsh language illustrates a distinctive perspec-
tive on commemoration and the fate of the soul, as well as providing incidental
detail on funeral practices.5 Examples from this literature and from other late
medieval Welsh sources will provide some of the key examples for this chapter.

1 The Deathbed

Deathbed rituals were first formulated for monastic communities, though

lay involvement was being encouraged by the Carolingian period.6 The 14th-​
century customary of St Augustine’s, Canterbury, gives a vivid picture of the
deathbed of a late medieval monk.7 The entire convent would process to his
bed in the infirmary with holy oil and water, cross, candles, and incense. After
the dying monk had made a final confession, been absolved, and received the
anointing with holy oil and the final eucharist, he was left in the care of a spir-
itual adviser of his own choice and the infirmary servants. When his death was
imminent, he was laid on sackcloth and ashes, or sometimes sprinkled with
ashes. The community then reassembled, said the Creed, and chanted litanies
and psalms. After the death, they went to the abbey church to sing the Office of

Illumination,” Journal of Medieval History 10/​4 (1984), 271–​94; Sarah Schell, “The Office of the
Dead in England: Image and Music in the Book of Hours and Related Texts, c.1250–​c.1500”
(University of St Andrews, unpublished PhD thesis, 2011), 61–​104; Jacques Chiffoleau, La
comptabilité de l’au-​delà: Les hommes, la mort et la religion dans la région d’Avignon à la fin du
Moyen Âge, vers 1320-​vers 1480 (Paris: 2011 edition), xvii, 57.
5 David Hale, “Death and Commemoration in Late Medieval Wales” (University of South
Wales, unpublished PhD thesis, 2018), available online at https://​pure.southwales.ac.uk/​
en/​studentthesis/​death-​and-​commemoration-​in-​late-​medieval-​wales(7d14b42e-​a69b-​4968
-​9398-​aad3b96748e0).html (last accessed 28/​6/​2020). This is a detailed study in English of
this very useful resource, with translations of many of the key texts.
6 For a detailed study of early developments, see Frederick S. Paxton, Christianizing Death: The
Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca: 1990); on lay involvement see
esp. 196–​200.
7 Etheldred Taunton, The English Black Monks of St Benedict, 2 vols (London: 1897), 1:305–​6; see
also Geoffrey Rowell, The Liturgy of Christian Burial (London: 1977), 64–​7.

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108 Gray

the Dead. The body was then washed, clothed in its habit and carried into the
church. Psalms were recited continuously until the funeral mass and burial.
While these rituals were monastic in origin, they soon extended into lay
use. By the 14th century, secular provision for the pastoral care of the dying
was well established, in principle at least. This was also the period during
which (in southern France, at any rate, according to Chiffoleau) the laity
began to take a strong interest in the ordering of funeral rituals.8 While the
church strengthened its control of the process, the liturgy for the commenda-
tion of the soul and the Office of the Dead appeared in most Books of Hours,
ensuring that lay people were increasingly able to participate. Illustrations of
the Office in Books of Hours also suggest concern for the proper performance
of the rituals surrounding death and burial.9 Medieval woodcuts showing the
Seven Sacraments and in books of advice on dying well (the ars moriendi), and
illuminations in Books of Hours, show the deathbed as intensely social, with
friends and family gathered to pray and encourage the dying. The prayers for
the commendation of the soul were sufficiently well known that they could
be quoted on the tomb of Thomas Phillips, a minor Monmouthshire gentle-
man buried at Tintern Abbey on the Welsh border, probably in the late 15th
century.10
A series of papal edicts, general and local church councils in the 12th and
13th centuries had regularised and attempted to make universal what was
probably already the customary practice.11 There was an increasing number
of manuals of advice for the clergy which outlined how to proceed with the
dying. Depictions of the last of the Seven Sacraments show the priest holding
a crucifix before the face of the dying person. As Julian of Norwich makes clear
in her Showings, this was to “comfort thee ther with”.12 The dying person was to

8 Chiffoleau, La comptabilité de l’au-​delà, 123–​6; Jacques Chiffoleau, “Ce qui fait changer
la mort dans la région d’Avignon à la fin du Moyen Âge,” in Death in the Middle Ages, eds
Herman Braet and Werner Verbeke (Leuven: 1983), 117–​33.
9 This is the central argument of Fiero, “Death Ritual in Fifteenth-​century Manuscript Il-
lumination”, though the earlier wills cited by Chiffoleau suggest that to some extent this
concern predates the disruption of the Black Death.
10 M. Gray, “ ‘Jesu mercy, Lady help’: Late Medieval Tomb Carvings at Tintern,” in The
Monuments Man: Essays in Honour of Jerome Bertram, ed. Christian Steer (Donington:
2020).
11 On developments in the 12th and 13th centuries, see Joseph Avril, “La pastorale des
malades et des mourants aux XIIeme et XIIIeme siècles,” in Death in the Middle Ages, eds
Herman Braet and Werner Verbeke (Leuven: 1983), 88–​106.
12 Julian of Norwich, Showings: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Denise Nowakowski
Baker (New York: 2005), 7.

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Deathbed and Burial Rituals in Late Medieval Catholic Europe 109

make a final confession, receive absolution, the final eucharist and the anoint-
ing with holy oil. The same ritual was followed for the humblest parishioner
and the highest officeholders of the church: the pope himself had to receive
absolution and the viaticum, though he had also to absolve his cardinals and
entrust the church to them.13 The importance of this final confession and com-
munion is clear from the rhyme which English worshippers were taught to say
at the elevation of the host at mass:

Ihesu! for thy holy name

Schelde me to day fro synne and schame
Schryfte and howsele, lord, thou grante me bo,
Er that I schale hennes go,
And verre contrycyone of my synne
That I, lord, neuer dye there-​Inne …14

Further evidence comes from the popularity of paintings and other depictions of
St Christopher, the saint who would protect you from an evil death.15 Wall paint-
ings of the saint faced the main door in many parish churches. Woodcuts were
also popular. One with the promise Cristofori faciem die quacumque tueris, Illa
nempe die morte mala non morieris (On whatever day you see the face of St Chris-
topher, that day you will not die an evil death) was printed in 1423. It is one of the
earliest European examples of printing, with the words cut into the wood rather
than using movable type.16
We have of course no way of knowing how conscientious parish priests
were. In the huge parishes of mountain regions like Wales, the Alps and the
Pyrenees, with settlements many miles from the parish church, attendance at
the deathbed could not always have been possible. That parishioners expected
it, though, is clear from their complaints when it did not happen. The visitation
returns of the diocese of Canterbury in 1511 are full of anxieties about absentee
priests, “wherby many have died without shrifte or hoselle”.17 The 15th-​century
Florentine merchant Giovanni di Pagolo Morelli was tormented by a dream of

13 Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, The Pope’s Body, trans. David S. Peterson (Chicago: 2000),
115–​8.
14 Edward Peacock (ed.), Instructions for Parish Priests. By John Myrc (London: 1868), 9–​10.
15 Eleanor Pridgeon, “Saint Christopher Wall Paintings in English and Welsh Churches
c.1250–​c.1500” (University of Leicester, unpublished PhD thesis, 2008), available online at
https://​lra.le.ac.uk/​bitstream/​2381/​7964/​1/​2010pridgeoneephd.pdf (last accessed 7/​1/​2019).
16 John Rylands Library jrl. ms 366 (17249).
17 K.L. Wood-​Legh (ed.), Kentish Visitations of Archbishop William Warham and his Deputies,
1511–​12 (Maidstone: 1984), quote on 64; see also 62, 115, 119.

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110 Gray

his son Alberto, a pious child who had died kissing a tavola of the Virgin Mary
but without the last rites.18

2 The Ordo Commendationis Anime

The liturgy for the commendation of the soul which followed the rites of con-
fession, absolution, the eucharist, and the final anointing had also reached
its fullest and most complex form by the 14th century.19 There were of course
many variants: as Matthew Salisbury has pointed out for England, even within
a tradition as apparently well-​established as the Sarum rite, there could be a
range of local traditions. Salisbury suggests that by the later Middle Ages, the
rites for the commendation and commemoration of the dead were among the
most stable, possibly because of their familiarity from Books of Hours. There
was however more variation in monastic communities. Each order had its own
usages, both in the liturgy for the commendation of the soul and the Office
of the Dead.20 In matins of the Office of the Dead, for example, while some
communities drew all nine readings from the Book of Job (though not always
using the same texts), others took the final reading from one of the Gospels or
Epistles, the Book of Revelation, or non-​scriptural sources such as Augustine’s
Enchiridion.21
The liturgy for the commendation of the soul began after the final anointing
and when the dying person was actually in articulo mortis. It was important to
know when that point had been reached: lists of the signs of impending death
(“Whanne mine eyhnen misten; And mine eren sissen …”) were commonplac-
es of medieval literature.22 In the Sarum rite, the liturgy began with the recita-
tion of the Creed then continued in its fullest form with the penitential psalms
and the prayer Parce domine, parce servo tuo, “Spare, O Lord, spare thy servant,

18 Jean-​Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval
Society, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: 1998), 54–​7.
19 On its development, see Paxton, Christianizing Death and John S. Lampard, Go Forth,
Christian Soul: The Biography of a Prayer (Peterborough: 2005).
20 Matthew Cheung Salisbury, The Secular Liturgical Office in Late Medieval England
(Turnhout: 2015), 47–​57, 133–​9, 165; for the scale of variation, mainly on the responsories
and versicles for Matins, see Knud Ottosen, The Responsories and Versicles of the Latin
Office of the Dead (Aarhus: 1993).
21 Ottosen, Office of the Dead, 53–​93.
22 Rosemary Woolf, “Lyrics on Death,” in Middle English Lyrics, eds Maxwell S. Luria and
Richard L. Hoffman (New York: 1974), 302–​5; for the full text of “Whanne mine eyhnen
misten” see Luria and Hoffman, Middle English Lyrics, 224.

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Deathbed and Burial Rituals in Late Medieval Catholic Europe 111

whom thou hast deigned to redeem with thy precious blood”.23 This was fol-
lowed by a lengthy litany invoking God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Virgin
Mary, angels and archangels, patriarchs and prophets, and an extensive list of
saints. This would have taken some time: recitation of the penitential psalms
alone requires about twenty minutes.24 The final clauses of the litany imply
that death may already have taken place:

Agnus dei qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere anime eius

Christe ihesu miserere anime eius
Agnus dei qui tollis peccata mundi dona ei pacem eternamque felici-
tatem et gloriam sempiternam.

Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on his
soul. Christ Jesus, have mercy on his soul. Lamb of God, who takes away
the sins of the world, give him eternal peace and everlasting glory.

After this the priest began the prayer Proficiscere anima (Go Forth, Christian Soul)

Proficiscere, anima christiana, de hoc mundo, in nomine Dei Patris om-

nipotentis, qui te creavit: in nomine Jesu Christi Filii Dei vivi, qui pro te
passus est: in nomine Spiritus Sancti, qui in te effusus est …

Go forth, Christian soul, out of this world, in the name of God the Father
Almighty, who created you; in the name of Jesus Christ, the Son of the
living God, who suffered for you; in the name of the Holy Spirit, who was
poured out on you …

and continued with prayers for the release and protection of the soul and for
its reception into heaven.

3 Preparation of the Body

The liturgy performed a social as well as a spiritual function: it bridged the

space after death had taken place but before the work of preparing the body

23 J. Wickham Legg (ed.), The Sarum Missal: Edited from Three early Manuscripts (Oxford:
1916), 423–​30.
24 H. Gittos and S. Hamilton (eds.), Understanding Medieval Liturgy: Essays in Interpretation
(Farnham: 2016), 30.

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112 Gray

for burial could begin. For most people, this involved washing, possibly further
anointing, and wrapping in a shroud. Illustrations in Books of Hours suggest
that for the laity the washing and shrouding was normally the work of women.
This was something that communities of beguine women often undertook, ei-
ther as part of their charitable work in caring for the sick and dying or in return
for bequests.25 The white linen shroud was a sign that the dead person had
confessed and received the last rites.26
Manuscript illuminations, wall paintings of the Last Judgement and repre-
sentations of the last of the Seven Corporal Acts of Mercy, the burial of the dead,
suggest a range of styles for shrouds: tightly sewn, loosely swathed, pinned to
fit the body or knotted at the head and foot. A Parisian Book of Hours now in
the Pierpont Morgan Library shows a body being sewn into a tightly-​fitting
shroud with a large black cross.27 The corpse in the last of the Seven Corpo-
ral Acts of Mercy at Llancarfan in the Vale of Glamorgan has a shroud which
seems to be knotted at head and foot but still tightly-​fitting, with a small cross
over the right breast. By contrast, the Death figure at Llancarfan has a loosely
fitting shroud with a large knot at the head. Apart from the Death figure, these
illustrations show the shroud covering the face, though separate face cloths
were sometimes used and can be found on effigies.28 However, the implication
of the Welsh poetry is that the face could sometimes be exposed: Iolo Goch
(ca. 1320–​ca. 1398) described the body of Tudur Fychan with

Anhudded oer iawn heddiw

O ro a phridd ar ei ffriw

A very cold covering today /​Of gravel and earth on his face.29

The shrouded figures on the tomb chests of Thomas and John White in Tenby
(Pembs.) are loosely swathed, with their faces exposed.

25 Christine Guidera, “The Role of the Beguines in Caring for the Ill, the Dying and the Dead,”
in Death and Dying in the Middle Ages, eds Edelgard E. DuBruck and Barbara J. Gusick
(New York: 1999), 51–​73.
26 Christopher Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven, CT: 2006), 50.
27 Pierpont Morgan ms M231 f. 137, reproduced in Roberta Gilchrist and Barney Sloane,
(eds), Requiem: The Medieval Monastic Cemetery in Britain (London: 2005), cover and 21.
28 For discussion and examples see Brian and Moira Gittos, Interpreting Medieval Effigies: The
Evidence from Yorkshire to 1400 (Oxford: 2019), esp. 178–​80.
29 Iolo Goch: Poems ed. Dafydd Johnston (Llandysul: 1993) no. 4 lines 63–​4; Hale, “Death and
Commemoration,” 114. For biographical material on the Welsh poets cited here, see the
Dictionary of Welsh Biography, online at https://​biography.wales (last accessed 28/​6/​2020).

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Deathbed and Burial Rituals in Late Medieval Catholic Europe 113

For most people, burial took place soon after death. For the elite, however,
procedures could be more complex. Arranging a high-​status funeral could take
months: bodies might have to be transported for hundreds of miles. Embalm-
ing techniques changed during our period, partly through increased knowl-
edge but also in response to ecclesiastical criticisms. Thirteenth-​century em-
balming techniques were crude and not always effective. After removal of the
internal organs (sometimes including the brain and eyes), the body might be
slashed all over before being placed in salt. Sometimes, aromatic oils and spic-
es were used instead of (or as well as) the salt. Papal funeral ceremonial includ-
ed washing the body with white wine and herbs, stopping all the orifices with
myrrh, incense, aloes and musk, and anointing the whole body with balsam.30
These practices were probably the origin of partible burial: the viscera had
to be buried where they were removed, the heart could be separately em-
balmed and be buried in a different location from the body. This then became
a convenient solution for great landowners who wished to acknowledge family
connections with more than one religious institution; it also offered the fur-
ther advantage that it secured prayers from more than one community. In the
most extreme form of embalming, known as the mos teutonicus (though it was
not confined to Germany), after removal and burial of the organs, the body
was boiled, leaving only the bones to be transported to their eventual burial
place.31
These practices were widespread among the elite in the 13th century, though
there was considerable variation across western Christendom. Estella Weiss-​
Krejci suggests that throughout our period partible burial was more common

30 Bagliani, The Pope’s Body, 134.

31 This discussion of the debate over embalming and partible burial is based on 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), 221–​70; Katharine Park,
“The Life of the Corpse: Division and Dissection in Late Medieval Europe,” Journal of
the History of Medicine 50 (1995), 111–​32; Estella Weiss-​Krejci, “Excarnation, Evisceration,
and Exhumation in Medieval and Post-​ Medieval Europe,” in Interacting with the
Dead: Perspectives on Mortuary Archaeology for the New Millennium, eds Gordon Rakita,
Jane Buikstra, Lane Beck, and Sloan Williams (Gainesville: 2005), 155–​72; Danielle
Marianne Westerhof, Death and the Noble Body in Medieval England (Woodbridge: 2008)
and “Aristocratic Executions and Burials in England, c.1150–​ c.1330: Cultures of
Fragmentation” (University of York, unpublished PhD thesis, 2004); Agostino Paravicini
Bagliani, “The Corpse in the Middle Ages: The Problem of the Division of the Body,” in
The Medieval World, eds Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson (London: 2001), 327–​41; Sally
Badham, “Divided in Death: English Medieval Heart and Viscera Monuments,” Church
Monuments (forthcoming). I am grateful to Sally Badham for an illuminating discussion
of developments after Detestande feritatis.

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114 Gray

in France, England and Scotland, while excarnation was more commonly prac-
tised in Germany for simply practical reasons of transport.32 Both were much
less common in Italy than in northern Europe. By the end of the 13th centu-
ry, though, they were the subject of considerable debate. Saints’ bodies were
routinely exhumed and divided, but there were arguments against extending
this to others. In 1299, Boniface viii issued the bull Detestande feritatis, an im-
passioned attack on embalming procedures, with its strongest denunciation
reserved for the mos teutonicus. He insisted on burial as soon as possible, at
or near the place of death. He was however happy to accept the exhumation
of bodies for transfer to a more permanent place of burial once they had been
naturally defleshed.33
Both sides in the debate reflect the same belief that something of the iden-
tity of the individual remains in the body after death. (The same belief is of
course the foundation of medieval relic cults). They differ, though, in their at-
titude to the process of decay. If control of the body was an important aspect
of nobility, physical decomposition was a challenge which had to be resisted.34
For Boniface and those who agreed with him, decomposition was an essential
precondition for regeneration.35
It is difficult to assess the impact of Boniface’s bull, as our evidence is so
patchy and geared towards the most wealthy and powerful. The bull was in-
cluded in the canonical collection Extravagantes communes but did not find
its way into any of the great collections of decretals or canon law. In a will
drawn up in 1302, Blanche of Navarre, mother-​in-​law of Philip the Fair, de-
clared that if division of the body was genuinely forbidden, she was to be
buried in the Franciscan church which she founded at Nogent-​l’Artaud.36
However, it was always possible to attempt to secure a dispensation. Elizabeth
Brown lists a number of dispensations secured and refused, and suggests that
the process actually made dismemberment and partible burial more fashion-
able as it signified the high status of the person buried.37 Nevertheless, the
evidence of wills and surviving datable heart tombs suggests that, while there
may have been a decline in the number of partible burials in the early 14th

32 Weiss-​Krejci, “Excarnation, Evisceration, and Exhumation,” 160.

33 For examples of this, mainly of royal corpses, see Weiss-​Krejci, “Excarnation, Evisceration,
and Exhumation,” 165–​6.
34 This is the key argument of Westerhof, Death and the Noble Body and “Aristocratic
Executions and Burials”.
35 Bagliani, “The Corpse in the Middle Ages,” 338–​40.
36 Cited in Brown, “Death and the Human Body,” 252.
37 Brown, “Death and the Human Body”, 252–​62.

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Deathbed and Burial Rituals in Late Medieval Catholic Europe 115

century, numbers rose again thereafter. The number of recorded dispensa-

tions suggests that partible burial was particularly popular in France, but it
has to be remembered that we have firm evidence only for those whose status
and visibility led them to apply for dispensation. While Boniface was clearly
articulating concerns held by many others, his was an extreme position and
after his death in 1303 it was increasingly ignored. The evidence of wills and
tombs suggests than many simply continued the practice without bothering
to seek permission. Boniface’s most severe criticism was reserved for complete
dismemberment in the mos teutonicus, and that certainly seems to have be-
come much less popular after 1300. While Italians were in general less ready to
accept division of the body for embalming or partible burial, they were para-
doxically much more ready to conduct autopsies and to dissect human bodies
for the study of anatomy.38
Some level of embalming was necessary if the body was to lie in state for any
length of time. The popes were themselves embalmed to some extent, though
their burials were usually comparatively rapid as the cardinals could not pro-
ceed to elect a new pope until after the funeral. However, they might lie in
state with their faces exposed for up to eight days, the duration of a novena, a
prayer-​cycle of nine days.39 Henri de Mondeville’s Chirurgie, written between
1306 and 1320, suggested that the faces of royalty and senior ecclesiastics would
be exposed when they lay in state, but not the faces of the “middling sort”,
knights and barons.40 (The implication of this for his book was that the highest
class would require more careful embalming.) However, the continuing popu-
larity among lesser landowners and even townspeople of semi-​effigial tomb
carvings, which have been interpreted as showing the bodies partly covered by
the funeral pall but with faces exposed, may suggest that this custom spread
further down the social hierarchy.
The pall was not normally buried with the body, though in some of the
most elaborate burials it may have been. While most people were buried in
a shroud and uncoffined, some (and not only the elite) were clothed. Hurried
burials during serious outbreaks of plague were also likely to be clothed, possi-
bly rather than being shrouded. Syr Dafydd Trefor’s (d. ca. 1528) description of
Owain ap Maredudd ap Tomos, Gwyn ei grys yn y gown gro (White his shirt in
a gown of gravel) might suggest he was buried in white clothes, though “shirt”

38 Park, “Life of the Corpse,” 113–​6.

39 Bagliani, The Pope’s Body, 107–​8, 132–​8.
40 Henri de Mondeville, Die Chirurgie des Heinrich von Mondeville (Hermondaville) nach
Berliner, Erfurter und Pariser Codices, ed. J.L. Pagel (Berlin: 1892), 390-​39, referenced in
Westerhof, Death and the Noble Body, 53–​4.

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116 Gray

could be a poetic reference to a shroud, chosen for the alliteration necessary

in traditional Welsh poetry.41 For those who received the full burial ritual, the
clothed body could then be wrapped in a shroud, in cerecloth (linen soaked
in beeswax), or in strips of lead. Wooden coffins became more common in the
15th century, though illustrations in Books of Hours often show bodies being
lowered into the grave with only a shroud, even after comparatively elaborate
funeral rituals.
Our evidence for coffins, shrouding, clothing, jewellery and other adorn-
ments comes mainly from burial in monastic precincts, since it is usually im-
possible to excavate burial grounds still in use.42 Manuscript illuminations
can also be informative. Popes, bishops, and archbishops were customarily
buried in their vestments, some with their monastic habits underneath, prob-
ably after an impressive lying in state.43 At least some priests were buried
in their mass vestments, and they were sometimes depicted thus on their
tombs. Priests were usually buried with replica chalices and patens made
from low-​grade pewter: like their vestments, these are sometimes shown on
their tombs.
Monks, nuns and friars were buried in their habits, sometimes with hair
shirts or wrapped in haircloth. The survival of buckles, belt slides and chapes,
tags and buttons, suggests that wealthier lay people were also sometimes buried
clothed. Jewellery is found very occasionally in graves, as are coins. More com-
mon are crosses –​both those that were clearly from personal adornment and
specially-​made mortuary crosses, with and without inscriptions. Rosary beads
and pilgrim badges are also occasionally found. A significant number of lead
bullae from papal documents (possibly from indulgences) have been found in
graves in England and Wales, though this seems to be a purely regional practice.
The Welsh poetry makes reference to weapons and armour on graves –​tarian a
maneg Llandduw dan y llen ddu deg (the shield and gloves of Llanddew under a
fair black mantle), Gwedy yng Nglyn Egwestl … Gweled ei darged a’i lafn durgoch
(We have seen, in Glyn Egwestl … his shield and ruddy steel blade).44 Lines

41 Hale, “Death and Commemoration,” 113.

42 Much of this section is based on Gilchrist and Sloane, (eds), Requiem, 80–​111.
43 For a study of episcopal lying-​in-​state and funeral rituals, see Geraldine A. Johnson,
“Activating the Effigy: Donatello’s Pecci Tomb in Siena Cathedral,” in Memory and the
Medieval Tomb, eds Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo and Carol Stamatis Pendergast (Farnham:
2000), 99–​128.
44 Hale, “Death and Commemoration,” 122, 156–​7; H.M. Edwards, (ed.), Gwaith Madog
Dwygraig (Aberystwyth: 2006), 83, for other examples D.J. Bowen, “Agweddau ar Ganu’r

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Deathbed and Burial Rituals in Late Medieval Catholic Europe 117

in Huw ap Dafydd ap Llywelyn ap Madog’s marwnad for Syr Rhoser Salbri of

Lleweni (d. 1530),

Ei ddur, a’i faich, oedd ddaered,

A maner llew, main ar lled

His steel, and his burden, was his earth/​bequest, And his lion standard,
stones across him

have been interpreted as suggesting that he was buried in his armour and
wrapped in his standard.45
Several of the Welsh commemorative poems describe burial in coffins.
Dafydd ab Edmwnd’s (fl. 1450–​1490) marwnad for Dafydd ab Ieuan of Llwydiarth
refers to chwyr a bwrdd a chay /​r/​bedd (wax and board and closing the grave),
suggesting a body wrapped in cerecloth and a simple coffin made of planks.46
Stone coffins were more unusual by the 14th century, but Mab Clochyddyn’s
(fl. ca. 1380) marwnad for Gwenhwyfar, the wife of Hywel ap Tudur ap Gruff-
udd of Coeden in Anglesey, describes her burial mywn rhwym maenwaith, “in
a prison of stonework” and says Llun a roed dan llen, “her countenance was
placed under a sheet”, suggesting that she was wrapped in a shroud and then
placed in a stone coffin.47 While shrouding and coffining has been seen as part
of a strategy to maintain the integrity of the body until its resurrection, the
Welsh poetry often describes it in terms of confinement –​mewn daeardy (in a
dungeon), mewn arch yngharchar (imprisoned in a coffin), mewn gro a cherrig
mae’n garcharawr (he is a prisoner in gravel and stones), Eglwys Siat yn i gloi
sydd (he is locked in Chad’s church).48 Some of the references to keys and locks
may suggest burial in locked chests or with symbolic padlocks: clo durdderw (a
lock of hard oak), Eglwys Fach a gloes [e]‌i fedd (Eglwys Fach which locked his
grave), chlyd fur, a chlo dur du (thick wall, and hard black lock).49

Bedwaredd Ganrif ar Deg a’r Bymthegfed,” Llên Cymru 9 (1966–​7), 61, and “Sylwadau ar
Oes y Cywyddwyr Cynnar,” Ysgrifau Beirniadol 7 (1971), 28.
45 Hale, “Death and Commemoration,” 79.
46 Hale, “Death and Commemoration,” 109–​11.
47 Hale, “Death and Commemoration,” 117 and 399–​401.
48 Roberta Gilchrist, “Transforming Medieval Beliefs: The Significance of Bodily Resurrection
to Medieval Burial Rituals,” in Death and Changing Rituals, eds J. Rasmus Brandt, Marina
Prusac, and Håkon Roland (Oxford: 2015), 379–​97; Hale, “Death and Commemoration,”
110, 112–​13, 120.
49 Hale, “Death and Commemoration,” 109, 137, 379–​82; cf. Gilchrist and Sloane, Requiem, 178–​9.

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118 Gray

4 The Office of the Dead

There were prayers to accompany the washing and shrouding of the body,
though they are sometimes omitted in later texts.50 In the Sarum liturgy, the
ritual continues immediately with vespers and Vigils for the Dead. This is cer-
tainly how it would have proceeded in a monastic community. For a lay person,
it was more likely that the body would be moved to a church and the Office
of the Dead sung or said there on the night before the funeral, though it was
sometimes said in the home.51 While there is still debate about its develop-
ment, the Office had its origin in the psalms sung after death in the Roman
Ordo defunctorum.52 It was developed and elaborated in monastic usage into
a sequence of three services to be said after the regular services of vespers,
compline, and matins.
Vespers of the Dead began with the antiphon Placebo domino in regione vi-
vorum (I will please the Lord in the land of the living), taken from Psalm 114 in
the Latin Vulgate version of the Bible.53 It continued with psalms, antiphons,
versicles, the Magnificat and Paternoster, and a series of collects. Matins of the
Dead began with the antiphon Dirige, Domine, Deus meus, in conspectu tuo viam
meam (Direct, O Lord my God, my steps in your sight), from Psalm 5. Thereafter
it was formed of three nocturns, each with psalms and other chants and read-
ings taken mainly from the Book of Job. The precise choice of readings might
vary but the theme was the same. While the psalms offered comfort, the trials
of Job spoke to the trials which the dead would endure in purgatory. Lauds fol-
lowed the same pattern as vespers, with psalms, antiphons, versicles and col-
lects. Vespers was often known as Placebo from its opening antiphon, and mat-
ins as Dirige: the whole Office was commonly referred to as Placebo and Dirige
or simply Dirige. When used immediately after a death or immediately before
the funeral, vespers was said or chanted over the coffin on the evening before
the funeral, and matins and lauds on the morning of the funeral.
The Office of the Dead was included in the Book of Hours and frequently ap-
pended to the psalter. It would thus have been a familiar part of lay devotion,

50 Rowell, Liturgy of Christian Burial, 70–​1.

51 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven, CT: 1992), 368–​9.
52 On the early development of the Office, mainly in a monastic context, see Schell, “The
Office of the Dead in England,” 37–​60 and for discussion of music in the Office, 153–​88.
53 This paragraph summarises the outlines in Roger S. Wieck, “The Death Desired: Books
of Hours and the Medieval Funeral,” in Death and Dying in the Middle Ages, eds Edelgard
E. DuBruck and Barbara J. Gusick, (New York: 1999), 431–​76; Schell, “Office of the Dead in
England”; Ottosen, Latin Office of the Dead, 31–​49.

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but it was always part of the monastic daily routine. This regular performance
of the liturgy for the dead was one of the advantages of burial in a monas-
tic church. While there could be considerable variation in detail between the
liturgical texts of the different religious orders, and even between different
houses of the same order, the overall structure of the office was stable by 1300
and its repetition in close proximity to the bodies of the dead was valued.54

5 Burial Location

Monastic performance of the liturgy for the dead was certainly one of the in-
fluences on choice of burial location. For most people, there was little or no
choice: they were buried in the enclosure around their parish church. This was
still sacred space, consecrated and set aside (and needing to be reconsecrated
if it was polluted by violence or spilt blood, or by the burial of anyone who
had been excluded from Christian burial). While most urban graveyards were
in close proximity to churches, in France for example, the Roman cemetery
outside the walls of Arles and the Merovingian cemetery in the suburbs of Bor-
deaux continued in use through the later medieval period.55 Pressure on space
was already becoming a problem in some towns. As early as 1277 the archbish-
op of Pisa had given land for an enclosed cemetery immediately within the
walls but some way from the cathedral.56 Plague cemeteries were often extra-​
mural but temporary. In 1480, however, the duke of Bavaria and the city council
of Munich sought permission from the pope to move the permanent burial
places of the city away from the centre to the outer wall. A number of German
towns developed extra-​mural cemeteries in the early 16th century: Freiburg im
Breisgau in 1514, Nuremberg in 1518, Ansbach in 1520, and Zwickau in 1521.57 It
has been suggested that, by breaking the link between the living and the dead,
this may have helped to prepare the way for the more radical changes of the
Reformation.58
Burial inside the church was becoming more common by the 14th century
but was still restricted to the local élite, and burial in the chancel was of course

54 On the range of variation, see Ottosen, Latin Office of the Dead. See also Sally Harper,
Music in Welsh Culture before 1650 (Aldershot: 2007), 201–​16 for specifically Welsh variants.
55 Howard Colvin, Architecture and the After-​life (New Haven, CT: 1991) 131.
56 Colvin, Architecture and the After-​life, 364–​7.
57 Craig M. Koslofsky, The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early Modern
Germany, 1450–​1700 (Basingstoke: 2000), 41–​2.
58 This is the underlying argument of Koslofsky, The Reformation of the Dead.

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particularly prized.59 Chest tombs and alcove tombs inside churches suggest
burial inside the chest, but this was very rare: the body was usually placed
under the floor of the church, possibly in a stone coffin or a stone-​or brick-​
lined shaft or vault.60 By the 15th century, though, some elite corpses were be-
ing placed in elevated sarcophagi (something Archbishop Charles Borromeo
of Milan would try to prevent in the later 16th century).61 Where the Welsh
poems specify or hint at a burial place, it is most frequently in the chancel,
even ym min allawr, at the edge of the altar.62 Burial in monastic chancels was
possible: the poet Llywelyn ab y Moel (d. 1440) was buried Yng nghôr Ystrad,
rad rybudd, Marchell yng nghangell ynghudd (In the choir of Ystrad Marchell
[or Strata Marcella, near Welshpool in Powys], blessed warning, hidden in the
sanctuary).63
Monastic burial was the traditional choice for the wealthiest and most pow-
erful. The foundation and endowment of a monastery or friary was partly to
create a family mausoleum and secure the privilege of burial for the founder
and their descendants.64 The first known benefactor of the Cistercian house
at Aberconwy in North Wales, Gruffudd ap Cynan ab Owain Gwynedd, was
buried there, as were several successive rulers of Gwynedd and their sons.65
Gruffudd’s cousin and ally Llywelyn ab Iorwerth founded a Franciscan friary
at Llanfaes on Anglesey to house the tomb of his wife Siwan (Joan, illegitimate
daughter of King John of England) and his grandson Llywelyn ap Gruffudd’s
wife Eleanor de Montfort was buried there.66 Their involvement in pastoral

59 Colvin, Architecture and the After-​Life, 144–​51; Ronald Finucane, “Sacred Corpse, Profane
Carrion: Social Ideals and Death Rituals during the Later Middle Ages,” in Mirrors of
Mortality: Social Studies in the History of Death, ed. Joachim Whaley (London: 1981), 40–​
60, on 43–​4.
60 Gilchrist and Sloane, Requiem,137. For an example of a body found in an alcove tomb, see
Sally Badham, “ ‘What Lies Beneath’: A Discovery at Much Marcle, Herefordshire,” Church
Monuments Society Newsletter 29/​2 (2014), 16–​19.
61 Colvin, Architecture and the Afterlife, 220–​1, 235.
62 Hale, “Death and Commemoration,” 123.
63 Hale, “Death and Commemoration,” 125.
64 Paul Crossley, “The Architecture of Queenship: Royal Saints, Female Dynasties and the
Spread of Gothic Architecture in Central Europe,” in Queens and Queenship in Medieval
Europe, ed. Anne Duggan (Woodbridge: 1997), 263–​300.
65 David Stephenson, “The Rulers of Gwynedd and Powys,” in Monastic Wales: New
Approaches, eds Janet Burton and Karen Stöber (Cardiff: 2013), 89–​102, on 91.
66 Andrew Abram, “Monastic Burial in Medieval Wales,” in Monastic Wales: New Approaches,
eds Janet Burton and Karen Stöber (Cardiff: 2013), 103–​15, though his identification of
Llanfaes as a distinct mausoleum for women of the royal house of Gwynedd is based
on a misunderstanding of the evidence for the burial of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd’s mother
Senana.

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Deathbed and Burial Rituals in Late Medieval Catholic Europe 121

work meant the houses of friars were particularly popular places for burial in
the 14th, 15th, and early 16th centuries. In London alone, there are records of
over a thousand tombs in the city’s friaries. These are mainly antiquarian re-
cords of the tombs of the aristocracy and armigerous gentry: many more must
have been buried in the precincts of the friaries.67 Those buried in religious
communities had the benefit of the regular round of prayer there, and the
promise that at the Last Judgement they would rise in the company of peo-
ple already acknowledged as holy. By the 14th century, though, there was also
awareness of the advantages of burial in a parish church. Monastic churches
could be overcrowded, and the Cistercians in particular were resistant to the
idea of impressive effigy tombs obstructing the patterns of worship. Burial in
monastic precincts continued to be popular. For the aristocracy, it meant buri-
al alongside the ancestors. Archaeological evidence from some monastic sites
suggests more secular burials in the later medieval period, including less well-​
furnished graves and more burials of women.68 However, wealthy landowners
and townspeople were increasingly likely to endow chapels in parish churches
and to establish chantries or other foundations for regular services. They were
then more likely to choose burial there. The change in patterns of endowment
may originally have been triggered by the overload of monastic commemora-
tion, the focus specifically on intercessory masses rather than other forms of
prayer, and a move towards more specific endowments whereby a monastery
was given land explicitly to maintain a chaplain to say intercessory masses.
Once that had been established, it was possible to move to making similar en-
dowments in non-​monastic churches –​initially in cathedrals and collegiate
churches but subsequently in parish churches.69
Chantry foundations could be very diverse in scale. The collegiate church
at Tong, founded by Isabel de Pembridge in 1410, had a staff of a warden, four
chaplains, two clerks and thirteen almsfolk, and became the burial place

67 Christian O. Steer, “Burial and Commemoration in the London Friaries,” in The Friaries
of Medieval London From Foundation to Dissolution, ed. Nick Holder (Woodbridge: 2017),
272–​92.
68 For example, Grenville G. Astill and Susan M. Wright, “Perceiving Patronage in the
Archaeological Record: Bordesley Abbey,” in In Search of Cult: Archaeological Investigations
in Honour of Philip Rahtz, ed. Martin Carver (Woodbridge: 1993) 125–​37, esp. 132–​5.
69 Nigel Saul, Lordship and Faith: The English Gentry and the Parish Church in the Middle
Ages (Oxford: 2016), 14–​15, 135–​7, 161–​83; Colvin, Architecture and the After-​life, 152–​76. On
the relationship between tombs and chantries see Anne McGee Morganstern, “The Tomb
as Prompter for the Chantry: Four Examples from Late Medieval England,” in Memory
and the Medieval Tomb, eds Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo and Carol Stamatis Pendergast
(Farnham: 2000), 81–​98.

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of the Vernons, lords of Tong. On a much smaller scale, the north chapel
at Howell (Lincs.) was built by the Hebden family and became their burial
place.70
For many of those who had a choice, burial with other members of the
family was the main consideration: but there were other influences. The em-
phasis in medieval Welsh commemorative poetry on the dedicatory saint of
the church –​“Yng nghongl gwyngor Beuno” (In the corner of Beuno’s blessed
chancel), “draw ’nhŷ Deiliaw” (yonder in Teilo’s house), “yn nghôr Cynllaw” (in
Cynllaw’s choir)71 –​suggests that it was burial near the saint that was valued.
In the early 16th century, the body of Gruffudd Carreg of Carreg, north of Ab-
erdaron, was taken across the dangerous Bardsey Sound “i dir y saint … unll-
wybr Ynys Enlli” (to the land of the saints … the one path to Ynys Enlli) to be
buried on the island which was the legendary burial place of twenty thousand
saints.72
For women, the decision lay between burial with the husband and his
family or return to her own family. While surviving effigy tombs suggest that
married couples were generally buried together, the Welsh poetry offers some
striking examples of women from middle-​ranking gentry families returning to
their own family base for burial. In the early 16th century, Catrin the wife of
Wiliam Glynllifon was taken across Gwynedd to her father’s vault at Gloddaith
east of Conwy, “gwyddfa’i thad Egwlys Gloddaith”.73 Marged Bawdrem was
taken “i dre’i thad, wrth ddeheudir … ar fôr a thir” (to the town of her father,
in the south … on sea and land).74 Effigy tombs, too, can be misleading. Lady
Katherine Gordon, widow of the pretender Perkin Warbeck, was commemo-
rated in effigy on the magnificent alabaster tomb commissioned by her third
husband Sir Mathew Cradoc in Swansea. However, she married again and was

70 Saul, Lordship and Faith, 1–​4.

71 Hale, “Death and Commemoration,” 126, 128, 134 and references therein.
72 Hale, “Death and Commemoration,” 143.
73 Hale, “Death and Commemoration,” 142.
74 A. Cynfael Lake (ed.), Gwaith Lewys Morgannwg, vol. 1 (Aberystwyth: 2004), 49 ll. 31–​
2 and notes on 219; see also Guidera, “The Role of the Beguines,” 57 for wills request-
ing burial with the woman’s family. For some royal examples, see John Carmi Parsons,
“ ‘Never was a body buried in England with such solemnity and honour’: The Burials and
Posthumous Commemorations of English Queens to 1500,” in Queens and Queenship in
Medieval Europe, ed. Anne Duggan (Woodbridge: 1997), 317–​37. See also Kathleen Nolan,
“The Queen’s Body and Institutional Memory: The Tomb of Adelaide of Maurienne,”
in Memory and the Medieval Tomb, eds Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo and Carol Stamatis
Pendergast (Farnham: 2000), 249–​67. The tomb itself is mid-​12th century but the chapter
makes more general points.

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Deathbed and Burial Rituals in Late Medieval Catholic Europe 123

eventually buried alone, with another elaborate alabaster tomb, in the parish
church of her own Berkshire estates at Fyfield.75
There were also those who were excluded from consecrated ground. Sui-
cides, the excommunicated, and children who died unbaptised had to be
buried elsewhere. John Mirk, an Augustinian prior from Shropshire in the
late 14th and early 15th centuries, listed those who were excluded: as well as
excommunicates and suicides, unconfessed thieves and adulterers, and those
killed in jousting.76 Dismemberment and burning were a punishment for the
most severe crimes precisely because they prevented burial.77 On the other
hand, there were religious institutions which claimed the privilege of offering
burial to criminals and those otherwise excluded. The Knights Hospitallers of
Clerkenwell had a separate cemetery for burying London criminals, the Par-
don Churchyard.78 There were also separate emergency burial grounds during
particularly virulent outbreaks of epidemic diseases such as the plague. Mar-
chione di Coppo Stefani’s matter-​of-​fact account of plague burials in 1348 Flor-
ence, suggests haphazard burial:

And those who were responsible for the dead carried them on their backs
in the night in which they died and threw them into the ditch, or else
they paid a high price to those who would do it for them. The next morn-
ing, if there were many [bodies] in the trench, they covered them over
with dirt. And then more bodies were put on top of them, with a little
more dirt over those; they put layer on layer just like one puts layers of
cheese in a lasagna.79

But archaeological evidence demonstrates that even in the most difficult cir-
cumstances, burial could be well-​organized.80 War graves were more likely to
be haphazard and might include deliberate prone burials.81 Excavation of the
battlefield at Towton in north Yorkshire, one of the key battles in the Wars of

75 M. Gray, “The Property of a Lady (Katherine Cradock, d.1537),” The Swansea History
Journal: Minerva 21 (2013/​14), 82–​93.
76 John Mirk’s Festial, edited from British Library MS Cotton Claudius A.II ed. S. Powell, vol.
2, EETS, OS 335 (2011), 259–​61. See also Finucane, “Sacred Corpse, Profane Carrion,” 54–​8.
77 Westerhof, Death and the Noble Body, 115–​35.
78 Gilchrist and Sloane, Requiem, 73–​4.
79 Marchione di Coppo Stefani, Cronaca fiorentina. Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, Vol. 30, ed.
Niccolo Rodolico (Città di Castello: 1903–​13), online at http://​www2.iath.virginia.edu/​
osheim/​marchione.html (last accessed 1/​2/​2019).
80 Gilchrist and Sloane, Requiem, 74–​7.
81 Gilchrist and Sloane, Requiem, 73, 153–​4.

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the Roses, found a shallow grave with the remains of 38 individuals, apparently
deposited rapidly but with some attempt at east-​west orientation. Several were
laid prone, and in some cases this may have been deliberate.82 Battlefield casu-
alties might not be buried for some time. The Battle of Aljubarrota in Portugal
was fought in 1385 but the bodies were not buried until 1392, when a chapel was
built on the site of a communal burial ground.83
According to Mirk, a woman who died in childbirth could be buried in
the churchyard but the foetus had to be removed and buried separately.84
There was considerable debate about the status of unbaptised children.
Women who had died in childbirth or before they had been churched were
also sometimes excluded from consecrated ground. There were nonetheless
accommodations in practice. Sanctuaires de répit, sanctuaries of grace, were
places where children who had been born dead were brought in the hope that
they would revive for long enough to be baptised.85 A 15th-​century collec-
tion of miracles at the tomb of Philippe de Chantemilan, a devout laywoman
from Vienne, listed no less than 18 children born dead and revived there.86
A midwife could claim the child had breathed and baptise it; women could
be churched by proxy.87 In about 1400, a monk of Byland recorded a story of
a stillborn child who had been buried unbaptised but appeared to the father
who was able to baptise it.88 Archaeological evidence suggests mothers dying
in childbirth could be buried with their stillborn infants, and an extension of
the cathedral graveyard at Hereford seems to have been used for a number of
infant burials, though these were haphazardly arranged and may represent
clandestine burials.89

82 Veronica Fiorato, Anthea Boylston, and Christopher Knüsel (eds), Blood Red Roses: The
Archaeology of a Mass Grave from the Battle of Towton AD1461 (Oxford: 2007), 40, 186.
83 Fiorato, Boylston and Knüsel (eds), Blood Red Roses, 180, citing E. Cunha and A.M. Silva,
“War Lesions from the Famous Portuguese Medieval Battle of Aljubarrota,” International
Journal of Osteoarchaeology 7 (1997), 595–​99.
84 John Mirk’s Festial, 260.
85 Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 145.
86 Pierette Paravy, “Angoisse collective et miracles au seuil de la mort: Résurrections et
baptêmes d’enfants mort-​nés en Dauphiné au XVe siècle,” in La Mort au Moyen Âge.
Colloque de l’Association des historiens médiévistes français (Strasbourg: 1977), 87–​102.
87 Gilchrist and Sloane, Requiem, 72; M. Gray, “Ritual Space and Ritual Burial,” in Faith of our
Fathers: Popular Culture and Belief in Post-​Reformation England, Ireland and Wales, eds
Joan Allen and Richard Allen (Newcastle upon Tyne: 2009), 11–​25, on 15–​16.
88 Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 145.
89 Gilchrist and Sloane, Requiem, 72; Ron Shoesmith, Hereford City Excavations 1: Excavations
at Castle Green (London: 1980), 51.

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Deathbed and Burial Rituals in Late Medieval Catholic Europe 125

6 The Funeral and Associated Liturgies and Practices

The proper performance of the liturgy and other rituals was important for the
welfare of the dead person’s soul: many medieval ghost stories involve appari-
tions complaining that they cannot rest because the rituals have not been per-
formed.90 As the illustrations in Books of Hours make clear, ritual actions as
well as words were important.91 Funeral processions for the élite could involve
a ceremonial journey, carrying the coffined body from the place of death to
the place of burial. For everyone, though, there was some degree of formality.
One of the main functions of local guilds and confraternities was supporting
and attending the funerals of members. For the poorest, there were candles,
palls and biers provided by the parish. Guilds might also help with the funerals
of the poor. The guild of Holy Cross in Stratford-​on-​Avon provided candles to
burn in the houses of deceased members, and all members of the guild were to
accompany the corpse to the church. In addition, however:

It is also ordained by the bretheren and sisteren, that if any poor man in
the town dies, or if any stranger has not means of his own out of which to
pay for a light to be kept burning before his body, the bretheren and sis-
teren shall, for their souls’ health, whosoever he may be, find four waxes,
and one sheet, and a hearse-​cloth to lay over the coffin until the body is
buried.92

The body could be coffined to be carried to the church, even if it was subse-
quently removed so that the coffin could be reused. It was carried on a bier,
usually covered by a pall. These could be made of rich fabrics and decorated,
though towards the end of our period they seem to have become simpler. In
southern France they were often white.93 In northern Europe, they were more
commonly black with a large white cross. Wealthy families might have their

90 Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 2–​3.

91 Michel Vovelle, “L’histoire des hommes au miroir de la mort,” in Death in the Middle
Ages, eds Herman Braet and Werner Verbeke (Leuven: 1983), 1–​18. The description of the
funeral ritual which follows is based largely on miniatures in Books of Hours as described
by Roger Wieck in “The Death Desired” and in his Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in
Medieval Art and Life (New York: 1988) and Painted Prayers: The Book of Hours in Medieval
and Renaissance Art (New York: 1997), and in Schell, “The Office of the Dead in England,”
73–​104.
92 English Gilds. The Original Ordinances of more than one hundred Early English Gilds …, eds
Toulmin Smith and Lucy Toulmin Smith (London: 1870), 214–​5.
93 Chiffoleau, “Ce qui fait changer la mort dans la région d’Avignon,” 122.

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own pall; guilds usually had one for the use of members; parishes might have
one to be hired out or might be given cloth to provide a pall for the poor. The
family pall of the Fayrey family of Dunstable (Beds.) depicted members of the
family and emblems of their business associations, the Merchants of the Sta-
ple and the Mercers’ Company.94 The pall of the Clothiers’ Guild of Worces-
ter included panels with emblems of the cloth trade: shears, habicks (the iron
claws used to stretch cloth for shearing), teasel frames, combs and brushes.95
During our period, funeral processions became more complex. As early as
the 9th century, Bishop Jonas of Orléans had urged the laity to attend funerals
as a charitable act, and burial of the dead was one of the Seven Corporal Acts
of Mercy.96 In southern France, by the 14th century, merchants, artisans, and
even labourers could ask to be accompanied to their graves by “figurants” –​
members of confraternities, bedesmen, torchbearers, acolytes, crucifers.97
Gifts of money or clothing to the poor in return for their presence in the funer-
al procession also secured their prayers for the dead person’s soul. The pres-
ence of additional clergy –​local priests or monks –​could be paid for or could
be a charitable act. The wall painting depicting Burying the Dead in Llancarfan
(Vale of Glamorgan, Wales) shows a charitable funeral, but there are five or six
tonsured figures around the shrouded corpse. The funeral procession would be
accompanied by the ringing of bells. Bells would already have been rung at the
time of death, and they would announce the month’s mind. Bequests for the
construction or repair of bell towers and the provision of bells were a common
feature of late medieval wills: they were also a very visible (and audible) way of
securing prayer for one’s soul.98
On reaching the church, the corpse was placed before the altar. Candles
would be placed, at least one at the head and the foot, though there could be
many more. Most guilds were required to provide specified numbers of can-
dles and torches for the funerals of members. The ordinances of the Guild of
the Resurrection of Our Lord in Lincoln were very specific:

94 http://​collections.vam.ac.uk/​i tem/​O122998/​the-​fayrey-​p all-​funeral-​p all-​unknown/​

(last ac­cessed 11/​7/​2019).
95 T.J. Bridges, “The Funeral Pall of the Clothiers’ Company of Worcester,” Transactions of
the Worcestershire Archaeological Society 3rd ser. vol. 12 (1990), 2010–​11. I am grateful to
Christine Buckley for both these references.
96 Paxton, Christianizing Death, 197.
97 Chiffoleau, “Ce qui fait changer la mort dans la région d’Avignon,” 121; La comptabilité de
l’au-​delà, 132–​6.
98 For examples in East Anglia see Judith Middleton-​Stewart, Inward Purity and Outward
Splendour: Death and Remembrance in the Deanery of Dunwich, Suffolk, 1370–​ 1547
(Woodbridge: 2001), 108–​10.

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Deathbed and Burial Rituals in Late Medieval Catholic Europe 127

When a brother or sister dies, a hearse shall be put about the body, with
thirteen square wax lights burning in four stands, at placebo, dirige and
mass; and there shall be four angels, and four banners of the Passion …
And offerings shall be made; and as many masses shall be said for the soul
of the dead, as there are bretheren and sisteren in the gild.99

The coffins of the wealthy could be surmounted by a hearse or catafalque

designed to carry lights, heraldic devices and religious imagery. Candles and
torches were expensive, and in their wills some people stipulated that any that
were not completely used up were to be kept for the use of the church.
If the Office of the Dead had not been said at home, it would now be said
or sung in church, vespers on the night before the funeral, matins and lauds in
the morning. Where possible, music contributed to the Office and enhanced
its emotional impact.100 The site for the grave was marked with a cross, and the
grave was dug during the Requiem Mass. This concluded with a final absolu-
tion of the corpse, and the procession reformed to carry the bier to the grave.
Here the body was given one last blessing with holy water before being lowered
into the grave. As well as earth, charcoal, ash, lime, or chalk could be placed
in the coffin or around the body. Plants were sometimes added, particularly
evergreens, symbols of the Resurrection, and hyssop, a token of repentance.101
The Welsh poetry frequently refers to bodies being placed on or covered with
gro, gravel or small stones, possibly as a form of ‘clean’ earth. Phrases like gro a
phridd (gravel and soil) in Iolo Goch’s marwnad for Tudur Fychan clearly sug-
gest that gro is something different from pridd (soil).102

7 Grief and Mourning

The Office of the Dead, the Requiem Mass and the funeral liturgy were geared
mainly to benefiting the soul of the deceased, but they were also to help the liv-
ing to grieve. There is a sense in which rituals of remembering are also rituals
of forgetting, allowing those who are left to move towards acceptance of their
loss.103 Nevertheless, the emotional arousal of the liturgy was an important

99 English Gilds, eds Smith and Smith, 176.

100 On music in the Office of the Dead, see Schell, “Office of the Dead in England,” 167–​88.
101 Gilchrist and Sloane, Requiem, 120–​5, 180.
102 Hale, “Death and Commemoration,” 111–​4. The University of Wales Dictionary gives “the
earth as the resting-​place of the dead” as one variant meaning of gro but this is arguably a
misreading, based on its appearance in the commemorative poetry.
103 Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 5–​6.

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128 Gray

part of the consolidation of memory.104 The early Christian church discouraged

excessive grief as implying lack of faith in the Resurrection but acknowledged
that grief could be caused by separation.105 Philippe Ariès’s argument that the
expression of grief at a medieval funeral was ritualised and conventional has
been challenged by more recent research.106 Some 13th-​century tombs had
representations of extremes of deathbed and funeral mourning, though there
was debate over the appropriateness of this.107 In 14th-​century Italy, Coluccio
Salutati advocated less ostentatious display and a more dignified and medita-
tive form of grieving.108 However, marwnadau, commemorative Welsh poetry
from the 14th and 15th centuries, typically include statements of extreme and
even extravagant grief at the loss to family and wider society: “dros dayar weid-
di” (weeping across all the earth), “gwaed a ŵyl beirdd gwedy ef” (the poets
weeping tears of blood for him), “trist wylofain” (sad lament), “côr ag uban
… cri ’mhob llan” (a choir of wailing … crying in every church).109 The 15th-​
century poet Guto’r Glyn was particularly fond of likening tears of mourning to
Noah’s flood. In his elegy for Hywel ab Owain of Llanbryn-​mair, he exclaimed:

Am ei hoedl y mae hedlif,

A môr llawn yma’r â’r llif.
Dŵr Noe oedd daear a naint
I’m hwyneb am ei henaint.

104 Del Alamo and Pendergast, (eds), Memory and the Medieval Tomb, 5.
105 For a summary, see Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo, “Lament for a Lost Queen: The
Sarcophagus of Doña Blanca in Náhera,” The Art Bulletin 78/​2 (1996), 311–​33, reprinted in
Del Alamo and Pendergast, Memory and the Medieval Tomb, 43–​80.
106 Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death: from the Middle Ages to the Present, trans.
Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore: 1974); Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen
Weaver (London: 1981). For more recent perspectives see, for example, the articles in
“Medieval and Early Modern Responses to Death and Dying,” special number of Parergon
31/​2 (2014), Rebecca F. McNamara and Una McIlvenna, “Medieval and Early Modern
Emotional Responses to Death and Dying,” 1–​10; Naama Cohen-​Hanegbi, “Mourning
under Medical Care: A Study of a consilium by Bartolomeo Montagnana,” 35–​54; Alicia
Marchant, “Narratives of Death and Emotional Affect in Late Medieval Chronicles,” 81–​
98. For the general context of the history of emotions see, e.g., C. Stephen Jaeger (ed.),
Codierungen von Emotionen im Mittelalter /​Emotions and Sensibilities in the Middle Ages
(Berlin: 2003); Barbara Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–​1700
(Cambridge: 2015).
107 Rocío Sánchez Ameijeiras, “Monumenta et memoriae: The 13th-​ century Episcopal
Pantheon of León Cathedral,” in Memory and the Medieval Tomb, eds. Elizabeth Valdez
del Alamo and Carol Stamatis Pendergast (Farnham: 2000), 269–​99, esp. 270–​1.
108 Cohen-​Hanegbi, “Mourning under Medical Care,” 42–​3.
109 Hale, “Death and Commemoration,” 153–​8.

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Deathbed and Burial Rituals in Late Medieval Catholic Europe 129

There is an overrunning flood of tears because of his life, and the flood
is becoming a whole sea here. The waters of Noah, covering earth and
valleys, were over my face because of his old age.110

Like the French plainte funèbre, these marwnadau are often formulaic, but the
formulae testify to a sense of what is appropriate and even expected.111
The Welsh poets are also one of our best sources for grief at the deaths of
children. Here again, Ariès’s pioneering work has been modified by more re-
cent research. Ariès went so far as to suggest that the death of a young child
was treated as we would now treat the death of a pet, the body being “buried
almost anywhere”.112 This has been challenged, notably by Shulamith Shahar
and, specifically for England, Nicholas Orme; by Erika Langmuir with refer-
ence to visual imagery and by Sophie Oosterwijk and Sally Badham in the spe-
cific context of tomb carvings and other memorials.113 In Wales, later medieval
poetry certainly suggests deep grief for the loss of very young children. Several
poets wrote of their grief at the deaths of their own children, and there are
also references to mourning for the children of patrons.114 Gwilym ap Sefnyn
(fl. ca. 1440) compared his sorrow to that of Adam on being expelled from
Eden, and wrote movingly about his dead children:

Llawen oeddwn, gwn ganllys,

wrth feithrin Rhobin a Rhys …

110 http://​www.gutorglyn.net/​gutorglyn/​poem/​?poem-​selection=040 (last accessed 3/​ 2/​

2019); Hale, “Death and Commemoration,” 162–​5.
111 On the French funeral lament, Claude Thiry, La plainte funèbre (Turnhout: 1978).
112 Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. R. Baldick
(Harmondsworth: 1979), 37.
113 For an overview of the debate, see Albrecht Classen (ed.), Childhood in the Middle Ages and
the Renaissance (Berlin and New York: 2005), especially the introductory chapter, “Philippe
Ariès and the Consequences: History of Childhood, Family Relations and Personal
Emotions: Where do we stand today”. See also Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle
Ages (London: 1990); Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven, CT: 2001); Erika
Langmuir, Imagining Childhood (New Haven, CT: 2006); Sophie Oosterwijk, “Chrisoms,
Shrouds and Infants on English Tomb Monuments: A Question of Terminology?” Church
Monuments 15 (2000), 44–​64; Sophie Oosterwijk, “’A swith feire grave’: The Appearance of
Children on Medieval Tomb Monuments,” in Family and Dynasty in Late Medieval England,
eds R. Eales and S. Tyas, Proceedings of the 1997 Harlaxton Symposium (Donington: 2003),
172–​92; Sophie Oosterwick, “Madonnas, Mothers, Mites and the Macabre,” Church
Monuments 18 (2003), 10–​22. Sally Badham, Seeking Salvation: Commemorating the Dead
in the Late-​Medieval English Parish (Donington: 2015), esp. 83.
114 D.R. Johnston (ed. and transl.), Galar y Beirdd: Marwnadau Plant/​Poets’ Grief: Medieval
Welsh Elegies for Children (Cardiff: 1993); Hale, “Death and Commemoration,” 180–​95.

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130 Gray

Bu –​och fi nad byw iach fai! –​

Sioned, hi a’m cusanai
I took delight, I who know a hundred courts, in nursing Robin and Rhys
… There was –​oh if only she were alive and well! –​Sioned, she used
to kiss me.115

8 After the Burial

After the grief of the funeral, the funeral feast can be seen as a rite of reincor-
poration, or as the next stage in the social construction of the dead body. These
occasions could be lavish. The funeral feast of Bishop Mitford of Salisbury in
1407 involved feeding 1,450 members of his household and guests. Twenty-​nine
cooks worked for three days; 30 spits and 4,002 platters and dishes had to be
hired.116 On a much smaller scale, guilds could contribute to the simple food
after a member’s funeral. In 1442–​3, the guild of Holy Cross at Stratford-​upon-​
Avon supported one Matilda during her final illness and provided 4d. worth
of bread and ale for her funeral and a further 1d. worth of ale afterwards.117
It was probably at the funeral feast that many of the Welsh commemorative
poems were first performed, making them part of the ritual of remembrance.
The sometimes rather formulaic expression of the poems suggests they were
composed in some haste, but the conventional language is part of the process
of acceptance and reconciliation.
St Augustine had encouraged the conversion of the funeral feast towards
charity for the poor, and feeding the poor was by the end of the first millen-
nium an important part of the commemoration of the dead.118 Wills from the
late medieval period often include doles of food to the poor, explicitly or im-
plicitly in return for their prayers and attendance at the funeral. However, this
did not necessarily mean they were invited to the feast. Some tomb carvings
show funeral and anniversary feasts specifically for the poor.119 When Hugh
Johns, a wealthy Welsh brewer living in Bristol, made his will in 1505, he left
2d each to 24 poor men holding torches at his funeral cum prandio competenti,
“with a decent meal”, but the implication is that they would be fed separately

115 Hale, “Death and Commemoration,” 188–​9, 336–​9.

116 Christopher M. Woolgar, The Culture of Food in England, 1200–​
1500 (New Haven,
CT: 2016), 198–​9.
117 Woolgar, Culture of Food in England, 125.
118 Paxton, Christianizing Death, 26–​7, 136–​7.
119 Ameijeiras, “Monumenta et memoriae,” 272–​3.

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Deathbed and Burial Rituals in Late Medieval Catholic Europe 131

from his family and friends.120 As with so many other aspects of late medieval
charity, there was an increasing tendency by the end of the 15th century to
concentrate on neighbours and fellow parishioners.121 Food was used to cre-
ate community, but the scope of that community was limited. The prayers of
those who knew the dead person were perhaps becoming more valued than
the prayers of casual recipients of charity.
Meanwhile, the physical body still had a journey to make: decomposition,
skeletonization, relocation to a more honourable burial place, to a shrine, or
to the parish charnel house. The trajectory of the socially constructed body
was even more complex. For some, there were rituals of commemoration, from
monuments and masses to entry on the parish bede roll. For others, there were
rituals of degradation: exposure, dismemberment, hanging in chains. Even the
most extreme degradation, death by burning, left bone fragments which could
be collected for veneration or further punishment. In death as in life, the social
identity of the body was both constructed and complex.
120 tna Prob/​11/​14 f. 286.
121 Woolgar, Culture of Food in England, 229–​31.

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 ­c hapter 4

“Do This in Remembrance of Me”: Offerings,

Identity, and Bills in the Medieval English Royal
Funeral
Anna M. Duch

The English royal funeral during the Middle Ages was a highly stage-​managed
event. From at least the 14th century onward, the royal house had to follow a
carefully choreographed series of instructions, set forth in books such as the
Liber Regalis and the Liber Regie Capelle. Every moment –​the embalming of
the body, the religious ceremonies, and the burial –​had the objective of con-
veying the status of the deceased to the funeral’s viewers. Yet, at the same time,
the king was still a Christian in need of burial and a soul in need of care. This
was not forgotten during the conspicuous consumption that inevitably trans-
pired as part of the royal funerary and burial ceremonies. As astutely observed
by Ralph Giesy regarding the royal exequies in Renaissance France,

all the superstructure of the symbolic attachment of sovereignty to the

corpse […] was appended to the essentially religious rites. “Appended”
is the proper word for there was never any real fusion of the secular and
religious elements.1

The medieval funeral mass for a king or queen in England never became “The
King’s Funeral Mass” or “The Queen’s Funeral Mass.” The same basic reli-
gious rituals were performed, although this was obscured by the luxury and
drama that played out over the course of the weeks and months following a
monarch’s death.
This chapter will examine the English royal funeral during the late Middles
Ages, as a case study to illustrate the general features of death and disposal in
­chapters 2 and 3 of this volume. The focus will be on royal expenditure to se-
cure the status and reputation of the monarch, as well as to pay the necessary
fees to the churches; the method and delivery of payment was integrated into
the pageantry of the royal funeral. The funerals of kings will be contrasted

1 Ralph Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France (Geneva: 1960), 29.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004443433_006

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“Do This In Remembrance of Me” 133

with the most basic requirements of a commoner’s Christian funeral, with

particular reference to activity requested by those who made wills in late me-
dieval York. The comparison will serve as a reminder that medieval people
had shared, universal anxieties about death, regardless of their station in life.
Even kings cowered in the face of death and its uncertainties, though they
had thousands of pounds of wax burning for their souls compared to the poor,
who hoped to render up enough for a candle. Discussion of kings with irregu-
lar funerals due to abdication or deposition will be minimal. This discussion
will not extend to the tombs of kings but instead focus on ritual activity and
its costs.2
Within the literature surrounding the English royal funeral during the me-
dieval period, more emphasis is placed upon the statements of status and
power conveyed by the ceremonies, than the actual costs and mechanics of
executing such a high-​profile event. Even in the essays in this volume, with
minor exceptions, the price paid for exequies and later commemorative ac-
tivity is not mentioned. Although contemporary financial records have been
published, they are rarely complete and typically do not explicitly state what
certain objects were used for in relation to the funeral.3 Information collected
by antiquarians, such as W.H. St. John Hope, also tends to lack a clear under-
standing of function; objects are fetishized and extensively discussed without
determination as to what they actually were used for during the course of the
royal funeral. Stating an object was purchased for a funeral does not inform the
historian as to how it was used. Works such as “The Exequies of Edward iii and
the Royal Funeral Ceremony in Late Medieval England” by Chris Given-​Wilson
have been more successful in connecting the pageantry with the money spent
to achieve it, but this area remains in need of further development.4
Patronage of churches and the close relationships between testators and
their local religious have been examined in previous studies. Samuel Cohn, Jr.,
in an examination of Italian Renaissance material culture, has examined the
wills of testators who lived outside of the major cities, who were not neces-
sarily rich, and who had varying concerns regarding people and their posses-
sions. This included what they left to their burial churches and other financial

2 For work on post-​Reformation wills, see Lorraine C. Attreed, “Preparation for Death in
Sixteenth-​Century Northern England,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 13/​3(1982), 37–​66.
3 Frederick Devon (ed.), Issues of the Exchequer, Being a Collection of Payments Made Out of
His Majesty’s Revenue, from King Henry III to King Henry VI, inclusive (London: 1837) can be a
useful source, but it is incomplete, has inaccuracies within the transcriptions, and has issues
with accurate dates.
4 Chris Given-​Wilson, “The Exequies of Edward,” EHR 124/​507 (2009), 259–​82.

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134 Duch

matters, what Cohn describes as “pious and non-​pious bequests.”5 Christian

Steer’s recent work on the Grey Friars in London and its non-​elite patrons has
brought an additional dimension to a church that has been mostly discussed
in the context of its queenly benefactors, Margaret of France (d. 1318) and Is-
abella of France (d. 1358).6 However, most academic studies do not place the
mortuary, exequies, and anniversary of a monarch into the same religious and
social context as that of a commoner; there is a segregation by class, as if the
rites celebrated in the chapel of the monarch were completely different crea-
tures from those celebrated by the fishmonger or wool carder. In this chapter,
royal funerals will be analysed and set within the wider soteriological concerns
shared by all late medieval Christians.

1 Preparing the Body

The expectations for an English royal funeral by the mid-​15th century are most
clearly conveyed in the Liber Regie Capelle, the governing book for the Chap-
el Royal, the clergy and choristers who were in direct service to the king of
England and often travelled with him.7 An extant copy of this book, created
ca.1448–​9, resides in the archive at Evora, Portugal.8 The Liber Regie Capelle
was not innovative in its own time. Rather, it was an accumulation of practices
at royal ceremonies which had already been implemented and performed, as
evidenced by monastic accounts, chronicle narratives, and financial records.
The Liber Regie Capelle includes a transcription of a much older text, titled “De
Exequiis Regalibus,” which describes the embalming and dressing of the king

5 Samuel Cohn, Jr., “Renaissance Attachment to Things: Material Culture in Last Wills and Tes-
taments,” The Economic History Review 65/​3 (2012), 984–​1004.
6 Christian Steer, “Souls of Benefactors at Grey Friars Church, London,” in Medieval London-
ers: Essays to Mark the Eightieth Birthday of Caroline M. Barron, eds Christian Steer and Eliz-
abeth New (London: 2019), 297–​322; W.M. Ormrod, “Queenship, Death, and Agency: The
Commemorations of Isabella of France and Philippa of Hainault,” in Memory and Commem-
oration in Medieval England: Proceedings of the 2008 Harlaxton Symposium, eds Caroline
M. Barron and Clive Burgess (Donington: 2010), 87–​103; Michael Robson, “Queen Isabella
(c.1295/​1358) and the Greyfriars: An Example of Royal Patronage Based on Her Accounts for
1357/​1358,” Franciscan Studies 65 (2007), 325–​48; Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, The Grey Fri-
ars of London: Their History with the Register of Their Convent and an Appendix of Documents
(Aberdeen: 1915).
7 Walter Ullman (ed.), Liber Regie Capelle, Henry Bradshaw Society, 92 (London: 2010 [1959]),
111–​5.
8 Bibliotheca Publica e Arquivio Distrital, Evora (Portugal) ms CV/​I -​36, formerly ms 36.

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“Do This In Remembrance of Me” 135

in a manner befitting his station.9 The Liber Regie Capelle then establishes the
appearances and activities that would have been seen during the royal funeral.
These exequies were often lengthy, justifying the need to embalm the body.
After a person’s death, their body was prepared for burial. For a common
person, this typically was limited to being wrapped in a shroud; clothing was
costly and did not always go to the grave with the deceased.10 The bodies were
typically not laid out for display and were interred within days of death. Ac-
cording to French royal physician Henri de Mondeville in his Cyrurgia, em-
balming a common person was “not useful or necessary, and it pays nothing.”11
For those higher in society, what could be done for them depended upon
what they could pay and the objective of preservation: to retain a human
appearance or to take the remains to a distant place for burial.12 In England,
all post-​Conquest monarchs were interred with an intact external appear-
ance, so that they could be viewed post-​mortem in their regalia prior to be-
ing coffined.13 For someone of rank or money, the bodily orifices were plugged
with preservatives, and the body was rubbed with balms, spices, and herbs and

9 The “De Exequiis Regalibus” text appears in multiple manuscripts connected to Westmin-
ster Abbey, including (but not limited to) Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C 425;
London, Westminster Abbey, MS 37 Litylington Missal; Westminster Abbey MS 38 Liber Re-
galis; and Pamplona, Archivo General de Navarra, MS 197. The text has been dated as early
as the 13th century and as late as the third quarter of the 14th century; cf. John Wickham
Legg (ed.), Missale ad Usum Ecclesie Westmonasteriensis, iii, Henry Bradshaw Society, 12
(Bury St. Edmunds: 1999 [1897]), ix; Percy Schramm, A History of the English Coronation (Ox-
ford: 1937), 80; Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony, 85; Paul Binski, Westminster Abbey and
the Plantagenets: Kingship and the Representation of Power, 1200–​1400 (London: 1995), 196.
10 Christopher Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England, 1066–​1550 (Woodbridge:
1998), 38–​9.
11 Henri de Mondeville, Chirurgie de Maître Henri de Mondeville, trans. and ed. E. Nicaise
(Paris: 1893), 569–​70.
12 Madeleine Gray, in ­chapter 4 above, refers to the embalming style used for the transport
of bodies, which often destroyed any human-​like appearance for the sake of getting the
remains where they were needed to go. English embalming was highly effective by the
beginning of the 14th century, as evidenced by the good condition of Edward I’s body;
see below. John (d. 1216) was also reported to be very well preserved at his tomb’s open-
ing in 1529; see J.H.P. Pafford, “King John’s Tomb in Worcester Cathedral: An Account of
Its Opening in 1529 by John Bale,” Transactions of the Worcester Archaeological Society 35
(1958), 58–​60. Nuance is needed here, as different methods of embalming were employed
for different priorities among the royal houses.
13 Liber Regie Capelle, 112. Giesey proposes that Henry ii of England (d. 1189) was the origina-
tor of this custom; Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony, 21. This author wonders whether
this was just the first successful effort; Henry I (d. 1135) may have attempted to be pre-
sented but decayed prior to his arrival at his foundation at Reading; Henry of Huntingdon,
Historia Anglorum (Oxford: 1996), 702–​3.

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136 Duch

then wrapped tightly in a shroud. If there was concern about the body’s lon-
gevity post mortem, the bowels could be evacuated.14 For esteemed persons
whose faces were to be exposed and bodies on display for four days or more,
Mondeville prescribed that a balm should be applied to the face.15 The last,
most involved measure to keep a noble body for more than four days was to
eviscerate it, removing the internal organs and replacing them with fragrant
herbs and salt. Optionally, the extracted organs could be stored and buried
separately, which was only occasionally done in England after 1299; although
embalming still happened, the extracted body parts were not given a separate
funeral as they were in France, a practice that continued until the French Revo-
lution.16 For an elite person, embalming was a necessary part of their exequies,
since their body would be out of its grave for an extended period to permit a
procession appropriate to their rank as well as the votive activity that came
with it. In contrast with English custom, most other European royal and noble
houses could tolerate division of the royal body, even to the point where noth-
ing could be visually presented.17
Embalming within itself could also be interpreted as a sign of status and
money. Any attempt at preserving a body was a temporary measure; inevitably,
decay would set in, but someone of means could afford to try to maintain the
integrity of the body long enough to have elaborate exequies. In 1377, £21 was
spent solely upon the embalming of Edward iii, who had died on 21 June 1377
and was interred at Westminster Abbey on 5 July 1377.18 This space between
death and burial was not uncommon for medieval English kings of the 14th

14 Mondeville, Chirurgie, 569–​70. Mondeville’s text crossed the Channel no later than the
late 1300s, as an English surgeon translated it into Middle English; see London, Wellcome
Library, MS 564.
15 Mondeville, Chirurgie, 572. Mondeville stated that he attempted to use it on two French
kings with little to no benefit. He was likely referring to Philippe iv in 1314 and Louis x
in 1316.
16 Mondeville, Chirurgie, 572–​3. Boniface viii issued the papal bull De Sepulturis in 1299. In
it, he explicitly banned the abusum destatande feritatis (the detestable abuse of savagery)
of mos teutonicos, a form of excarnation. Whether this was meant to condemn the specific
practice or all forms of post-​mortem division is debated to this day. For the text of the bull,
see Georges Digard, Maurice Faucon and Antoine Thomas (eds), Les Registres de Boniface
VIII: Recueil Des Bulles de Ce Pape, vol. 2 (Paris: 1885), 575–​6.
17 E.A.R. Brown, “Philippe le Bel and the Remains of Saint Louis,” Gazette Des Beaux-​Arts
95 (May-​June 1980), 175–​82, though Giesey, Royal Funeral Ceremony, 21, points out that
this practice ceased among French monarchs by the late 1300s. Various examples can
be found in G. Klaniczay, Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval
Central Europe, trans. E. Palmai (New York: 2000).
18 tna e 101/​398/​9, fo.24; see also Chris Given-​Wilson, “The Exequies of Edward III,” 264.

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“Do This In Remembrance of Me” 137

and 15th centuries; Edward i died on 7 July 1307 and was interred at Westmin-
ster Abbey on 27 October 1307, and Edward ii died on 21 September 1327 and
was interred at Gloucester Abbey on 20 December 1327. This pattern continued
through the reign of Henry v, who died on 31 August 1422 and was not buried
at Westminster Abbey until 7 November 1422. Embalming was a required ele-
ment of a royal funeral. Otherwise, the royal corpse would not endure the full
range of masses, processions, and rites suitable for a king.
While a common person was often stripped of his clothing for the sake of
the living and wrapped in a shroud, the king maintained his clothing in death
as he did in life. According to “De Exequiis Regalibus,” the late king wore an
ankle-​length tunic and a decorated pallium. He was to wear a crown over a
shroud or coif on his head. In the case of Edward ii and possibly others, the
coif and other undergarments were from the king’s coronation.19 His beard
was arranged fittingly on his chest. The hands were to be wrapped with the
individual fingers separated so that gold-​fringed gloves could be placed upon
them, along with a ring atop the right glove on the middle finger. The king
was to hold a rod with a ball and cross in the right hand, a sceptre in the left,
with the rod and sceptre both crossing the king’s chest. The feet were shod in
silk boots and sandals. A confirmed, nearly ideal example of this practice was
discovered at the tomb opening of Edward i in 1774; those present could hardly
find any deviation from the prescriptive text.20 Also confirmed at Edward i’s
tomb opening was the fact he was embalmed; his skin had tanned rather than
rotted, and his features remained distinguishable and recognizable. Edward i’s
body had been cared for appropriately and fittingly for his station at his death
in 1307. This evidence also indicates that the activity described in “De Exequiis
Regalibus” was seemingly well-​practiced, given the success of Edward i’s em-
balming, long before it was recorded.

2 The Procession: Navigating Purgatory and Society

The next step after preparing the body for burial was to escort it on a bier to
its site of burial. For a common person, that was typically a short trip to the
local parish church, and the deceased was accompanied by friends and family.
If the deceased was a member of a guild or a fraternity, community members

19 tna e 361/​3, r. 8/​16. King John was also coifed and crowned, Worcester Cathedral
Additional MS 438 (old Additional MS 77B), f. 48B.
20 Joseph Ayloffe, “An Account of the Body of King Edward the First, As It Appeared on
Opening His Tomb in the Year 1774,” Archaeologia 3 (1775), 377–​85.

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138 Duch

would provide support for the deceased, both in terms of personal presence
and financial or material aid.21 Should family, friends, or community be unable
to provide, the parish church may have supplied the deceased with a herse and
pall to drape over it for a small fee.22 A herse was a wooden superstructure that
would hold a shrouded body or a coffin and potentially candles. This is differ-
ent from our modern hearse, which only carries the body from place to place,
like a bier or a catafalque. The medieval herse varied in size, based upon the
status of the deceased, as did the number of candles it would hold. Social sta-
tus was demonstrated through the height and size of the herse, along with how
much decorated wax and wood was utilized.23 If feasible, gifts would be given
to the mourners who lined the streets during the procession. For those lower in
society, pieces of clothing, food, fuel for fires, and other immediate needs were
distributed, while those further up in society tended to give increasingly elab-
orate gowns and caps. Not only was this an expression of wealth, it was also a
trade: new clothes for prayers. This established a link between the continued
needs of the living and the need of prayers for the dead in the context of the
doctrine of purgatory.
Since the early days of Christianity, unofficial and indirect references to an
‘in-​between’ space for departed souls had existed in Christian texts, indicating
that these souls were not yet in heaven but certainly not in hell.24 As discussed
in ­chapter 1 of this volume, the doctrine of purgatory was officially adopted in
1274 at the Second Council of Lyons, establishing that souls passed through a
time of purification or purgation prior to entering heaven. With the increasing
observance of this doctrine, the deceased Christians became the direct bene-
ficiaries of prayers, though such activity had previously existed. For example,
upon attaining his majority in 1227, Henry iii began to ask for prayers for the
soul of his father John, a practice he continued until his death in 1272, two
years before the Second Council of Lyons.25 By the 14th century, the gifts given

21 See prior chapters in this volume by Stephen Bates and Madeleine Gray for further dis-
cussion on the involvement these groups. For specific examples from London, see Jessica
Lutkin “The London Craft of Joiners, 1200–​1550,” Medieval Prosopography 26 (2005), 129–​
64; Doreen Leach, “The Turners of Medieval London,” Medieval Prosopography 28 (2013),
105–​36.
22 Rosemary Horrox, “Purgatory, Prayer, and Plague: 1150–​1380,” in Death in Medieval
England: An Illustrated History, eds Peter C. Jupp and Clare Gittings (Manchester: 1999), 102.
23 The only surviving image of a medieval herse comes from the 1532 mortuary roll of Bishop
John Islip, held in the Westminster Abbey Muniments.
24 Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago: 1986), though hotly debated, remains a
key text.
25 The earliest example I have found of Henry III’s personal agency in this matter is dated
17 March 1227, wherein he refers to the 100 solidates of land that had been assigned to the

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at funerals were a tacit bargain for prayers, which would expedite this purifica-
tion.26 Caroline Walker Bynum suggests that the doctrine of purgatory acted as
social control. Because purgation was an experience of suffering to be purified,
prayers and good works would expedite the unpleasant experience, with the
guarantee that such prayers would not be wasted; the soul was already des-
tined for heaven.27
The procession, herses, and prayers offered for a king were rooted in the
same concerns, but they manifested at an entirely different level of expendi-
ture. The Liber Regie Capelle continues the narrative of the king’s funeral on
procession.28 Someone with high rank would likely have a large herse with
many candles, and for kings, multiple herses were typical. Henry v had no few-
er than eight herses set up for him during his procession in England, from Do-
ver to Westminster Abbey, in 1422. It cost £300 12s 6d for the eight herses, with
the one at Westminster more lavishly decorated and likely more expensive
than the rest, as there was further discussion of compensation to Westminster
Abbey for £53 6s 8d for the last herse as well as 200 torches.29 Similarly, Edward
iii’s final herse at Westminster Abbey in 1377 cost £59 16s 8d, while the imme-
diately preceding herse at St. Paul’s was £11.30
Henry v’s exequies of 1422 had a vast procession, with members from all lev-
els of society clothed in black. Some of these people were given the mourning
clothes as gifts in exchange for their prayers, including the poor who lined the
streets of the English towns that Henry’s body passed through.31 Hall’s Chron-
icle offers that about 500 men of arms “all in black harness and their horses
barded black” and 300 persons holding torches were positioned on each side
of Henry’s bier as it was taken from Dover to Westminster.32 The king of En-
gland was meant to be at the top of society, and that message was conveyed

abbot of Croxton, the office held by John’s embalmer in 1216, “for the soul of King John.”
“Calendar of Fine Rolls of the Reign of Henry III,” Henry III Fine Rolls Project, https://​
finerollshenry3.org.uk/​content/​calendar/​roll_​025.html, #141 (last accessed 20 May 2020;
tna c 60/​25 m. 8.)
26 Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England, 51.
27 Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body (New York: 1995), 280–​1.
28 Liber Regie Capelle, 113–​4.
29 Devon, Issues of the Exchequer, 336.
30 W.H. St. John Hope, “The Funeral, Monument, and Chantry Chapel of King Henry the
Fifth,” Archaeologia 65 (1915), 129–​86, on 131.
31 Friedrich W.D. Brie (ed.), The Brut, or the Chronicles of England, vol. 2 (New York: 1971),
429–​30; 493.
32 Edward Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, containing the History of England during the Reign of Henry
the Fourth and the Succeeding Monarchs to the End of the Reign of Henry the Eighth,
(London: 1809), 114.

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by the king’s executors, through mustering people, dressing them (and their
horses), and providing them with candles. Henry v also ensured that the poor
would pray for him, even after his funeral. In the third version of his will, in
1421, Henry v ordered that within a year of his death, 30 paupers were to be
provided with clothing and food in exchange for reciting the Psalter of the
Blessed Virgin. He also requested that, every year, 24 paupers with 24 torches
were to attend his anniversary hours and masses, receiving 5d for each. These
men then were to receive £20 from the abbot.33
Meanwhile, in his will of 1493, John Beseby, merchant of York, asked that 40
shillings of bread be distributed to paupers on his behalf. He left little Mald John-
son his best two silver spoons. He wanted a priest to sing for his soul and for that of
his father, his mother, Mr. Beverley to whom he was apprenticed, and all Christian
souls. Every day for a year, while wearing his mass vestments, the priest should
visit the grave and say De Profundis with the collect and then sprinkle holy water
on the grave.34 Beseby did not have thousands of mourners, nor did he have the
money to feed and provide for 30 poor men or have a permanent anniversary.
However, at his own social and economic level, he desired the same spiritual care
that Henry v did.
Beseby also asked that four pounds of wax burn about his body. In medie-
val funerals, candles were key indicators to the social status of the dead person
(more wax equated to more status), but they were also thought of as necessary to
provide light for the deceased, as the living petitioned, “Rest eternal grant them,
Lord, and light perpetual shine on them.” Some English parishes would break the
paschal candle into smaller portions to supply the poor dead with candles for
their funeral.35 John Chambelleyne, a York butcher, gave 12d for three torches to
burn during his dirige and requiem mass in 1516.36 For kings as well, candles were
explicitly part of their commemoration. In his will, Edward iii simply asked that
he be buried at Westminster Abbey with his forebears with little ostentation.
However, he did request that his tomb be well-​lit.37 In accordance with this
will, 7511 pounds of wax was purchased to make torches, candles, and lamps,

33 Patrick Strong and Felicity Strong, “The Last Will and Codicils of Henry V,” EHR 96/​378
(1981), 91.
34 Testamenta Eboracensia: A Selection of Wills from the Registry at York, vol. 4, Publications
of the Surtees Society 53 (Durham: 1869), 86.
35 Horrox, “Purgatory, Prayer, and Plague,” 103.
36 Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England, 47.
37 John Nichols (ed.), A Collection of All the Wills Now Known to Be Extant … (London: 1780),
60. For the legal difficulties of enacting this will, see Chris Given-​Wilson, “Richard II and
His Grandfather’s Will,” EHR 93/​367 (1978), 320–​37.

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“Do This In Remembrance of Me” 141

and assumedly to decorate the herse.38 For Edward iii’s first anniversary, Rich-
ard ii ordered candles to burn, along with other high-​ranking commemorative
activity; out of £29 6s 8d spent on the anniversary, £17 went toward candles and
people and objects to hold the candles.39 Chambelleyne’s four torches may have
been comparatively dimmer than Edward iii’s funeral or anniversary candles,
but they served the same function and expressed the same concerns.
The 7511 pounds of wax used for Edward iii’s funeral was exponentially
greater than the breaking of paschal candles for the poor, but even that was
soon dwarfed by Richard ii’s expenditure on wax for the funeral of his wife,
Anne of Bohemia, in 1394. An indenture for wax for Anne’s funeral shows that
approximately 14,800 pounds of wax were to be divided among four locations
that her procession would pass through from Sheen: Wandsworth received
1570 pounds of wax, St. Mary Overie 1450 pounds of wax, St. Paul’s 4330 pounds
of wax, and Westminster Abbey 7440 pounds of wax.40 After subtracting the
necessary tapers, torches, work lights, wax that was wasted during the course
of construction, there was about 10,100 pounds of wax that was to be utilized
in the construction and decoration of the herses, including devotional images
and tabernacles. Based upon the language used, a herse was to be as archi-
tecturally complicated as the larger church structures, although temporary in
construction.41 To create a building of wax –​something impermanent –​was a
massive show of wealth, yet the more than 4500 pounds of wax for candles also
reflected the religious concerns of the living for the dead.
Ultimately, Anne of Bohemia’s Westminster herse and its wax was pur-
chased back from the abbey for £66 13s 14d by the royal house.42 The gift of the
herse or the money it had been worth acted as partial payment for the exequies
or, had those expenses already been paid, as a votive gift to garner prayers for
the deceased. Had the abbey kept it, the wax and wood from the herse would
have been used for other purposes or sold to another purchaser for the upkeep
of the abbey church and its fabric. Compared to its initial cost, £66 13s 14d is
somewhat of a lacklustre return; the indenture indicates a sum of £690 15s
7d was paid out in the course of collecting the wax and supplying Roger Elys,
wax chaundler, with it, and the abbey’s herse took up about half of the 14,800
pounds of wax.43 Frederick Devon makes mention of one of the purchases of

38 tna e 101/​398/​9, f. 24; Given-​Wilson, “The Exequies of Edward III,” 268.

39 Issues of the Exchequer, 211.
40 tna e 101/​403/​4.
41 Robert Willis, Architectural Nomenclature of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: 1846) 74–​7.
42 Hope, “The Funeral, Monument, and Chantry Chapel,” 143.
43 Richard Gough, Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain, 1B (London: 1786), 170.

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1500 pounds of wax in Issues of the Exchequer, but this is only a portion of
the total expenditure for this funeral.44 A later entry indicates Richard ii was
still paying off his debt to Elys’s executors in 1397, as a payment of £41 8s 10d
was rendered on 7 November.45 However, the lack of value of the herse after
the funeral is partly the point: this is meant to be conspicuous consumption,
excess beyond anything else to show that the English royal house –​especially
the king, Richard ii –​had the greatest means and could spend the most at the
top of society.
Along with the gifts given to mourners and the candles within the churches,
votive activity was a part of the procession. Performed at each location where
the body was taken, the Office of the Dead was composed of the liturgical hours
of vespers, matins or vigil, and lauds. Vespers and matins had set times, dusk
and midnight, respectively. Lauds had variation in timing. In monastic com-
munities, lauds was said separately, a short while after matins.46 However, in
the case of funerals, matins and lauds were always held consecutively, whether
the location was secular or monastic, thus the habit of chroniclers referring to
them as one service, Dirige. The Liber Regie Capelle describes matins in some
detail. Matins for a king or royal person required nine lessons or readings, tak-
en from the book of Job. Normally, a cycle of matins is performed with three
lessons per day over the course of three days, with a day’s break before starting
the next cycle. For someone of status, nine lessons were done in a day. For a
king, the bishops would read the first eight lessons, and the archbishop would
read the last lesson.47 An archbishop or someone of high station was required
by the Liber Regie Capelle to preside over the royal exequies.
The Liber Regie Capelle states that a king was to receive the Office of the
Dead and three votive masses (of the Blessed Virgin, of the Trinity, and Re-
quiem) at each location where he was taken in procession. This reflected the
king’s status and his capacity for conspicuous consumption; only a man of a
certain level of power and money could afford all of this. Not having at least
single mass of requiem for the deceased was offensive; all Christians needed
that, even a pauper. A king not having enough hours and masses was socially
disturbing, as the king’s status was perceived to be undermined.48

44 Issues of the Exchequer, 256.

45 Issues of the Exchequer, 265.
46 John Harper, The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from the Tenth to the Eighteenth
Century: A Historical Introduction and Guide for Students and Musicians (Oxford: 1991), 74.
47 Liber Regie Capelle, 113.
48 Disruptive royal funerals, such as those of Henry vi and Richard iii, are more exten-
sively discussed in Anna M. Duch, “ ‘King by Fact, Not By Law’: Legitimacy and Exequies
in Medieval England,” in Dynastic Change: Legitimacy and Gender in Medieval and Early

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“Do This In Remembrance of Me” 143

After the Office of the Dead and before the three votive masses, it is suggest-
ed by Liber Regie Capelle that there was a communion service, as the archbish-
op administered the eucharist and wine to those present of a certain station.49
This is a notable deviation from common custom at the time, as communion
of both kinds was not available to the laity. At the Fourth Lateran Council in
1215, a lay person was to receive communion at least once a year at Easter. This
may have been laid down to avoid any risk of sacrilege, whether by taking the
host from the church with bad intent or even simply spilling the wine, the
blood of Christ.50 At the Council of Lambeth in 1281, it was deemed that only
priests should take both kinds of communion, while the laity would only have
the host.51 Exceptions seem to have been made for anointed monarchs, partic-
ularly at their coronation, and by papal bull.52 A possible explanation for the
communion service at the English royal funeral may be found in their marital
connections to the French royal house.
During the 14th century, the French monarchy actively sought to attain large
numbers of papal bulls and indults to extend royal privileges and, arguably,
to further establish the sacerdotal character of a familial line that had pro-
duced Louis ix.53 This included, but was not limited to, choosing their own
confessors, being able to divide their body parts into multiple burial sites to
solicit prayers, and being able to receive communion in both kinds. In a series
of indults issued on 20 April 1351, Pope Clement vi extended these privileg-
es to Jean ii, his family, and all relatives perpetually and without limit.54 This
would potentially include Jean ii’s distant cousin, Edward iii, but it more likely

Modern Europe, eds Ana Maria Rodrigues, Manuela Santos Silva, and Jonathan Spangler
(New York: 2019), 170–​86.
49 Liber Regie Capelle, 113, states “Post exequias autem uinum et species ministrantur archi-
episcopo et ceteris iuxta status suos.”
50 Lee Palmer Wandel, Eucharist in the Reformation (Cambridge: 2006), 32–​3. See also Ian
A. McFarland, The Cambridge Dictionary of Christian Theology (Cambridge: 2011), 170–​2
for a general overview of the history of eucharistic practice.
51 J.D. Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova Amplissima Collectio, vol. 24 (Venice: 1780), 405.
52 Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in France and England, trans. J.E.
Anderson (New York: 1989 [1961]), 119–​20; n. 42 on 340–​1 extensively documents the dis-
pensations for the French monarchy.
53 The concept of beata stirps and its political uses is discussed in Anna M. Duch, “Chasing
St. Louis: The English Monarchy’s Pursuit of Sainthood,” in The Routledge History of
Monarchy, eds Elena Woodacre, Lucinda H. S. Dean, Chris Jones, Russell E. Martin, and
Zita Eva Rohr (New York: 2019), 330–​51.
54 Adolphe Tardif (ed.), Privilèges Accordés à la Couronne de France par le Saint-​Siège
(Paris: 1855), 223–​61. Marc Bloch indicates the privilege stems from indults issued in 1344
to Philippe vi, but the 1351 indults extend the privilege to all relatives perpetually and
without limit.

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included his first cousin, Philippa of Hainault, Edward’s wife. Edward iii and
Philippa were the great-​grandparents of Henry v, who had married Katherine
of Valois, Jean ii’s great-​granddaughter. Ultimately, at the time of the Liber Re-
gie Capelle’s composition in the late 1440s, there was no theological obstacle
to the English royal family receiving communion in both kinds alongside the
priests, bishops, and archbishops.
Thereafter, vigil was kept in the church throughout the night, which likely
involved the guarding of the body as well as prayer. On the morrow, the three
masses were celebrated for the soul of the deceased: the mass of the Blessed
Virgin Mary, the mass of the Trinity, and the mass of requiem. The first two
masses were always votive masses, meaning that they were offered as a gift
or token to the Blessed Virgin and the Trinity. Typically, a reciprocal gift from
these entities was expected; in the context of a recent death, the gift may be in-
tercession or aid in expediting the soul’s stay in purgatory. The requiem mass,
in the case of the procession or on anniversaries, was votive in nature as well,
but at the funeral, it was the final mass that preceded burial and had accompa-
nying special prayers at the end.

3 Paying the Bills

Votive masses were not essential to the actual rite of burial. Regardless of sta-
tion, all Christians needed a requiem mass, and this did not require a payment
to a priest. However, there was a certain social expectation that to receive, one
should give. The mortuary fee was “technically not a fee at all but a voluntary
gift of the testator for forgotten tithes.”55 This was essentially a catch-​all mea-
sure to ensure the person was in good standing with their burial church at
death. The mortuary fee could have been met with the deceased’s best posses-
sion, if that had not been already been sold to pay off debt, as was commonly
requested in wills. Miles Metcalf of York willed his best gown to the parson of
his parish church “in the name of my mortuary.” He requested also that a priest
sing for his soul for two years in exchange for 14 marks in his parish church.56
At each mass during the royal funeral, an offering of gold cloth was to be
made: 16 for the first mass (the Blessed Virgin Mary), 24 for the second mass
(Trinity), and 30 for the final mass (Requiem).57 This offering occurred along
the procession route as well, but the most cloth was to be given at the final

55 Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England, 54.

56 Testamenta Eboracensia, iv, 9.
57 Liber Regie Capelle, 113.

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“Do This In Remembrance of Me” 145

three masses at the burial site. Lords of the blood were expected to make of-
ferings of gold cloth as befitting their station, and they did so at Henry v’s fu-
neral.58 The cloths of gold were a reflection of the status of the king and those
offering them up, not to mention they were highly portable. On the back of
the sacrist’s roll at Westminster Abbey, Roger Cretton recorded the income
received from Henry v’s funeral in 1422.59 This was not just money, but the
objects the Abbey received as part of the funeral including the cloths of gold
and the other gifts made. Although Edward iii and Henry vii also had funerals
at Westminster Abbey, similar information has not been found. However, this
information survives for Katherine of Valois’s funeral in 1437, similarly on the
back of the sacrist’s roll.60
In total, Westminster Abbey received 222 cloths of gold from mourners
during the exequies of Henry v in November 1422.61 The two largest offerings
came from the absent eleven-​month old Henry vi: 13 cloths of gold at Dirige
and 24 cloths at the requiem mass. Queen Katherine, widow of Henry v, of-
fered nine cloths of gold at the Dirige and 16 cloths at requiem. Next came the
dowager Queen Joan of Navarre, the widow of Henry iv, who offered 11 cloths
at Dirige and 13 at the requiem but then purchased back her entire offering
for £33 6s 8d to the abbey. Lord Bourchier purchased back his three cloths of
gold as well (one from Dirige, two from requiem), while the Count of March
bartered his offered 13 cloths of gold for a single gown of “cloth of gold of
Damascus.”62 The money went into Westminster Abbey’s coffers, while the
unredeemed clothes of gold remained useful for liturgical purposes or for
re-​sale.
In comparison, Westminster Abbey received 91 cloths of gold for dowager
Queen Katherine when she died in 1437. The two largest offerings came from
the King, Henry vi, with five for Dirige and seven for the requiem, and from
dowager Queen Joan, four for Dirige and six for requiem.63 Despite the fact that
it appears Henry vi celebrated the anniversary of his maternal grandmother,
Isabeau of Bavaria, dowager queen of France, at the same time, Cretton is very
clear about what was offered for whom. Henry vi was the only one to offer

58 Thomas Walsingham, The St. Albans Chronicle: The Chronica majora of Thomas
Walsingham, vol. 2, eds and trans. John Taylor, Wendy R. Childs, and Leslie Watkiss
(Oxford: 2011), 779.
59 Westminster Abbey Muniments, London (wam) 19664v.
60 wam 19678v.
61 wam 19664v.
62 wam 19664v. The roll is transcribed in part in Hope, “The Funeral, Monument and
Chantry Chapel,” 139–​44 and 186.
63 wam 19678v.

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cloths of gold for Isabeau, and just two at that. Twenty-​six banners were of-
fered for Katherine, and four for Isabeau.64
The verse of Cretton’s sacrist’s roll also reveals goods that the Abbey had
kept from the effigies of Henry v and Katherine of Valois. An effigy was typ-
ically a mannequin that represented the recently deceased monarch or con-
sort, and it lay atop the coffin for all to see. Most English effigies were made of
wood, but Henry v’s effigy had been made of boiled leather in France.65 The
dead monarch was typically shown to the peers of the realm in private, but he
was not shown to the public along the route of transport from the site of death
to the site of burial. An exception to this was the brief transit of Henry iii’s
body from Westminster Palace to Westminster Abbey in 1272, where he was
displayed openly to the public. Most of his successors and their consorts were
either simply coffined or they had effigies on top of their coffins. The effigy was
dressed in the finery that the person would have worn in life to convey high
status.
What happened to the clothes, jewels, and crowns on the effigies varied. In
the case of Edward ii, the first monarch with a documented effigy in England,
the Great Wardrobe issued two sets of clothing for Edward ii’s funeral in De-
cember 1327. One set of Edward ii’s clothes (mantle, tunic, dalmatic, belt hose,
shoes, cap, and spurs) was returned to the Great Wardrobe, likely after having
been placed on the effigy. The other set (tunic, shirt, cap, gloves, and corona-
tion coif) did not, and this set likely went to the grave with Edward ii.66
In other cases, the items did not return to the Great Wardrobe. These items
may have ended up at the burial church in part payment for the exequies. This
is suggested by the sacrist’s rolls from the funerals of Henry v and Katherine of
Valois. From the effigy of Henry v, Westminster Abbey received a large mantle
of purple velvet and a gown of the same fabric, ermine fur from another man-
tel, two minivers, a crown of silver and gilt with stones and pearls, a long silver

64 Amusingly, because of the Hundred Years’ War and Henry’s own status as disputed King
of England and France, Isabeau could not be referred to as the Queen of France. She was
instead referred to as the Duchess of Bavaria. That title was not her own, but the English
royal house had to hedge between the king’s claim on the crown of France and the need
for the king’s grandmother to be of adequate station; author’s conversation with W.M.
Ormrod.
65 Enguerrand de Monstrelet, The Chronicles of Enguerrand de Monstrelet, vol. 1, ed. Thomas
Johnes (London: 1840), 484–​5. See also Anthony Harvey and Richard Mortimer (eds), The
Funerary Effigies of Westminster Abbey (Woodbridge: 2003) for the broader tradition of
effigies for members of the royal family and high-​ranking nobility.
66 David Carpenter, The Reign of Henry III (London: 1996), 429–​32. See also Seymour Phillips,
Edward II (London: 2010), 553–​4.

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“Do This In Remembrance of Me” 147

and gilt sceptre, a smaller silver and gilt sceptre with ball and cross, a ring with
a precious stone, and two armbands of silver and gilt with pearls and stones.67
In 1437, the abbey retained items from Katherine’s effigy after her funeral, in-
cluding a gilt crown, a gilt sceptre, two rings, and what may be two armbands,
all silver.68 Given that kings and queens were to be dressed in clothing befit-
ting their station within their coffins, their effigies were dressed similarly to be
viewed by the populace. This was another assertion of wealth and status, but
permitting the burial church to retain these luxury items reflected the reality
that somehow, all of this pomp had to be paid for and the royal house was not
necessarily able to pay in currency.

4 The Slight of Hand: The Presentation of Achievements

It is at this point that we must rejoin the prescriptive text of the Liber Regie
Capelle and its indirect description of how the royal funeral was paid for. Three
different transactions occurred during the offering of arms, in a short period
of time. The first was the payment to the church. The second was the presenta-
tion of banners, arms, and hatchments –​the achievements that would be part
of the king’s permanent memorial in the church, used to decorate his tomb.
The third was the bringing of the shield with which to perform a raising cere-
mony. The exact inclusion and order of these three events changed over time.
The payment to the funerary church was an on-​going process throughout the
other two transactions; as the symbolic presentations were made, more mate-
rial was funnelled into the vestry, stables, and coffers of Westminster Abbey.
According to the Liber Regie Capelle, a mounted horseman rode into each
church at the end of its requiem mass. The horse was to have belonged to the
deceased, and both the animal and the man were clothed in the arms and ar-
mour of the dead king.69 At the steps of the high altar, the pair offered the
banners most often used by the king –​his personal arms, the banners of his
personal saints, and his insignias de guerre. The rider and the horse would be
stripped of their armour and trappings and depart the main church. The exe-
quies would continue, but the activity at that particular church had just been
paid for, although it was hidden among the ceremonies of the day.
The horse and its trappings and the rider’s armour were worth money and
were items that the church could resell. A documented example of this system

67 wam 19664v.
68 wam 19678v.
69 Liber Regie Capelle, 114.

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comes from the reign of Edward iii. In a letter close dated 14 February 1353,
Edward iii ordered an investigation to determine the exact disposition of the
fine that was supposed to have been paid for the funeral of John of Eltham, his
brother, who had died in 1336 on campaign in Scotland.70 The fine was valued
at £50 in lieu of the horse and armour offered on the day of John’s funeral at
Westminster Abbey, in part payment of £100 owed. The armour worn by the
rider and the horse was part payment for the exequies.71 These items could
have been kept by Westminster Abbey but instead were redeemed for money,
just like the cloths of gold could be. The physical items were given as surety
against the debt owed, and, in 1353, Edward iii was attempting to determine
whether that debt had been paid.
The easiest way to transport battle-​ready plate and mail armour –​which
usually weighed about 50 pounds –​was to have someone wear it. The easiest
way to transport the wearer and a horse was for the said gentleman to ride
the mount, possibly right into the church. For a king or someone of great sta-
tus, this would be repeated multiple times. Great men of the realm often had
multiple sets of armour and horses to offer. Between 1372 and 1374, the royal
house purchased several sets of fine quality armours. One seems to have gone
to Thomas of Woodstock, as he is affiliated with the following: a pair of plates
with the arms of the Edward iii and Thomas of Woodstock which cost £4 13s
8d, a pair of leg harnesses £10 5s, arm defences 40s with a pair of gauntlets to
match at 26s 8d, and a bascinet 40s. This is a total of £20 5s 4d, and this does not
include any mail that would have been worn under the plate.72 The inventory
of Thomas’s goods seized in 1397 shows that he owned a respectable amount
of armour, totalling over £100 at a single residence.73 If Thomas of Woodstock
had had a normative funeral and burial, one or more sets of his armour would
have been offered at his funeral to offset the cost of it.74

70 Calendar of Close Rolls, 1349–​1354 (London: 1906), 527–​8.

71 Christopher Daniell offers an excellent explanation and breakdown of the church’s mor-
tuary fees, which covered not only the liturgies, but the labours of the bell-​ringers and
gravediggers; Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England, 52–​4.
72 Thom Richardson, “Armour in England 1325–​99,” Journal of Medieval History 37/​3 (2011),
304–​320, on 317. These figures are taken from tna e 101/​395/​1 and tna e 101/​397/​10.
73 Viscount Dillon and W.H. St. John Hope, “Inventory of the Goods and Chattels Belonging
to Thomas, Duke of Gloucester and Seized in His Castle at Pleshy, Co. Essex, 21 Richard
ii (1397): With their values, as shown in the Escheator’s Accounts,” The Archaeological
Journal 54 (1897), 275–​308, on 307.
74 Thomas of Woodstock duke of Gloucester died under suspicious circumstances in 1397,
accused of treason. He did not receive a funeral or burial typical of the station of duke or
as son of a monarch.

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“Do This In Remembrance of Me” 149

Andrew Ayton notes that while the values of most horses fluctuated, the
horses mentioned at Henry v’s funeral, destriers, remained particularly expen-
sive and desirable for men of status.75 Most relevant to this argument, Richard
ii rode upon a destrier worth £200 at his coronation on 16 July 1377.76 It would
be reasonable to consider that, at Edward iii’s funeral on 5 July 1377, a horse
of similar value was offered to offset the costs of his funeral and remind those
present that he had been the king.
In his article on Edward iii’s exequies, Chris Given-​Wilson compares the
offering of arms at the funerals of Edward iii in 1377 and Henry v in 1422, us-
ing Thomas Walsingham’s description of Henry v’s exequies in the Historia
Anglicana:

[…] three destriers with their riders were led up to the high altar of West-
minster as is customary (ut moris est), splendidly armed with the royal
arms of England and France, and there the riders were stripped [of their
arms]; and, once the arms had been completely removed, they were
carried, together with banners of the arms of St. George, England, and
France, and images of the Holy Trinity and St. Mary, in an unbroken line
around the corpse.77

Using this quotation, Given-​Wilson questions what exactly Walsingham was

trying to convey here: were presentations of arms at royal funerals customary
(ut moris est) in 1422, despite the fact Edward iii in 1377 was the only other king
known to have had such a rite performed?78 Given-​Wilson also speculates as to
whether there was just one ceremony or potentially two, due to a differences
in an account from the London Brewers’ Company:

At the requiem mass, there were offered up at the high altar of Westmin-
ster church four steeds, royally caparisoned, with a knight wholly and

75 Andrew Ayton, Knights and Warhorses: Military Service and the English Aristocracy Under
Edward III (Woodbridge: 1994), 194–​7.
76 Ayton, Knights and Warhorses, 37.
77 Given-​Wilson, “The Exequies of Edward III,” 272, translating Thomas Walsingham,
“Historia Anglicana, pt. 2,” Chronica Monasterii Sancti Albani, vol. 1, ed. H.T. Riley, RS 28
(London: 1864), 346: “Adducti etiam fuerant ad majus altare Westmonasterii tres dextrarii
cum eorum sessoribus ut moris est, armis Regis Anglaie et Franciae optime armatis et
sessors inibi inde expoliati. Arma vero integer ablata cexilla insuper circa corpus defuncti
ferebantur, arma Sancti Georgii, Angliae, et Franciae, ac imaginum Sanctae Trinitatis,
Sanctae Mariae, continenter.” See also Walsingham, The St. Albans Chronicle, ii, 778–​9.
78 Given-​Wilson, “The Exequies of Edward III,” 274.

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completely armed with the king’s coat armour and a crown upon his
head sitting royally upon one of the said steeds.79

Ultimately, Walsingham’s ut moris est can be interpreted differently. It may not

necessarily be the ritual offering of arms or horses as a royal person or as a no-
ble person that was the tradition, but rather, Walsingham recognized all of this
stagecraft for what it actually was: giving the church its fee and making votive
offerings for the sake of the soul of the deceased. In isolation, Walsingham’s
sentence states that at Henry v’s funeral, the riders and horses were led to the
high altar of Westminster Abbey, as was customary (ut moris est), wearing the
arms of England and France, and they were stripped of those goods.80 Now it
was up to the royal house to redeem those items for money, if desired. The per-
formance created a funeral appropriate to the station of the king, even though
the true function of these ceremonies remained the same as would be found
in the funeral of a commoner.
The second transaction was the presentation of the achievements, or the
decorations intended for the king’s tomb at the burial church. According to the
Liber Regie Capelle, at the final requiem at the site of burial, the rider and the
horse with the banners of the king arrived at the altar. He was then followed in
by another soldier on horseback who arrived to offer the king’s shield.81 Only
the burial churches kept and displayed the achievements of the deceased king,
so the rider with the shield only appeared at the final requiem.82 This also
meant that the burial church received the most sets of armour and horses, as
the Liber Regie Capelle mentions at least three riders to bear the banners, the
shield, and other achievements, such as a sword or helm. The riders would
then leave the intended achievements at the high altar, give up their armour,
trappings, and horses, then exit. The presentations of arms and hatchments
were a slight of hand; the actual offering to the church and payment for the
funeral –​the battle armour and horses –​disappeared into the vestry or into the
stable while attention remained on the “offered” decorated items surrounding
the dead king.

79 Given-​Wilson, “The Exequies of Edward III,” 272; quotation from A Book of London English
1384–​1425, eds R.W. Chambers and M. Daunt (Oxford: 1931), 146.
80 Walsingham, “Historia Anglicana, pt. 2,” 346; Walsingham, The St. Albans Chronicle,
ii, 778–​9.
81 Liber Regie Capelle, 115.
82 For the investigation of the achievements of Edward iii at Westminster Abbey, see wam
62481–​62485; the sword and replica shield remain on display.

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“Do This In Remembrance of Me” 151

There was considerable disparity between the worth of the decorative

achievements that remained visible and the actual battle-​ready arms, armour,
and horses that disappeared. The decorated equipment offered at the funerals
Edward iii, Henry v, and others who had similar rituals, such as Edward of
Woodstock (the Black Prince), was not likely used by the original owner in the
field of battle or at the tournament. In many cases, it was crafted specifically
for the funeral.83 It may have been deliberately created larger for display pur-
poses, such as Edward iii’s seven-​foot, eighteen-​pound sword.84 Since it did
not need to face true battle, it could be made with lesser quality materials for
a low price.85 Henry v’s funeral achievement helm is a great helm, a style that
was used in battle prior to 1400; it was out of practical use by the time he start-
ed his military career.86 Admittedly, the helm style was still popular for use at
the tournament, but Henry v did not joust. In addition, the helm was not spe-
cially crafted for the funeral; the accounts for Henry’s funeral only pay 33s 4d
for the painting of the helm and crest, not for the actual crafting of it.87 Henry’s
achievement helm was an old-​fashioned helm with new, detailed coat of paint.
Likewise, because of the rise of plate armour in England during the 14th cen-
tury, by 1353, there was little use for a heater shield in the field; this is the style
of shield, a scuta, used in the surviving achievements of the Black Prince and
Henry v.88 The preferred functional shield styles by the third-​quarter of the
14th century were the target (a small, hand-​held round shield) and the pavise
(a door-​like shield that could be propped up on a battlefield).89 The shield used
in the funeral of Henry v likely had belonged to the household of Henry iv,
as the arms of Navarre mark the interior. The style of both the helm and the
shield offered at Henry v’s funeral harkened back to earlier times of glory, such
the prime of the military careers of Edward iii and the Black Prince.90 The use

83 For the Black Prince, see James Mann, The Funeral Achievements of Edward the Black
Prince (London: 1951), 4.
84 Given-​Wilson, “The Exequies of Edward III,” 275.
85 Mann expresses some of these ideas when examining the achievements of the Black
Prince, The Funeral Achievements, 3–​4, but these are more thoroughly discussed in Beard’s
analysis of Henry vi’s helm; C.R. Beard, “The Tomb and Achievements of King Henry VI
at Windsor,” in Fragmenta Armamentaria, vol.2, pt. 1, ed. F.H.C. Day (Frome: 1936), 2–​4.
These were not battle-​ready pieces of armour or weaponry; they would have shattered if
actually struck. W.M. Ormrod calls the quality of Edward III’s sword “surprisingly crude,”
in Edward III (New Haven: 2011), 580.
86 Claude Blair, European Armour, circa 1066 to circa 1700 (London: 1978), 73.
87 Hope, “The Funeral, Monument, and Chantry Chapel of King Henry the Fifth,” 136.
88 Richardson, “Armour in England,” 319.
89 Richardson, “Armour in England,” 320.
90 Blair, European Armour, 197.

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of an older style helm and shield connected Henry v’s accomplishments in

France visually with the shield of his great-​grandfather in Westminster and the
achievements of his great-​uncle in Canterbury.91
It is apparent that the painted achievements were not worth as much as
the armour worn by the riders. The riders wore armour that could be worn in
battle; it was serviceable and worthwhile for the family to redeem for usage
again, or the church could find someone to sell it to. In contrast, the achieve-
ments were never expected to be used again. They were to be on display. Anne
Sutton and Livia Visser-​Fuchs state that the offering of achievements was still a
method of payment during this period.92 However, this misses a key point: the
achievements were inalienable, as they were intended to be part of the per-
manent monument. The family was not going to buy them back, nor could
the church resell them during the lifetime of the deceased’s family. This was a
mark of status, not charity or monetary riches.
The third transaction was the presentation of the shield to do the raising
ceremony, which marked the ritual end of the king’s reign. In a highly symbolic
gesture, the shield and the arms of the second soldier were crossed, as if to say,
Consummatum est.93 In turn, then, a lord received that shield and inverted it
as if to say Vivit (sic) rex, the king lives. This referred to not only the continued
survival of the body politic or the office of the king, but also the transfer of the
kingship to the new mortal body. The order of service in Liber Regie Capelle
ends abruptly, stating that afterwards a solemn dinner was held for the guests.
The actual burial service and prayers took place after the offering of the shield,
though this is not explicitly stated by the text.
A royal funeral with all the elaborate ceremonies and offerings of arms and
cloths of gold was an expensive venture, but that was, in part, the point; only
someone of a certain status and wealth could pay for all of this. The use of
armour and horses as payment at a funeral has a longer history than the ritu-
alized display with which it is now affiliated. The activity progressed from the
functional, necessary form of payment made in the 14th century to the splen-
did, formalized presentation of achievements found in the Liber Regie Capelle.
On the back of the sacrist’s roll for Henry v’s funeral in 1422, the following was
given to Westminster Abbey and meant for sale or redemption: four horses
with their bridles, four saddles, one sword with all the affiliated armour for

91 The conference Beyond Agincourt: The Funeral Achievements of Henry V, held at

Westminster Abbey on 28 October 2015, discussed this and other matters. It was indicated
that the conference proceedings would be published at a future date.
92 Anne Sutton and Livia Visser-​Fuchs, Royal Funerals of the House of York (London: 2005), 27.
93 Liber Regie Capelle, 115.

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“Do This In Remembrance of Me” 153

one man, five luxuriously decorated trappers (two of which the executors of
the king purchased back), four great banners, 15 smaller banners, 39 pensyles
(pennants?), a cloth of the Trinity, and 120 yards of fabric. Let us not forget also
the effigy itself and the clothes it was dressed in for the procession, mentioned
previously. Wood from the barriers that had been erected around the herse and
eighty-​three yards of black cloth from the herse were also given to the Abbey
and apparently divided up among those who lived and worked there, with the
remainder going to the poor.94 All of this was potentially useful, wearable, and
redeemable, if so desired by the royal house, or sellable for the Abbey. This was
how a royal funeral was paid for.
Any excess could have gone toward the 20,000 or more masses mentioned
in the wills of Henry v, the votive activity that would care for his soul. In the
last will of Henry v, he requested three masses a day every day (and named
which specific ones he wanted in the Use of Sarum, rather than the Use of
Westminster), as well as yearly requiem masses. Henry v also requested
upwards of 20,000 masses for his specific devotions and for the sake of his
soul.95 Within his will, Henry v declared that this would be paid for by the
assignment of rents of at least £100 to Westminster Abbey. However, that was
not the only way he attempted to provide for his soul. During his lifetime,
Henry v elected to bind parties legally in organising anniversaries and chant-
ries for his soul. Indentures for physical items, such as tombs, had been in use
for centuries, but to create indentures for intangible items, such as prayers,
was novel in the early 15th century. An example of such an agreement can
be found between the king and the dean and chapter at Chichester, dated 12
August 1414.96 This indenture included the grant of rents, fees, and services of
Wilmington Priory; the fees to be paid to the chaplain; what moneys Henry
would send for the upkeep of the building and others resident at the church
in which the chantry was; which masses were to be said, as well as what days
of the week these masses were to be said; if there was to be anyone else to be
prayed for; and if the chaplain died, what qualifications Henry and his coun-
cil would look for in a new candidate. This became common practice for his
reign, and Henry vii later used this model extensively in the establishment of

94 wam 19664v. This is also transcribed in Hope, “The Funeral, Monumental and Chantry
Chapel,”140–​2.
95 Strong and Strong, “The Last Will and Codicils of Henry V,” 90–​1. This will superseded
another from 1415, in which he also asked for at least 20,000 masses; Thomas Rymer (ed.),
Foedera (The Hague: 1745), iv, pt. 2, 138–​9. In a second will, he dealt predominantly with
matters of land; A Collection of Wills, 236–​42.
96 The Calendar of Close Rolls, 1413–​1419 (London: 1913), 89–​90.

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154 Duch

elaborate anniversaries for himself, his wife Elizabeth of York, and his mother
Margaret Beaufort.97
Very few people below the rank of knight request any sort of marker for
their grave, let alone a tomb with achievements or indentures with Westmin-
ster Abbey for perpetual anniversaries. The poor who benefited from distribut-
ed clothes and food would have the king’s name in their mouths, and he would
not be forgotten. However, even those of comparatively limited means wanted
to their memory to linger. In his will of 1493, John Lepton requested that his bay
horse be given as his mortuary fee and that he be buried in the new aisle near
the altar of Saint Anne. The window closest to the altar was to be glazed with
white glass by Lepton’s executors; when the priests did their daily duties, they
would recall Lepton.98

5 Conclusions

In this chapter, the elaborate nature of the royal funeral in medieval England
has been contrasted with the less opulent arrangements made by the people
of York; they were knights, merchants, and other people of some means who
made wills to address their concerns for this life and the next. Little Mald John-
son received John Beseby’s best spoons, just as Katherine of Valois received
some of Henry v’s best silver. There still remains a large section of the popu-
lation outside the reach of most historical research, the nameless members of
the crowd who watched the king’s herse, impossibly tall and burning bright in
procession. They also watched the priests bless graves, listened to De Profundis
without knowing what it meant, and obediently waited for their chance to say
prayers and psalms so that they could get a portion of bread or a cloak, if they
were lucky. These people performed spiritual labour and received compensa-
tion in life for it, as they not only aided in the spiritual journey of the king’s
soul, but also his reputation and the maintenance of his status as king of En-
gland. Only a king could muster hundreds, thousands of people to sing for his
soul, an intersection of financial and spiritual economy.
However, even with all the ceremony and pomp, all of the prayers purchased,
and gifts given, anxiety over death and what happens thereafter is evident in
the wills of kings. Edward iii reflected on the nature of the transitory world
in his will, while his grandson Richard ii fretted over what might become of

97 For example, The Calendar of Close Rolls, 1500–​1509 (London: 1963), 138–​57, is a seven-​part
indenture between Henry vii, Westminster Abbey, and other persons.
98 Testamenta Eboracensia iv, 130.

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“Do This In Remembrance of Me” 155

his body and his burial in his own final testament.99 The elaborate indentures
and the various wills and codicils of Henry v may have been an expression of
his unsureness and worry. When the window-​dressing and conspicuous con-
sumption of the king’s station is stripped away, he becomes a man who asks
for prayers for his soul and those of his father and mother, asks his executors
to care for his wife and heirs, and attempts to rectify any debts or wrongdoing
in his life –​and remains worried as to whether this would all come to pass.
Despite all the spiritual comforts they could pay for, kings seemingly had no
better sense of assurance than those who could never afford such grand exe-
quies and commemoration. After all, once they were dead, they were no longer
kings that could muster, pay, and command the living.
99 For Edward iii, see A Collection of All the Wills, 59; for Richard ii, see A Collection of All the
Wills, 194.

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 ­c hapter 5

The Reformation of Burial in the Protestant

Churches

Gordon D. Raeburn

There was no single Reformation of death and burial. There was never sim-
ply a Protestant way of death. Different reformers had different beliefs on the
subject, and ultimately this led to a range of practice across the European con-
tinent. This occurred not only within the Protestant churches, but in some re-
gards the Catholic Church also reacted to the Reformation, and this too was
reflected in certain aspects surrounding death and burial. Of course, the act of
placing the corpse in the ground was not the only important aspect of a burial.
Throughout Europe following the Reformation the act of burial continued to
be viewed as a method by which the laity could be comforted, but also educat-
ed. As noted by Ruth Atherton, the attendance at a burial would often be much
larger than a regular church service, and for many ministers this opportunity
was one that should not be passed up.1 In this chapter, some of the varieties of
the Protestant way of death will be examined comparatively, but with particu-
lar reference to the Scottish Reformed tradition.
Many of the first Protestants had no true burial location, as these individ-
uals were executed for their outspoken beliefs, and were largely burned at
the stake, with their ashes dumped in the sea or other bodies of water, or
otherwise left to scatter where they fell. Of course, this did not prevent the
memorialisation of certain locations to serve as a focal point for the various
strands of Reformation, some of which survive to this day. Indeed, following
the martyrdom of Walter Myln in St Andrews, Scotland in 1558 John Knox
claimed that:

In testification that they would his death should abide in recent memory,
there was cast together a great heap of stones in the place where he was
burnt. The Bishop and Priests, thereat offended, caused once or twice to
remove the same, with denunciation of cursing, if any man should there

1 Ruth Atherton, “The Pursuit of Power: Death, Dying and the Quest for Social Control in the
Palatinate, 1547–​1610,” in Dying, Death, Burial and Commemoration in Reformation Europe,
eds Elizabeth C. Tingle and Jonathan Willis (London: 2016), 25–​48, on 41.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004443433_007

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The Reformation of Burial in Early Modern Europe 157

lay any stone. In vain was that wind blown; for still was the heap made,
till the Priests and Papists did steal away by night the stones to big (build)
their walls, and to other their private uses.2

These executions, however, would not continue to serve their intended pur-
pose, and throughout Europe Reformation sentiment solidified, aided by the
gruesome public executions of those early converts. Following the execution
of Patrick Hamilton in St Andrews in 1528 John Knox reported John Lindsay as
having stated:

My Lord, yf ye burne any mo, except ye follow my counsall, ye will utter-

lye destroy your selves. Yf ye will burne thame, lette thame be brunt in
how [low] sellarris; for the reik of Maister Patrik Hammyltoun hes infect-
ed as many as it blew upoun.3

This led ultimately to the development of several Protestant denominations,

necessitating a discussion of the subject of burial from these new Protestant
perspectives. The significance of the fate of the remains of the early Protestant
martyrs should not be ignored however, as it serves to highlight the impor-
tance of the disposal of a corpse for the community which identified with the
deceased. As will repeatedly be argued below, the disposal of the dead is an im-
portant way for the living members of the community to cement their identi-
ties.4 During times of uncertainty and social change, such as the Reformation,
these methods of disposal would become particularly significant, and as such
the burial of the dead would frequently be very difficult to reform. Communi-
ties across Europe were reluctant to let these practices go.
There has been somewhat of a resurgence in the study of early modern
death and burial in recent years, and with the advent of areas of study such
as the history of emotions, fresh light has been shed upon older interpreta-
tions. This, however, does not change a fact noted elsewhere in this volume;

2 John Knox, The History of the Reformation of Religion within the Realm of Scotland, ed. C.J.
Guthrie (London: 1899), 155–​156. Cf. J. Moffat Scott, The Martyrs of Angus and Mearns; Sketch-
es in the History of the Scottish Reformation (Paisley: 1885), 263. Unfortunately, neither Knox
nor Scott recall what happened to the ashes of Myln, merely that a cairn was built upon that
spot. As Guthrie notes, a granite obelisk, erected in 1842, now stands on the site of the “heap
of stones.” Cf. Knox, The History of the Reformation, 156, n. 1.
3 John Knox, The Works of John Knox, vol. 1, ed. David Laing (Edinburgh: 1864; repr. New York:
1966), 42.
4 Gordon D. Raeburn, “Death and Dying,” in The Routledge History of Emotions in Europe, 1100–​
1700, eds Andrew Lynch and Susan Broomhall (London and New York: 2019), 200–​215, on 211.

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158 Raeburn

that the majority of surviving material related to death and burial concerns
the upper echelons of society. It is far harder to find material dealing with the
actual practices of the common man and woman. We do, however, have a va-
riety of sources at our disposal. Through liturgies, ars moriendi, and a wealth
of printed sermons we can determine what the instructions were to the ide-
al forms of death and burial. Various sources, including mortality rolls, disci-
plinary records, and church session records can shed light upon the actualities
of death and burial, sometimes in contrast to the ideals. Letters and diaries can
offer glimpses at the emotions surrounding funerals and the loss of loved ones,
and wills can show us the desires of those about to die. Drawn together, these
various sources provide us with an image of the realities of death and burial in
early modern Europe, and the changes wrought by the Reformation. These are
the focus of this chapter.

1 Rewriting Burial in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

As with other notions of the reform of the Catholic Church, the practices and
rituals surrounding burial had been discussed and debated internally long be-
fore the early 1500s. The Catholic Church was not, after all, as monolithic as
may otherwise have been believed. Yet there were some universal practices
in relation to death, and it was these that provoked the reactions of the early
reformers, in varying ways.
Interestingly, not all of the early strands of reform believed that all of the
practices and rituals which surrounded death should be stripped away, and
in certain cases some aspects of death culture were left intact. Some, how-
ever, advocated for a cleaner break from the older practices. Craig Koslofsky
notes the horror felt by Lutherans upon the suggestion that their doctrines
had somehow led to funerals with no procession, song, or sermon. He notes
that from their very inception Lutheran congregations still held to the impor-
tance of honourable funeral rites.5 As such, while Luther dismissed the invoca-
tion of the fourteen Holy Helper saints as empty superstition, he continued to
recommend taking the eucharist at the point of death.6 Indeed, those around

5 Craig M. Koslofsky, The Reformation of the Dead. Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany,
1450–​1700 (London and New York: 2000), 92.
6 Susan C. Karant-​Nunn, The Personal Luther: Essays on the Reformer from a Cultural Historical
Perspective (Leiden: 2018), 175. The saints in question are Acacius, Barbara, Blaise, Christo-
pher, Cyriacus, Catherine of Alexandria, Denis, Erasmus of Formiae, Eustace, George, Giles,
Margaret of Antioch, Pantaleon, Vitus.

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The Reformation of Burial in Early Modern Europe 159

him in the weeks before his death stressed how Luther, through his actions
in those final weeks, experienced a Protestant form of penance.7 In Lutheran
early modern Germany, a death without repentance, absolution, or sacrament
would result in a burial without ceremony; no knell, procession, song, or clergy.
The only people present would be relatives, and even then, only if they wished
to appear. Additionally, in such cases the deceased frequently were buried in
unconsecrated ground.8 For certain reformers this would not be an inherent
issue, but for much of the laity burial in consecrated ground remained signif-
icant, and was deemed important for the soul of the deceased. In certain re-
spects, it could be suggested that the first attempts at burial reform, particular-
ly within the Lutheran areas of Germany, were gentle enough so as to hold on
to certain aspects of funerary tradition, as without them it could appear that
all that was Christian had been stripped from the practices.
In the majority of those areas of Europe influenced by the works of John
Calvin, burial practices would ultimately become far sparser affairs, con-
taining little ceremony, and actively avoiding anything that may have been
deemed superstitious or intercessory. Examples of burials such as these can
be seen from across early modern Europe. Walloon synods instituted very sim-
ple burials, and Strasbourg, in the Rhineland, briefly embraced what would
ultimately become the norm in the Reformed areas of the continent.9 Until
approximately 1533 Strasbourg practised funerals along very simple lines, with
no graveside prayers or sermons. However, the first Strasbourg Synod pro-
tested against what they saw as extreme practices, citing the burials of the
Old Testament Patriarchs and the first Christians as examples of the validity
of prayers and sermons at burials, noting that in performing them the dead
were honoured.10 In Geneva in the 1541 Draft Ecclesiastical Ordinances it was
determined that:

It will be good that the carriers be warned by us to discourage all super-

stitions contrary to the Word of God, not to do duty at too late an hour,

7 Karant-​Nunn, The Personal Luther, 185–​6.

8 Susan C. Karant-​Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Ger-
many (London and New York: 1997), 168–​9.
9 Andrew Spicer, “ ‘Rest of their bones’: Fear of Death and Reformed Burial Practices,” in
Fear in Early Modern Society, eds William Naphy and Penny Roberts (Manchester: 1997),
167–​183, on 168.
10 William D. Maxwell, John Knox’s Genevan Service Book, 1556: The Liturgical Portions of the
Genevan Service Book used by John Knox while a Minister of the English Congregation of
Marian Exiles at Geneva, 1556–​1559 (Edinburgh and London: 1931), 56.

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160 Raeburn

and to make a report in the case of sudden death, in order to obviate all
inconvenience that might thereby arise.11

In a similar vein to Calvin’s instructions for Geneva, John Knox determined

that in Scotland following 1560 it was simply to be the case that:

The corps is reuerently brought to the graue, accompagnied with the

congregatio[n]‌, with owte any further ceremonies, which beyng burie-
de, the minister goeth to the churche, if it be not farre of, and maketh
some comfortable exhortacion to the people, towchyng deathe, and
resurrection.12

This is, surprisingly, even vaguer than the Draft Ecclesiastical Ordinances of Ge-
neva. It is unclear if the minister should be present at the burial, nor is it made
clear what constitutes a too distant church. This text was perhaps too vague,
as it was ultimately followed by a lengthier set of instructions, in which it was
determined that there should be no superstition or sermon, and no prayers for
the dead. If a minister was present, he was there only in a personal capacity,
and he was not to perform any ceremony whatsoever.13
In many ways this early Calvinist approach would become the model for
other Reformed regions of Europe. Superstition and intercession on behalf
of the dead were avoided, and attendance was not compulsory. Indeed, the
presence of a minister was not even mandated. Other areas of Europe, how-
ever, were not quite so stark in their approaches. In Frankfurt in 1554 Pollanus
(Valérand Poullain), published a liturgy that was essentially a translation of
Calvin’s Strasbourg liturgy. Importantly however, when addressing burial Pol-
lanus added the instruction that “at funerals the pastor is to go before, and
give an exhortation and prayer at the grave.”14 The mandated presence of a
minister at the funeral stressed the importance of burial for good Christians,

11 John Calvin, Theological Treatises, trans. and ed. J.K.S. Reid (London: 1954), 68; Gordon
D. Raeburn, “Rewriting Death and Burial in Early Modern Scotland,” Reformation and
Renaissance Review 18/​3 (2016), 254–​272, on 257.
12 The forme of prayers and ministration of the Sacraments, and used in the Englishe
Congregation at Geneua: and approued, by the famous and godly learned man, Iohn Caluyn
(Geneva: 1556, stc-​16561), 88.
13 James K. Cameron, ed., The First Book of Discipline (Edinburgh: 1972), 45–​46, 199–​201;
Raeburn, “Rewriting Death,” 259–​260.
14 George W. Sprott, The Book of Common Order of the Church of Scotland, commonly known
as John Knox’s Liturgy, with Historical Introduction and Illustrative Notes (Edinburgh and
London: 1901), 198.

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The Reformation of Burial in Early Modern Europe 161

and perhaps reinforced in the minds of the laity the importance of at least
some ceremony, which could not have been a surprise to Pollanus or other ear-
ly reformers. In England the Book of Common Prayer showed a development of
thought on the subject of death and burial. It had initially been printed in 1549,
and revised in 1552 and 1559, and its section addressing the form of burial to be
employed by Protestants was one aspect that was occasionally revised.15 In all
versions it was specified that a priest must meet the corpse at the church style,
and was to say or sing a set order of words from scripture affirming the bodily
resurrection.16 Upon arrival at the grave the priest would then say or sing fur-
ther scriptural verses while the body was prepared for burial, while the body
was being buried, and once the burial was complete. Subsequently a lesson
was to be given upon 1 Corinthians.17 Removed in the 1552 and 1559 versions,
however, was the entreaty that God

graunt vnto this thy seruaunt that the synnes whiche be committed in
this worlde be not imputed vnto him, but that he escapying the gates of
hel and paynes of eternal darkenes: may euer dwell in the region of light,
with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, in the place where there is no wepying,
sorowe, nor heauines:18

It could be suggested that this was a form of intercessory prayer, and as such
would not have sat comfortably with other Reformed denominations, leading,
perhaps, to its subsequent removal. It should perhaps be unsurprising that,
with such a variety of instruction as to the matter of death and burial, the actu-
al practices themselves would vary across Europe, as will now be investigated.

2 Location

As discussed elsewhere in this volume, late medieval burial locations were

dependent on a great many factors, including the nature of the death, the

15 For more on the history of The Book of Common Prayer more generally, see John E. Booty
(ed.), The Book of Common Prayer 1559, the Elizabethan Prayer Book (Charlottesville and
London: 1976), 327–​384.
16 The Boke of common praier, and administracion of the Sacraments, and other Rites and
Ceremonies in the Churche of Englande (London: 1552, stc-​162862), fol. 121r. Cf. Booty (ed.),
The Book of Common Prayer, 309–​13.
17 The Boke of common praier, fol. 121r-​122v.
18 The booke of the common praier and administracion of the Sacramentes (London: 1549,
stc-​16269), fol. Clxiir.

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162 Raeburn

geographical location of the death, and the social status of the deceased,
among others. Prior to the Reformation intra-​mural burial was seen through-
out the Catholic world as beneficial to the deceased, as it would decrease the
time to be spent in purgatory. As early as 1525 Luther began to advocate extra-​
mural burial. For Luther this did not just constitute burial outside of the fabric
of the churches, but rather burials were ideally to take place outside of the city
walls.19
One of the central tenets of the Reformation was the rejection of the doc-
trine of purgatory, and therefore of the efficacy of intercessory acts.20 As such
there was no longer any spiritual justification in Protestant areas of Europe
for intra-​mural burial. Protestants did not subscribe to the belief in purgato-
ry, and the burial of the deceased within the fabric of the church could not,
therefore, lessen the time spent there by the soul of the departed. Koslofsky
has noted, however, that Luther’s primary justification for extra-​mural buri-
al was medical. Luther argued that the risk of infection from overcrowded
graveyards, as well as too shallow burials within the churches, should be justi-
fication enough for the removal of burials from within the bounds of cities.21
There are suggestions from across Europe that these were valid concerns. At
Boleskine, on the south bank of Loch Ness in Scotland, in 1684 the minister
noted in a letter that “severall coffines were hardly under ground, which was
like to be very dangerous and noisome to the hearers of the word within the
s[aid] church.”22 The later editor of those records commented on the situa-
tion, claiming that

[the] dogs that followed the people to church fought over the human
bones that protruded through the earthen floor; and for the malignant
fevers that so often ravaged the country, the foul air which the worship-
pers breathed while they worshipped was not less responsible than the
insanitary condition of their dwelling-​houses.23

19 Koslofsky, The Reformation of the Dead, 47.

20 As a brief aside, as a reaction to the Reformation, during its sessions regarding death,
the Council of Trent strongly reinforced the Catholic belief in purgatory and the efficacy
of intercessory acts. Cf. Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, trans. H.J. Schroeder
(Illinois: 1978), 29–​46, 145–​146, 214, 246.
21 Koslofsky, The Reformation of the Dead, 47.
22 William McKay (ed.), Records of the Presbyteries of Inverness and Dingwall, 1643–​1688
(Edinburgh: 1896), 118.
23 McKay (ed.), Records of the Presbyteries of Inverness and Dingwall, xvii.

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The Reformation of Burial in Early Modern Europe 163

In the Minutes of the Synod of Argyll in 1709 reference was made to “the stench
occasioned by the burials in the church of Kilmun.”24 In Catholic Brittany, al-
though somewhat later than other records in this study, in 1836 it was claimed
that in ossuaries “shreds of putrefying flesh attract dogs which no-​one cares
to chase away.”25 Despite the possibility of exaggeration in these, occasionally
second-​hand reports, they do reinforce the notion that burial grounds were
overcrowded, and if health concerns could be used as motivation for their re-
moval, then that was the direction from which the issue would be approached.
Indeed, from a brief survey of other Lutheran areas of Europe following the
Reformation it seems clear that intra-​mural burial was rather tenacious. For
example, the practice continued in Denmark, was further developed in Trond-
heim, Norway through the authorisation of a detailed price list for burial in
the cathedral, and actually increased in Tallinn, Estonia in the 17th century.26
Other Protestant denominations too took issue with intra-​mural burial, also
with varying degrees of success. The Reformed Church on Guernsey had simi-
lar concerns to Luther about unsanitary burials.27 In Scotland burial was to be
a sober affair taking place in a dedicated location, external to the fabric of the
church, and ideally away from the towns and cities.28 Attempts were made in
Zurich to remove all burials outside of the city walls.29 In Geneva it was deter-
mined that “[t]‌he dead are to be buried decently in the place appointed. The
attendance and company are left to each man’s discretion.”30 It is clear, how-
ever, that the location of a burial continued to be an important issue following
the Reformation, hence the continuing desire for intra-​mural burial, and some
churches, such as the Reformed Church in the Netherlands, continued to allow

24 Duncan C. MacTavish (ed.), Minutes of the Synod of Argyll, 1636–​1651 (Edinburgh: 1943), 62
(footnote).
25 Prosper Mérimée, Notes d’un voyage dans l’Ouest de la France (Paris: 1836), 165.
26 Birgitte B. Johannsen and Hugo Johanssen, “Re-​forming the Confessional Space: Early
Lutheran Churches in Denmark, c. 1536–​1660,” in Lutheran Churches in Early Modern
Europe, ed. Andrew Spicer (Farnham: 2012), 241–​76, on 256; Øystein Ekroll, “State Church
and Church State: Churches and their Interiors in Post-​Reformation Norway, 1537–​1705,” in
Lutheran Churches in Early Modern Europe, ed. Andrew Spicer (Farnham: 2012), 277–​310, on
284; Krista Kodres, “ ‘Das “Geistliche Gebäwde” der Kirche’: The Lutheran Church in Early
Modern Estonia as a Meeting Place of Theological, Social and Artistic Ideas,” in Lutheran
Churches in Early Modern Europe, ed. Andrew Spicer (Farnham: 2012), 333–​76, on 354.
27 Spicer, “ ‘Rest of their bones’,” 171.
28 Cameron (ed.), The First Book of Discipline, 45–​46, 199–​201; Raeburn, “Rewriting Death,”
259–​60.
29 Bruce Gordon, The Swiss Reformation (Manchester: 2002), 277.
30 Calvin, Theological Treatises, 68; Raeburn, “Rewriting Death,” 257.

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164 Raeburn

the practice, although without any superstition or ceremony.31 Taking this va-
riety further still, Clodagh Tait has noted that Protestants in Ireland embraced
the traditional burial sites, including intra-​mural burial locations, and actively
shunned simple funeral rites.32 The rather confused approach to this topic can
be seen in the work of Pierre Viret who, writing in Lausanne in the 1550s, held
that for the Christian, no one piece of land was any more suitable than the
rest, yet at the same time, for Viret land could be corrupted by the presence of
“infidels.”33 With such a confused approach by certain prominent reformers, it
is no wonder that the importance of burial location would be such a persistent
sticking point for Protestantism.
The persistence of the laity in this regard, as with all aspects of the reforma-
tion of burial, led to greater and lesser degrees of the implementation of new
rules across the continent. In some instances, it can be suggested that prom-
inent reformers did lead by example. Calvin’s burial in Geneva in 1564 was a
very simple affair. He was buried in the common churchyard with no ceremony
or ritual, and no gravestone was placed upon the grave.34 The burial of Knox in
1572 was similarly an exemplar for prominent Scottish Protestants. Knox was
buried in the churchyard of St Giles, Edinburgh, with little pomp.35 Zwingli’s
death was rather different to other reformers, having died in battle, although in
life he had been opposed to any burial markers.36 Yet the same cannot be said
for certain members of the laity. Indeed, one of the most contentious aspects
of burial reform was the prohibition against intra-​mural burial. The desire to
be buried within the fabric of the church remained strong for certain members
of society, possibly due to lingering belief in the efficacy of intra-​mural burial
for the soul of the deceased, but also as a mark of social status and in order
to maintain connections to ancestors. Public outcry throughout the Reformed
Swiss states led to the continuation of the old ways of burial.37

31 Spicer, “ ‘Rest of their bones’,” 174, 175; Andrew Spicer, Calvinist Churches in Early Modern
Europe (Manchester: 2007), 134.
32 Clodagh Tait, Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550–​1650 (Basingstoke: 2002),
60–​1.
33 Bernard Roussel, “ ‘Ensevelir honnestement les corps’: Funeral Corteges and Huguenot
Culture,” in Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–​1685, eds Raymond A. Mentzer
and Andrew Spicer (Cambridge: 2002), 193–​208, on 199.
34 John Wilkinson, The Medical History of the Reformers: Luther, Calvin and Knox
(Edinburgh: 2001), 75; Thomas Fuller, Abel Redevivus, or, The Dead Yet Speaking (Wing-​
F2401. London: 1652), 284.
35 Wilkinson, The Medical History of the Reformers, 108; David Calderwood, The History of the
Kirk of Scotland, ed. T. Thompson, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: 1843), 242.
36 Gordon, The Swiss Reformation, 275.
37 Gordon, The Swiss Reformation, 277.

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The Reformation of Burial in Early Modern Europe 165

Possibly even more problematic for the reform of burial was the per-
sistence throughout Europe of the charnel house or ossuary, where the dried
bones of older burials were collected in order to serve as a memento mori.38
As Philippe Ariès noted, “it was important to see … The bones and skulls
were arranged around the courtyard of the church so as to form a backdrop
for the daily life of those sensual times.”39 While ossuaries certainly did
function in this fashion, as did other centrally located reminders of death
and mortality,40 they were also possessed of a very practical aspect. Consid-
ering the aforementioned importance of burial location, burial space was at
a premium. Through the removal of bones to the ossuaries fresh burial plots
became free, and the cycle could continue.41 The ossuaries thus provided a
place wherein the bones of the more distantly deceased could be stored with
dignity.42
The lingering desire of the laity for the old ways of burial was rarely thwart-
ed by official proclamations against it. In Scotland a compromise of sorts
would be found in the classification of burial aisles as extra-​mural. Studied in
detail by Andrew Spicer and others, in brief a burial aisle was essentially an
annexe built onto the side of pre-​existing kirk buildings, often also serving as
accommodation during services for the family of the laird who had it built.43
Although tenuous, the distinction was acceptable for many Reformed minis-
ters. Indeed, this acceptance of burial aisles is exemplified in William Birnie’s
1606 work, The Blame of Kirk-​Bvriall, in which he noted:

And because they were but adjacent and incontiguous, being but sever-
ally set as to-​falles [lean-​tos] to the continent Kirks, they got therefore
among vs the name of Iles, that yet they keep. And this kynde may con-
tent our most honourable.44

38 Gordon, The Swiss Reformation, 277.

39 Philippe Ariès, The Hour of our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (London: 1981), 61.
40 Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall, “Introduction: Placing the Dead in Late Medieval and
Early Modern Europe,” in The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval
and Early Modern Europe, eds Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (Cambridge: 2000),
1–​16, on 11.
41 Elizabeth Musgrave, “Memento Mori: The Function and Meaning of Breton Ossuaries,
1450–​1750,” in The Changing Face of Death: Historical Accounts of Death and Disposal, eds
Peter C. Jupp and Glennys Howarth (London: 1997), 62–​75, on 65.
42 Musgrave, “Memento Mori,” 70.
43 Spicer, Calvinist Churches, 66–​7.
44 William Birnie, The Blame of Kirk-​Bvriall, Tending to Perswade Cemiteriall Civilitie (stc-​
3089. Edinburgh: 1606), sig. C4r.

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166 Raeburn

Of course, not all Protestant movements held to the same view of ritual and
ceremony as those of Reformed Protestantism, and the burial of Martin Luther
in Wittenberg in February 1546 serves as a distinct counterpoint to the burials
of Calvin and Knox. Luther had died four days earlier in the town of his birth,
Eisleben, yet the Elector John Frederick insisted upon a burial in Wittenberg.
As such Luther, despite his condemnation of the practice, was placed in a pew-
ter coffin, and buried beneath the floor of the Castle Church, directly in front
of the pulpit.45 It is not difficult to understand then, why prominent members
of European society believed that they, too, should be allowed to continue this
practice. And if a family had the means at their disposal, they could certainly
find ways around almost any regulation concerning burial.

3 Sermons and Services

The act of placing the corpse in the earth was not the totality of the burial pro-
cess, and there were many surrounding practices which would also be affected
in a variety of ways by the Reformation. Across the spectrum of early modern
Protestant Europe, the issue of funeral sermons saw a great variance of prac-
tice. As noted above and discussed in detail by Atherton in ­chapter 12 of this
volume, Lutheran areas in general supported the use of a funeral sermon, Lu-
ther himself gave many, while on the whole Calvinist areas did not.46 Similarly,
in Zurich and Berne the minister might say a few words at the graveside, and
the congregation could gather at church for prayer, but a sermon was forbid-
den.47 Even within these denominational divides, however, there was far from
universal observance. In Scotland in particular, the issue of funeral sermons
would arise time and again between 1560 and at least 1645, and it is difficult to
argue that they ever truly stopped for any length of time.48
In Lutheran Germany it was actively acknowledged that only the “promi-
nent” among society were to have a sermon at their funeral.49 Indeed, in 1525

45 Wilkinson, The Medical History of the Reformers, 31.

46 See, for example, Neil Leroux, Martin Luther as Comforter: Writings on Death (Leiden:
2007).
47 Gordon, The Swiss Reformation, 275.
48 For a more in-​depth study of post-​Reformation funeral sermons in Scotland see Raeburn,
“Rewriting Death,” 267–​69.
49 Interestingly, Sigrun Berg, referencing Nils Gilje and Tarald Rasmussen, notes that in
Lutheran northern Norway, everyone was entitled to a funeral sermon, not only the
elites. Cf. Sigrun H. Berg, “The Influence of the Reformation on Religious Practice in the
North,” in The Protracted Reformation in Northern Norway, Vol. 2: Towards a Protestant

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The Reformation of Burial in Early Modern Europe 167

Luther himself preached a funeral sermon for Frederick the Wise, Elector of
Saxony, and in 1532 he preached at the funeral of Duke John of Saxony.50 In
1576, the Heidelberg theologian Daniel Tossanus preached a funeral sermon
for Elector Freidrich iii, and, astonishingly, in 1609 Philipp Han gave a funeral
sermon in Magdeburg Cathedral for Jesus.51 On the whole, Lutheran Germany
only approved of funeral sermons for those of sufficient rank to justify them,
which obviously differed greatly from the Calvinist point of view on the sub-
ject. It is interesting to note, however, that when funeral sermons were to take
place, there was an expectation that they would follow a specific pattern, using
Luther’s death as an exemplar of the perfect Christian death.52 One interest-
ing exception to this general trend, however, may be seen from the surviving
funeral sermons printed in Nördlingen, a Free Imperial City located in Swabia,
Bavaria. It would appear that in Nördlingen the Lutheran pastors used funeral
sermons, or at least the printed versions facilitated by the relatives of the de-
ceased, as teaching tools for the laity.53 In them they emphasised the family life
of the deceased, and the love they had for their spouse and children.54 They
detailed the emotionality of the deathbed, and they emphasised the grief of
the family left behind.55 Rather than explicitly modelling the sermon on the
death of Luther, these local pastors attempted to teach the laity through the
example of local notables.
Not all of Germany was Lutheran, however. In the Rhenish Palatinate, one
of the Calvinist areas of Germany, the same general attitude towards sermons
was held as by the other Calvinist areas of Europe, with the expectation that

North, eds Sigrun H. Berg, Rognald H. Bergesen, and Roald E. Kristiansen (Hanover: 2016),
19–​46, on 37.
50 Susan C. Karant-​Nunn, The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in
Early Modern Germany (Oxford: 2010), 195–​202; Fred W. Meuser, “Luther as Preacher of
the Word of God,” in The Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther, ed. Donald K. McKim
(Cambridge: 2003), 136–​48, on 145.
51 Karant-​Nunn, The Reformation of Feeling, 195–​202. Jesus was, of course, the most “promi-
nent” of “citizens.”
52 Volker Leppin, “Preparing for Death. From the Late Medieval ars moriendi to the Lutheran
Funeral Sermon,” in Preparing for Death, Remembering the Dead, eds. Tarald Rasmussen
and Jon Øygarden Flæten (Göttingen: 2015), 9–​24, on 17–​21; Sivert Angel, “Preachers as
Paul: Learning and Exemplarity in Lutheran Funeral Sermons. A Motif-​Perspective on
Faith and Works in Face of Death,” in Preparing for Death, Remembering the Dead, eds
Tarald Rasmussen and Jon Øygarden Flæten (Göttingen: 2015), 173–​198.
53 Eileen T. Dugan, “The Funeral Sermon as a Key to Familial Values in Early Modern
Nördlingen,” SCJ, 20/​4 (1989), 631–​44, on 638, 643.
54 Duggan, “The Funeral Sermon as a Key,” 638.
55 Duggan, “The Funeral Sermon as a Key,” 639; 641–​2.

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168 Raeburn

all were to receive them, both rich and poor alike, as long as the sermon in no
way praised the deceased.56 It should be noted at this stage, however, that the
Reformed Protestant prohibition against funeral sermons did not mean that
the subject of death was never raised. On the contrary, it was important for the
reformers that the laity contemplate the reality of death on a daily basis. To
that end many ars moriendi works were produced,57 and death was a common
subject of regular sermons. Luther preached on the topic regularly, in addition
to his frequent funeral sermons, but for others such as Knox the regular ser-
mons were the only appropriate place for such a lesson.58 Elsewhere Ole Peter
Grell records an example of this continued contemplation of and discourse
on the reality of death and mortality in a letter of a Dutch Reformed minister
in London in the 17th century.59 Death was to be an ever-​present thought, not
merely on the occasion of a funeral.

4 Public Performances of Grief

The topic of the emotions surrounding death is addressed elsewhere in this

volume, and as such will not be covered extensively here. Yet the presence of
emotions at the point of burial should briefly be discussed. As Madeleine Gray
has highlighted in ­chapter 3, emotionality and grief at burial was perceived in
various fashions prior to the Reformation and cannot simply be considered as
a ritualistic practice devoid of true feeling. This would remain the case in the
early modern period, but the performance of emotions at a burial would be
addressed by various early reformers.60
As with the variety of attitudes and practices seen above, the approach
towards the emotions surrounding death and burial differed across Europe,
and also met with varying degrees of resistance to change. In Catholic areas of

56 Karant-​Nunn, The Reformation of Feeling, 205.

57 Juanita F. Ruys, “Dying 101: Emotion, Experience, and Learning How to Die in the Late
Medieval artes moriendi,” Parergon 31/​2 (2014), 55–​79.
58 Meuser, “Luther as Preacher of the Word of God,” 145; Cameron, (ed.), The First Book of
Discipline, 201.
59 Ole Peter Grell, Brethren in Christ: A Calvinist Network in Reformation Europe
(Cambridge: 2011), 305–​7.
60 For a more detailed analysis see, for instance, Gordon D. Raeburn, “Death, Superstition
and Common Society following the Scottish Reformation,” Mortality 21/​1 (2016), 36–​51, on
40–​45; Raeburn, “Death and Dying,”; Raeburn, “The Reformation of Death and Grief in
Northern Scotland,” Nordlit 43 (2019), 54–​67.

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The Reformation of Burial in Early Modern Europe 169

Europe mourning, particularly weeping, was an important indicator of faith.61

In Lutheran areas public grief remained an important aspect of death and
burial. Luther stressed that grief was understandable, particularly at the death
of a dear person.62 However, in what would become a common theme across
Protestant Europe, the grief experienced should have been tempered by the
belief that the deceased was in a better place. Faith in the Resurrection should
be displayed, and people should not mourn like “heathens with no hope.”63 In
a contrast to Luther’s approach, Bruce Gordon has noted that when Zwingli
in Zurich eradicated Catholic burial traditions, he encountered lingering ad-
herence to the old ways, due to the pastoral comfort they had offered the laity,
who often were presented with no new channels for their grief.64 In Reforma-
tion England the same situation can be seen in that the aforementioned aban-
donment of intercessory acts by the reformers ultimately deprived the rela-
tives of the deceased of a crucial method by which grief could be dealt with,
namely, channelling that grief into actions.65 This did, however, have certain
positive results, in that means of commemoration were developed more ful-
ly. Ralph Houlbrooke has noted how in this instance the denial of traditional
methods of processing grief inspired Protestant ministers to develop different
approaches, and led to a great increase in practical advice for the Christian life.
In a further contrast, in Scotland the Protestant clergy did not have the same
range of options as their English counterparts. As Houlbrooke subsequently
suggested, the more militant Protestants viewed sermons and intercessory acts
as unscriptural, and rife with the potential for raising the deceased up as a
better Christian in death than they ever had been in life, all in return for a
not insubstantial payment.66 For the more strictly Calvinist reformers all such
abuses were to be excised from funerals. There was to be no ritualised avenue
for the release of the emotions, primarily grief, that surrounded death.67
Of course, displays of emotion themselves were not forbidden at this time. As
the Swiss reformer Pierre Viret had stated, “the grief of those who are witness to

61 William A. Christian Jr., “Provoked Religious Weeping in Early Modern Spain,” in

Religion and Emotion: Approaches and Interpretations, ed. John Corrigan (Oxford: 2004),
33–​50, on 33.
62 Karant-​Nunn, The Personal Luther, 191.
63 Karant-​Nunn, The Personal Luther, 201.
64 Gordon, The Swiss Reformation, 273–​4.
65 Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England, 1480–​1750 (Oxford: 1998), 228.
66 Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England, 297; Raeburn, “Rewriting Death,”
267–​69.
67 Raeburn, “Rewriting Death,” 254–​61; Gordon D. Raeburn, “Death, Burial Customs and
Rites,” in A Companion to the Scottish Reformation, ed. Ian Hazlett (Leiden: forthcoming).

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170 Raeburn

death must be able to express itself, but not to excess.”68 Indeed, in the Institutes
Calvin himself stated that “you see that to bear the cross patiently is not to have
your feelings altogether blunted, and to be absolutely insensible to pain …”69 It
seems clear that for most, if not all, of the reformers, emotions had their place
at a funeral, but that displays of mourning should not be allowed to become
excessive. Indeed, it would appear that for the majority of reformers grief was
not the issue. Rather it was the potential for these methods of displaying grief
to develop over time into empty ceremonies, devoid of true feeling, or, inverse-
ly, that ritualised displays of sorrow could potentially lead to irrational, perhaps
even mindless behaviour, which seemed to deny any belief in the doctrine of
election, or no comfort in the belief that the deceased was now in God’s hands.
As Debora K. Shuger has noted, “emotions present a threat to rational objectivity
but not to faith, particularly if one understands faith in the Protestant sense of
fiducia, or trust.”70 Therefore, it seemed entirely possible both to engage in ritu-
alistic displays of grief and to adhere to Protestant concepts of death and resur-
rection. Against this, however, is the simple fact that, for the reformers, the only
true way to measure someone’s faith, particularly at such a time as a funeral, was
whether or not the individual concerned was carrying themselves in the correct
Protestant manner, namely with a certain solemn dignity. Anything more than
restrained emotions could be perceived as an attempt to intercede with God
to ensure that the deceased, because they had been so loved during their life,
would attain salvation. Indeed, as Zwingli noted, “that a person, out of concern
for the dead, calls on God to show them mercy, I do not disapprove. But to stipu-
late a time for this and to lie for the sake of gain, is not human, but devilish.”71 As
with so many aspects of early modern death and burial however, the belief in the
efficacy of intercessory acts would prove difficult to excise completely.

5 Death, Burial, and Identity

As noted at the start of this chapter, the specific methods of the burial of the
dead performed by communities are interlinked with their very identities. The
strength of a community’s identity, as well as the level of its autonomy, can

68 Roussel, “ ‘Ensevelir honnestement les corps’,” 198.

69 John Calvin, Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford L
Battles, Library of Christian Classics, 20–​21 (London: 1961), 3.8.9.
70 Debora K. Shuger, “The Philosophical Foundations of Sacred Rhetoric,” in Religion and
Emotion: Approaches and Interpretations, ed. John Corrigan (Oxford: 2004), 115–​132, on 121.
71 Huldrych Zwingli, Writings, Volume One. In Search of True Religion: Reformation, Pastoral
and Eucharistic Writings, trans. H. Wayne Pipkin (Allison Park, Pennsylvania: 1984), 353.

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The Reformation of Burial in Early Modern Europe 171

often be inferred from burial rituals. Strong communities with clear identities
can dictate how the dead are to be buried; weaker communities can have their
practices controlled from outside. Interesting examples of this can be seen
from the fringes of early modern Europe, such as the coronach in the Highlands
and Islands of Scotland, the caoineadh in more remote parts of Ireland, and
similar practices from the Basque areas of France and Spain, as well as Turkey
and Greece.72 All of these practices involved highly ritualised displays of emo-
tion, namely wailing and shrieking performed by older women, and attempts
were made by various authorities, both Catholic and Protestant, to stop these
traditions from occurring. Some were more successful than others. Of course,
remote locations offer a certain amount of strength to communities wishing to
continue certain practices. In the more remote regions of Sweden, for instance,
Lutheran pastors continually attempted to prevent the indigenous Sámi from
performing burials in the forests, instead attempting to enforce burial within
the churchyard, a protracted struggle throughout the 17th century.73 In Sámi
areas of Norway some groups had converted to Christianity in the medieval
period, and were willingly buried with Christian rites, while others only ac-
cepted Christianity at face value.74 In all of these cases the remoteness of their
homes gave these groups far greater autonomy than had they lived closer to
more densely populated Christian areas. As an aside, an interesting contrast to
this can be seen from Narva, in modern day Estonia, which in the early modern
period was variously controlled by Russia and Sweden. There the Orthodox
population continued their own rites and rituals, and Protestant visitors were
amazed to see practices more reminiscent, in their eyes, of paganism than any-
thing Christian, including picnicking on the graves of relatives, and expressing
their grief through wails and howls.75

72 Raeburn, “The Reformation of Death and Grief in Northern Scotland,” 58–​60; Raeburn,
“Death, Superstition and Common Society following the Scottish Reformation,” 44–​
5; Patricia Lysaght, “ ‘Caoineadh os Cionn Coirp’: The Lament for the Dead in Ireland,”
Folklore 108 (1997), 65–​82, on 66; Mark Goldie, “The Scottish Catholic Enlightenment,”
The Journal of British Studies 30/​1 (1991), 20–​62, on 52; Cia Sautter, “Women, Dance, Death,
and Lament in Medieval Spain and the Mediterranean: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim
Examples,” in Death in Medieval Europe: Death Scripted and Death Choreographed, ed.
Joëlle Rollo-​Koster (London and New York: 2017), 93–​113, on 110.
73 Gunlög Fur, “Reading Margins: Colonial Encounters in Sápmi and Lenapehoking in the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Feminist Studies 32/​3 (2006), 491–​521, on 498.
74 Siv Rasmussen, “The Protracted Sámi Reformation –​or the Protracted Christianizing
Process,” in The Protracted Reformation in Northern Norway: Introductory Studies, eds. Lars
I. Hansen, Rognald H. Bergesen, and Ingebjørg Hage (Oslo: 2014), 165–​184, on 165, 167.
75 Evgeny Khodakovsky, “Defining the Other: Northern European Views of Russian
Orthodoxy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in The Protracted Reformation in

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172 Raeburn

For those not granted such acceptance, distance does not guarantee safety
however. As such, throughout the early modern period Protestants were de-
nied specific burials by Catholic authorities, and vice versa. This is a situation
that would eventually change, particularly in areas with a delicate balance
of Protestants and Catholics. In the late 16th century, French Protestants had
been given access to certain cemeteries in order to bury their dead, but the
Catholics who continued to use those cemeteries interfered. For both sides the
right to use the cemeteries symbolized their membership of a community, but
the established Catholic order did not wish to share its sacred space with out-
siders. The Protestants, on the other hand, were desirous of using the old cem-
eteries as they had been the burial places of their ancestors; they did not want
to be seen as abandoning the past.76 Elsewhere, Penny Roberts has noted the
continuing desire of Huguenots to be buried with their Catholic ancestors, and
Vanessa Harding has noted that a burial near one’s family continued to be im-
portant in early modern Paris.77 Clodagh Tait has noted this among Irish laity,
and Keith M. Brown has noted a similar desire for continuity among the Scot-
tish aristocracy.78 In Gaelic areas of Scotland and Ireland this desire remained
particularly strong.79 Interestingly, by the early 17th century, in certain areas of
France Protestants and Catholics came to communal decisions to share ceme-
teries, although partitioning them into adjacent burial grounds. Through such
partitions both groups could be secure of their place in the community.80 Sim-
ilar arrangements could be found across Europe, with Catholics being buried
in Protestant churches in England and Ireland, and Catholics, Lutherans, and
Calvinists being buried alongside one another in Münster.81 Of course, this not

Northern Norway: Towards a Protestant North, eds. Sigrun H. Berg, Rognald H. Bergesen,
and Roald E. Kristiansen (Hanover: 2016), 237–​252, on 246.
76 Ariès, The Hour of our Death, 315–​16.
77 Penny Roberts, “Contesting Sacred Space: Burial Disputes in Sixteenth-​Century France,” in
The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe,
eds Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (Cambridge: 2000), 131–​148; Vanessa Harding,
“Whose Body? A Study of Attitudes towards the Dead Body in Early Modern Paris,” in The
Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds
Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (Cambridge: 2000), 170–​187.
78 Tait, Death, Burial and Commemoration, 66; Keith M. Brown, Noble Society in Scotland: Wealth,
Family and Culture, from Reformation to Revolution (Edinburgh: 2000), 251–​270.
79 Raeburn, “Death, Burial Customs and Rites,” see all; Tait, Death, Burial and Commemo­
ration, 66.
80 Keith P. Luria, “Separated by Death? Burials, Cemeteries, and Confessional Boundaries in
Seventeenth-​Century France,” French Historical Studies 24/​2 (2001), 185–​222, on 189, 200.
81 Peter Marshall, “After Purgatory: Death and Remembrance in the Reformation World,”
in Preparing for Death, Remembering the Dead, eds. Tarald Rasmussen and Jon Øygarden
Flæten (Göttingen: 2015), 25–​44, on 38.

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The Reformation of Burial in Early Modern Europe 173

to imply that such accommodation was the rule across early modern Europe,
and tensions could frequently erupt into violence and the disinterment of the
dead.82
Liturgical disputes, however, were often far easier to overcome than long
held prejudices, such as that against the Cagots, a persecuted minority found
in Navarre, Aragón, Béarn, and Brittany, among other locations.83 In terms of
burial, this community represented the powerless, in that they were required
to bury their dead away from the Spanish, Navarrese, and French communities
who surrounded them, not for any particular religious or liturgical reasons, but
simply due to generations of prejudice. Their identity was decided for them
from outside of their boundaries, and they were instructed as to what to do
with their dead.

6 Conclusion

As has been argued throughout this chapter there was no single reformation
of death and burial that can be applied to Europe as a whole. Each strand of
reform largely followed its own path when it came to the burial of the dead,
even those that had been influenced or inspired by earlier groups. There were,
however, universal experiences, in that every reform movement was faced with
a certain amount of resistance from the laity. Most communities, to a greater
or lesser extent, resisted the total reform of burial for as long as they could,
regardless of the extent of the changes with which they were being present-
ed. Different reform movements addressed this resistance in different ways.
Initial attempts generally focussed on quelling resistance with repeated proc-
lamations and church visitations in order to ensure correct practice. Popular
opinion, however, could not easily be denied, and there continued to be a great
demand among the laity for some semblance of ritual or comfort on the occa-
sion of a death or burial, as well as adherence to the idea of the importance
of burial location. This led to the aforementioned disparity of practice across
Protestant Europe, even in areas with broadly similar theology. Zurich, for in-
stance, continued to experience large crowds seeking prayer and comfort at
churches following burial, while such practices were discouraged in Geneva.84
As noted elsewhere, in Scotland some attempts at compromise were made, so

82 Marshall, “After Purgatory,” 39; Koslofsky, The Reformation of Death, 115–​32.

83 Alain Guerreau and Yves Guy, Les Cagots du Béarn: Recherches sur le développement inégal
au sein du système féodal européen (Paris: 1988).
84 Atherton, “The Pursuit of Power,” 42.

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174 Raeburn

that other, perhaps more important, reforms could successfully be implement-

ed, and in the more remote fringes of Europe there is evidence which suggests
pre-​Christian and Christian burial practices existed side by side in a very slow
period of integration, which was not drastically altered by the Reformation.85
Yet it was not simply a reluctance to embrace change that drove resistance.
As the way in which a community buries and honours its dead is intricately tied
to its communal identity, to have its rites and rituals stripped away was often
viewed as a threat to those identities. Indeed, this is reinforced by the fact that
in areas that remained Catholic the Counter-​Reformation led to an increase in
the veneration of the dead, as can be seen, for example, from Breton speaking
areas of Brittany, where the building of ossuaries increased rather dramatically
between 1550 and 1660.86 Elsewhere, Catholic exiles railed against what they
saw as the dishonouring of the dead, which may have reinforced, to a certain
extent, the continuing desires of the laity in regard to burial.87 Try as they
might, the reformers were never fully able to enact every desired change even
among those who otherwise willingly embraced reform, and there remained a
great variety of burial practice throughout early modern Europe.
85 Raeburn, “Rewriting Death,” 269; Siv Rasmussen, “Churches in Finnmark County and
the Torne Region in the Early Modern Period,” in The Protracted Reformation in Northern
Norway, Vol. 2: Towards a Protestant North, eds. Sigrun H. Berg, Rognald H. Bergesen, and
Roald E. Kristiansen (Hanover: 2016), 47–​80, on 58.
86 Musgrave, “Memento Mori,” 62–​63.
87 See, for example Certain Tractates, together with the Book of Four Score Three Questions,
and a translation of Vincentius Lirinensis by Ninian Winzet, ed. James K. Hewison, vol. 1
(Edinburgh and London: 1888), 113; Thomas G. Law (ed.), Catholic Tractates of the Sixteenth
Century, 1573–​1600 (Edinburgh and London: 1901), 60, 273.

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 ­c hapter 6

The Counter Reformation and Preparations

for Death in the European Roman Catholic Church,
1550–​1700
Elizabeth Tingle

Is any man sick amongst you? Let him bring in the priest of the
church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the
name of our Lord, and the prayer of faith shall save the sick man,
and our Lord will lift him up, and if he be in sin, his sins shall be
forgiven him.
james 5:14

∵
Comfort of the dying and preparation for one’s own death were fundamental
to the religious duties of a Catholic Christian. Based on the gospel accounts of
the acts of Jesus, visiting the sick and comforting the afflicted were traditional
corporeal and spiritual acts of mercy. By the time of the Reformation, the ele-
ments of a ‘good death’ were, in their idealised form, represented in the literary
and artistic genre known as the ars moriendi, as other authors in this volume
demonstrate. The theory and practice of dying shown in these works, which
were widely internalised by most western Christians, continue to be influential
in the Roman Catholic Church across the early modern centuries. The dying
individual was counselled to display spiritual strength, religious awareness,
resignation, and charity. He or she died at home, surrounded by family and
household, assisted by clergy: it was to be an orderly process. In contrast, how-
ever, many real deaths were messy: people died accidentally, unconsciously, or
unrepentant.1 It was widely held that the avoidance of a ‘bad’ death of this sort
required preparation. To this end, the church and popular culture provided a

1 Vanessa Harding, “The Last Gasp: Death and the Family in Early Modern London,” in Death
and Dying in Ireland, Britain and Europe: Historical Perspectives, eds Mary Ann Lyons and
James Kelly (Dublin: 2013), 78.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004443433_008

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176 Tingle

range of advice guides, institutions, and practices to prepare individuals for

this crucial rite of passage. The baroque or Counter-​Reformation traditions of
preparation for dying, and the institutions designed to support them, will be
examined in this chapter.
Three important features of preparations for death in early modern Catho-
lic communities were developments of those present in the later Middle Ages,
reasserted in the revival of the church militant from the Council of Trent on-
wards. Firstly, belief in purgatory was strongly restored after something of a
mid-​16th-​century decline. To prepare for this, intercessory activity before and
beyond the grave was vital. Secondly, the increasing prominence of the sacra-
ment of the eucharist as the most efficacious means of intercession was a dom-
inant feature of Tridentine Catholicism: during a lifetime and on the deathbed.
Thirdly, the increased clericalization of religious life, with the presence of the
priest gaining more authority in the post-​Tridentine period, was a corollary of
the sacramentary nature of the rite of passage. These evolutions affecting the
religious culture of the preparation of the soul for death, will be examined here
with particular reference to France and especially to the duchy of Brittany, in
western France, which is rich in evidence for pre-​and post-​mortem religious
culture in the early modern period. They will be explored through a study of
pastoral theology, using advice literature, then of practice, through sacramental
ritual, popular institutions and practices, over the late 16th and 17th centuries.

1 Handbooks for Dying: Advice Books and Devotional Treatises

As a number of chapters in this volume show, one of the most important devo-
tional genres of the later Middle Ages was the ars moriendi, or handbooks on
how to ‘die well’. The origins of the ars moriendi seem to lie with the Speculum
artis bene moriendi written in 1415 by an anonymous Dominican friar, based
on the tract De arte moriendi of Jean Gerson. This was translated into most
European languages and was among the earliest books to be printed.2 Another
popular work was the Hortulus animae, published in Strasbourg in 1498 and
widely disseminated.3 The function of these works was to provide guidance on

2 A concise outline of developments over time in the ars moriendi, with illustrations of spe-
cific texts, can be found at https://​numelyo.bm-​lyon.fr/​f_​view/​B ML:BML_​00GOO01001
THM0001ars_​moriendi_​3 (last accessed 28/​6/​2020).
3 Austra Reinis, Reforming the Art of Dying. The Ars Moriendi in the German Reformation (1519–​
1528) (Farnham: 2007); see ­chapter 1 for discussion of ars moriendi publications in Germany
before the Reformation.

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Counter Reformation and Preparations for Death 177

salvation. The underpinning assumption, reflecting popular belief, was that an

individual’s eternal fate was determined in large part at the moment of death.
While there was a constant admonition from churchmen to live well, to avoid
the necessity for final acts, this did not prevent contemporaries from privileg-
ing the process of dying and the final moments as a site of salvation. Thus, an
elaborate series of rituals and gestures, prayers, masses and almsgiving, assist-
ed by clergy, friends, family, and saintly intercessors, were prescribed, to assist
an individual’s transition to the next world, to elicit a favourable judgement
from God. While many people did not die an ideal death, as Vanessa Harding
states, “the literature of prescription offered a set of customs for model circum-
stances; perhaps these could not always be observed, but they helped both to
establish norms and expectations and to shape practice more widely.”4 The
precepts of the ars moriendi would persist, although in altered form, across the
early modern period.
Ars moriendi tracts traditionally consist of six chapters, mostly devoted to
deathbed rituals. The first chapter explains that dying has a good side and con-
soles the reader that death was not to be feared; the second chapter outlines the
temptations that beset the dying and the best methods to avoid them; the third
lists questions to ask the dying and the consolation to be given through the
redemptive powers of Christ’s love. The fourth chapter stresses the need to im-
itate Christ’s life, the fifth outlines the rules of behaviour for family and friends
gathered at the death bed, and the sixth chapter contains prayers to be said for
the dying person. In the mid-​15th century in the Netherlands, a ‘short’ version
of the ars moriendi emerged based largely on the second chapter of the longer
version. It was illustrated with eleven woodcut pictures of the temptations that
beset the dying person, the means of resisting them, and a final ‘scene’ of the
good death, where demons are vanquished. The long and short versions of the
ars were popular: there were nearly 100 printed editions in Europe before 1500.
Roger Chartier shows that Paris was the most important single production cen-
tre, followed by Leipzig and Cologne. His study of ars moriendi has shown that
they were at their most popular in the first third of the 16th century, although
they declined in popularity and production after 1530.5
From the 1520s, the tenor of writing about preparation for dying began to
change. Humanists and reformers preferred to place the ‘art of dying’ with-
in a broader ‘art of living’ a good Christian life, which included constant re-
flection upon and preparation for death and a wider repertoire of devotional

4 Harding, “The Last Gasp,” 83.

5 Roger Chartier, “Les arts de mourir, 1450–​1600,” AESC 31 (1976), 51–​76.

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178 Tingle

behaviour than deathbed acts. Early examples of this ars viviendi are Jean
Raulin’s Doctrinale mortis of 1518 and is Josse Clichtove’s De doctrina moriendi
of 1538.6 The thought of death should guide our entire life; Clichetove in par-
ticular considered a lifetime of repentance and asceticism to be better prepa-
ration than deathbed conversion. The most influential of these works was
Erasmus’s De preparatione ad mortem of 1534, which ran to 64 editions over
the next three hundred years, 35 in Latin, 9 in Dutch, 3 in English, 3 German, 7
French, 2 Czech, and 5 Spanish.7 Erasmus’s work “emphasised the doctrines of
grace and forgiveness over those of punishment and damnation, but insisted
that these benefits could be gained only through deliberate effort and prepa-
ration.”8 Devotional and advice manuals continued to be produced through
the second half of the century. To these were added early catechisms such as
those of Peter Canisius and Robert Bellarmine, containing pedagogical state-
ments of faith, with pithy teaching on Last Things and the sacramental frame-
work of dying.9
The early years of the 17th century saw advice literature take off in quantity
and scope, as never before. They were increasingly in the vernacular and took
the form of meditations on death, preparation handbooks, and advice man-
uals on how to look after the sick. Daniel Roche’s study of 17th-​century ars
moriendi-​type literature has shown that some 400-​500,000 editions of hand-
books were produced, representing 7 to 10 per cent of all religious publications
of the period.10 For France, Michel Vovelle argues that the main period of pro-
duction of literary works was before 1640 although Roche claims that the sec-
ond half of the century was more productive.11 During the grand siècle, spiritu-
al interests changed, to a further emphasis on lifetime actions. The ‘old-​style’

6 Jean Raulin, Doctrinale mortis (Paris: 1518); Josse Clichtove, De Doctrina moriendi opuscu-
lum necessaria ad mortem foeliciter oppetendam preparamenta declarans (Paris: 1538).
7 For a French version see Desiderius Erasmus, Préparation à la mort, nouvellement composé
et publié par le discret docteur Érasme avecques aulcunes prières et pseaulmes de la saincte
Escripture, moult prouffictables à tous christiens (Lyons: 1538); Pierre Chaunu, La mort à
Paris: XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siècles (Paris: 1978), 277.
8 Carlos Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-​Century
Spain (Cambridge: 1995), 24.
9 Versions used here are Peter Canisius, A Summe of Christian Doctrine ([St. Omer: 1622]);
Robert Bellarmine, Shorter Catechisme ([St Omer: 1614]).
10 Daniel Roche, “ ‘La mémoire de la mort’: Recherche sur la place des arts de mourir dans la
librairie et la lecture en France aux 17e et 18e siècles,” AESC 31 (1976), 76–​109, on 105–​6.
11 Michel Vovelle, La mort et l’Occident de 1300 à nos jours (Paris: 1983), 308–​10; Roche, “ ‘La
mémoire de la mort’,” 83–​6. Roche states that in the first half of the 17th century, one to
two per cent of all books produced were on dying, a figure which rose to five per cent after
1650, but which fell off thereafter.

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Counter Reformation and Preparations for Death 179

works of Gerson, Clichtove, and even Erasmus, went out of fashion and new
authors came to the fore, who wrote devotional handbooks of a more didactic
or practical form. To avoid damnation, preparation for death was a daily ne-
cessity. It was not to be left until late in life, as mortality could strike suddenly;
it was to be part of a regular routine and life of prayer for all ages.12 One of
the most influential of such works across Catholic Europe was Robert Bellarm-
ine’s De Arte Bene Moriendi, published in Rome in 1620, a handbook on living
and dying well, with precepts on virtue and the sacraments as means to sal-
vation.13 It was very popular, with at least five Latin editions known in France
alone between 1620 and 1665, an early translation into French in 1620 and one
into English at Douai in 1622, for example.14 The work was divided into two
parts: the precepts to follow while a person was in good health, largely virtues,
then those to be observed when one was dangerously ill, largely sacramental.
To live well, one needed to abandon worldly interests and honours, persevere
in hope, faith, and charity, be sober, just, and pious, fast, pray continuously,
and prepare to meet Christ. In addition, participating in the sacraments and
keeping the Ten Commandments was excellent preparation. A vital part of the
‘good life’ as opposed to the ‘good death’ was devotion to works in emulation of
Christ. Barbara Diefendorf has argued that by the 1630s, among female elites in
Paris at least, a preference for charitable service came to supplant penitential
asceticism as the dominant spiritual mode, reflecting a gentler Salesian spir-
it and more optimistic view of God. Further, Roche argues, religious practice
emphasised interiorization and individual action rather than collective ritu-
al.15 The ‘sites’ of salvation strengthened: Christ and his sacrament of the altar,
devotion to Mary, and participation in good works. Ronnie Po-​Hsia comments
that action rather than fear was the Counter-​Reformation’s answer to the fra-
gility of human existence. Through good works the Church “anchored the exis-
tence of the faithful to this-​worldly pursuits and prevented its drift to despair
over ultimate fate in the next world.”16
From the 1650s, handbooks solely devoted to dying a good death began
to disappear, and advice was increasingly confined to a wider literature of
spirituality. The view that the highest form of union with God might best be

12 John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death Among
Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-​Century France (Oxford: 1981), 199.
13 Robert Bellarmine, De Arte Bene Moriendi (Viterbii: 1620).
14 Robert Bellarmine, L’art de bien vivre pour heureusement mourir (Paris: 1620).
15 Roche, “ ‘La mémoire de la mort’,” 105–​6.
16 Ronnie P. Hsia, “Civic Wills as Sources for the Study of Piety in Münster, 1530–​1618,” SCJ
xiv (1983), 321–​348, on 347.

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achieved through an active life of Christian service continued to gain ground.17

In France, works such as La Douce et sainte mort of Père Crasset (1681) ran to
over forty editions. L’avant-​coureur de l’éternité (1643) of Jérémie Drexel, L’Ange
conducteur (1681) of Jacques Coret, and other such tomes were the new best-
sellers of the era. In these works, preparation for death was again the work of
a whole lifetime and they also offered prayers and actions to guide the read-
er. Coret’s L’Ange conducteur for example was written for the confraternity of
the Guardian Angel, the central aim of which was to help members achieve
a good death, as “the greatest good we could wish for, and the most import-
ant matter we have in this world” although there were no particular obliga-
tions upon confreres other than general good works and devotions.18 The book
was a collection of prayers for all liturgical and life-​cycle occasions, including
one for the dying, that they should have a holy death. In these works, a well-​
regulated life and the performance of good works were the best guarantees
of eternal life: spiritual combat necessitated permanent mobilization. Jean de
Saint-​Samson’s handbook on illness La Mort des saincts précieuse devant Dieu
of 1656 counselled four ways a person should prepare themselves for death.
The first was behavioural, the movements and passions of the soul should be
tamed, pain, hope, fear, love, hatred, desire, anger, levity, anxiety, presumption,
envy, and other such emotions should be eliminated. The second was by use of
the sacraments, especially the eucharist. The third was through experience of
adversity, illness, and sadness, which needed to be borne with resignation. Fi-
nally, one should prepare for death by learning how to die well.19 Resignation,
recourse to the sacraments, contrition, and faith were the means of achieving
a good death. There were some continuities with the ars of the later Middle
Ages, however, in many works. In particular, the deathbed as the site of the
final battle over the soul between demons and angels continued to have com-
mon currency.
With Jansenism and other rigorist influences from the mid-​17th century, the
role of external actions became more muted. Jansenists attacked “the frivolous
concept of a God whose punishment could be bought off so cheaply, by human
intercessions.”20 Indeed, John McManners argues that by the later 17th century,

17 Barbara Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity. Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation
in Paris (Oxford: 2004), 171, 243.
18 The edition used here is Jacques Coret, L’Ange conducteur de la dévotion chrétienne
(Liège: 1746), xxii.
19 Jean de Saint-​Samson, La Mort des saincts précieuse devant Dieu ou les moyens de mourir
sainctement, et dans la grâce de Dieu (Paris: 1657), 165.
20 McManners, Death and the Enlightenment, 127.

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most devotional works did not dwell on death. While their message was clearly
that we die but once and must ensure that we make no mistakes, preparation
for death was part of a regular routine of prayer. In most writings, hope and
salvation outweighed the burden of judgement and fear. Even gloomy spiri-
tual writers advocated a way of life of charity, prayer, and austerity daily of-
fered to God, as the best preparation for the end.21 Also, Roche argues that the
readership began to change. The art of dying was above all the reading matter
of the clergy and seminarian rather than the laity.22 These were the deathbed
specialists, the mediator of the sacraments, by whose hands a good death was
managed.

2 Popular Practices of Preparation: Confraternity Membership and

Indulgences

For the early modern Catholic, mutual aid, to support each other in the quest
for heaven, was important in life and in death. Preparation of the soul during
life and the transition from the earthly to the heavenly realm, all required the
support of family, friends, and community. One of the most important local
institutions which helped in practical preparations for death and more spe-
cifically, to assist the dying, was the confraternity. Guilds and confraternities
were widespread in the later Middle Ages, but the Reformation attack on
saintly and collective intercession for the living and the dead led to a decline
in membership in the mid-​16th century, even in Catholic regions. From the
later part of the century, however, with the reaffirmation of intercession by
the Council of Trent and papal sponsoring of high-​profile Roman confraterni-
ties as agents of Counter-​Reformation, the confraternity once again became a
prominent institution of religious life across Europe. There was a major expan-
sion of devotional and philanthropic fraternities. All of these groups provided
mortuary assistance for members and so adherence to such a group was an
important part of the preparation for the afterlife. In addition, associations
created specifically to assist the dying were introduced in the post-​Tridentine
period and spread widely. These groups, as well as parishes and conventual
churches, were also major consumers of another post-​Reformation revival, the
indulgence. Pardons, especially papal plenary pardons, were widely sought as
a means of avoiding purgatory at death and passing straight to heaven. The two

21 McManners, Death and the Enlightenment, 198–​202, 438.

22 Roche, “ ‘La mémoire de la mort’,” 97.

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institutions together were essential ways in which ordinary Catholics prepared

for death.

2.1 Confraternities and Support of the Dying

Nicolas Terpstra defines the confraternity as “a self-​governing congregation of
lay Christians adapting and adjusting traditional clerical forms of group wor-
ship to their own situation and times.”23 They were relatively independent or-
ganisations, raising and administering their own funds under supervision from
clergy. They offered members training in and exercise of the communal rituals
of the Catholic faith, education in doctrine through tutoring in the traditional
statements of the faith, and many also encouraged private devotions.24 New
devotional confraternities were one of the great successes of the Catholic Ref-
ormation. Holy Sacrament confraternities were founded to promote the cult
of the eucharist through more frequent administration of the sacraments of
confession, penance, and communion. Confraternities of the Rosary encour-
aged Marian devotions. Many community and parish saints also generated as-
sociations. The 17th century saw a return to medieval levels of participation
and then even more growth. In Rennes diocese in the 17th and 18th centuries,
Catherine Jamet has located 302 confraternities, an average of 1.2 per parish.
Almost 50 per cent were Marian, dominated by rosary groups; one-​third were
Christological, mostly Holy Sacrament, and the rest were dedicated to a variety
of saints.25 In Saint-​Malo diocese, in 171 parishes and chapelries, Bruno Restif
has counted 82 confraternities of the Rosary, 46 dedicated to the Holy Sacra-
ment, and 32 parishes where other confraternities, to saints or the guardian
angel, were organised. A wide membership was a notable feature of these new
groups. In Rennes diocese, the confraternities of the Holy Sacrament charged
low fees, to encourage widespread participation: at Boistruden, there was no
entry fee or annual charge, to encourage the participation of the poor.26 In
the archdeaconry of Retz, south of Nantes, by the 1680s total membership of
confraternities varied between 5 and 40 per cent of adults in many parishes.
The entry fee for the All Saints confraternity at Saint-​Jean de Montfaucon was
40 sous but that at Saint-​Hilaire-​du-​Bois was only 2 sous and Saint-​Fiacre’s

23 Nicholas Terpstra, Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna

(Cambridge: 1995), 49.
24 Terpstra, Lay Confraternities, 54–​5.
25 Catherine Jamet, “Les confréries de dévotion dans le diocèse de Rennes aux XVIIe et
XVIIIe siècles,” Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’Ouest 87 (1980), 481–​491, on 482–​3.
26 Bruno Restif, La Révolution des paroisses: Culture paroissiale et Réforme catholique en
Haute-​Bretagne aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Rennes: 2006), 187.

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confraternity charged 15 deniers, in addition to yearly subscriptions. These are

not large sums when the daily wage of a mason was around 15 sous at this
time.27 Membership of confraternities was one of the most important means
of preparation for death, for it provided a form of insurance that post-​mortem
needs of the soul were taken care of by an ongoing community of the living.
The reason for this is that all confraternities in early modern Europe offered
services to the dying and particularly to the dead membership through their
sponsorship of perpetual masses. Restif comments that the continued success
of confraternities came from the fact that the statues insisted on the solidarity
between living members, and between the quick and the dead, as much as
from interest in new devotions. Among late 16th and 17th-​century confrater-
nities, there was a return to the late medieval concern for the souls in purga-
tory and a resurgence of collective activity for the departed. Jamet comments
that confraternity membership was a guarantee of having a good death, with
prayers and sacraments, but also a fine death with a decent and well-​attended
funeral.28 The collectivity also guaranteed post-​mortem intercession, with its
annual services and regular prayers with an assured congregation. The 1661
statutes of the Rosary confraternity of Aradon in Vannes diocese stated that
there would be four anniversaries held a year for deceased confreres; follow-
ing the death of a member, the others undertook to say a rosary or, if wealthy
enough, to have a mass said for them at the rosary altar, within forty days of the
death.29 In the archdeaconry of Retz, all of the confraternities offered services
for the dead. At Saint-​Colombin the parish fraternity had regular processions
around the cemetery, singing Libera me domine and the Agonisants based at La
Trinité Church of Machecoul had a bell rung for each confrere who was dying,
so that prayers could be said for him or her.30
Confraternities also provided a framework in which members could under-
take good works and build up their own store of treasure in heaven. Members
were asked to assist sick confreres, by accompanying the viaticum and by pray-
ing for the sick. The statutes of the Holy Sacrament confraternity founded in
the chapel of Notre-​Dame-​des-​Lices of Vannes in 1610 stated that members
would accompany the host to the house of sick members with torches and can-
dles and that members should attend the funeral of deceased confreres and
the service held by the fraternity in the chapel of Notre Dame within fifteen

27 Jacqueline Ghenassia, “Les ‘chevauchées’ d’un archidiacre à la fin du 17e siècle: La visite
d’Antoine Binet dans le diocèse de Nantes (1682–​1698),” RHÉF 57 (1971), 83–​95, on 93.
28 Jamet, “Les confréries,” 489.
29 Archives Départementales du Morbihan (hereafter adm), G 1143. Arradon. Fondations.
30 Ghenassia, “Les ‘chevauchées’,” 93.

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days of their death.31 Some confraternities were also founded in this period
specifically to assist the dying: the Agonisant or Bonne Mort associations. These
were not found in the period before 1600, although they were effectively an ex-
tension of those long-​standing associations for the dead like the Ames du Pur-
gatoire and Trépassés. In papal registers of briefs for indulgences, between 5
and 9 percent were for these confraternities in the later 17th century.32 Some of
the Agonisant confraternities were affiliated formally with the archconfraterni-
ty of the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the Agonisants at Rome, created
in 1616. Their objectives were to give aid through prayer to those who were in
their last agonies. Their emphasis on the dying points to new views on the best
time for intercession. Agonisant confraternities emerged in France between
1640 and 1670; they undertook to sustain the dying in their final ‘agonies’ and
to aid them in the final combat with the devil, assisting their confreres through
the last rites, final communion, and prayers. The statutes of the confraterni-
ty based in Saint-​Génies in Avignon published in 1641, stated that members
would meet every Thursday to this end, but especially during the death of one
of their members.33 The statutes of a confraternity at Nancy of 1711 stated that
the relatives of a dying member should alert the parish priest and have the
large church bell rung thirty-​two times. While this was taking place, the priest
would expose the holy sacrament on the high altar and commence prayers
and confreres should make their way to the church, to assist. Those who could
not come to church should say the same prayers at home.34 These associations
were numerous. In Rennes diocese alone, eight confraternities of Notre Dame
des Agonisants were created after 1663.35 Philippe Desmette’s work on plena-
ry indulgences obtained in the dioceses of Cambrai shows that there were at
least five in the see, three in parish churches and two in Jesuit churches, and
probably more, which did not apply for papal pardons.36 Most confraterni-
ties accepted dying and deceased members. For example, the Agonisants of

31 adm 57 G 1. Cathédrale de Vannes. Confréries.

32 Françoise Hernandez, “Être confrère des Agonisants ou de la Bonne Mort aux XVIIe et
XVIIIe siècles,” in Confréries et dévotions dans la catholicité moderne (mi-​XVe –​début XIXe
siècle), eds Bernard Dompnier and Paula Vismara (Rome: 2008), 311–​338.
33 Marie-​Hélène Froeschlé-​Chopard, Dieu pour tous et Dieu pour soi: Histoire des confréries et
de leurs images à l’époque moderne (Paris: 2006), 246.
34 Règlements, statuts et prières pour la confrérie des Agonisans, érigée en 1711 en la paroisse de
Saint Sebastien, ville neuve de Nancy (Nancy: 1756).
35 Restif, La Révolution des paroisses, 183.
36 Philippe Desmette, Les brefs d’indulgences pour les confréries des diocèses de Cambrai et
de Tournai aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: A.S.V. Sec. Brev. Indulg. Perpetuae, 2–​9 (Brussels:
2002), passim.

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Counter Reformation and Preparations for Death 185

Saint-​Léonard of Fougères received seventeen new members from 1689–​91, of

whom eight were already dead and one was dying.37
The Bonne Mort associations had a different focus, in that they were intend-
ed to help individuals prepare for their own deaths and were linked to a con-
fraternity established by the Jesuits of Rome in their church of the Gesù in
1648. Two thirds of the known associations in Europe were housed in a Jesuit
church.38 Membership was linked to regular exercises of prayer and medita-
tion. Typically, the confraternity would gather, confess to a priest, take the eu-
charist, listen to a sermon, and then pray and meditate on death and salvation.
In addition, individual members would undertake personal meditations, on
their own illness, dying, and death.39 All of these confraternities played a vi-
tal role in preparation for death, they were “societies of mutual spiritual assis-
tance; they assured a vast exchange of prayers of the living for the sufferings of
souls which created a powerful solidarity of the mystical body and the cohabi-
tation of the dead and the living, united by grace.”40

2.2 Indulgences
A second collective intercessory institution frequently linked to confraternity
membership, was the indulgence or pardon. From the later 16th century and
particularly after 1600, indulgences again emerged –​after a dip in popularity
during the Reformation –​as a popular part of the economy of salvation. For
Andel de Lodève, writing in 1638, indulgences were the fourth means of es-
caping purgatory, after the eucharist, charity, and “satisfactory works” which
included prayer, alms, vigils, and fasts.41 They required personal engage-
ment in penance and good works. As Jean-​Pierre Camus stated in Instruction
Catholique des Indulgences published in Paris in 1641, an indulgence was a form
of largesse and extraordinary dispensation which came from the treasury of
merits of the church, accessed through the sacraments, firstly through baptism
but primarily through penitence.42 The role of indulgences as a form of good
work remained vital. Across the post-​Tridentine period indulgences became
more powerful as they were closely associated with the highest good work of

37 Jamet, “Les confréries,,” 490.

38 Hernandez, “Être confrère,” 313.
39 Froeschlé-​Chopard, Dieu pour tous, 249.
40 Elizabeth C. Tingle, Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–​1720 (Farnham: 2012), 201.
41 Andel de Lodève, Defense du purgatoire et de l’honneur des ecclésiastiques et des religieux
mesprizez et calumnies sans raison par les ministres de la religion pretendue reformée
(Tournon: 1638), 108–​9.
42 Jean-​Pierre Camus, Instruction Catholique du Purgatoire (Paris: 1641), 7, 9.

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all, the sacrifice of the mass because to obtain a plenary indulgence, confes-
sion, contrition, and communion were the means of activating its power. Fur-
ther, indulgences could be gained by having masses said at privileged altars,
by taking part in jubilees, and by benefitting from pardons that came from
privileged medals and rosaries.43 It was possible to avoid purgatory by dying
in possession of a plenary indulgence, with the words “Jesus Maria” on the lips
and in the heart, so long as contrition was felt.
The post-​1600 resurgence in indulgences is seen everywhere in Catholic Eu-
rope. Most surviving indulgences from the 17th century were papal pardons,
evidence of shifts in authority over powers to loose and bind towards Rome.
From early in the century, confraternity membership and indulgenced or “priv-
ileged” altars, where a mass said would release a soul from purgatory, seem
to have become the principal means of acquiring pardons. Ollive Godart’s be-
quest of 1639 for two weekly masses in the Carmelite church of Nantes “at the
altar privileged for the deceased” and Jeanne Gillot’s foundation of 1648 of an
anniversary in the Minimes’ church at the “privileged altar” are examples.44
In 1662, David de Cléguénec and his wife Jeanne du Mur of Cléguer in Vannes
diocese founded weekly low masses in the church of the Dominicans of Quim-
perle, Récollets of Port-​Louis and Carmelites of Hennebont at the “privileged
altars.”45 Individual parish churches also sought papal indulgences, to attract
visitors and their donations on feast days. In 1626, Cléder parish church in
Vannes diocese obtained a seven-​year indulgence for its altar of St Sebastian,
through the actions of one of the parish’s priests, Jean Charles, who visited
Rome in the previous year.46 In 1670, the parish church of Saint-​Gonnéry re-
ceived a plenary indulgence from Clement x for seven years “for the augmen-
tation of the religion of the faithful and the salvation of souls” for visitors to
the church on their feast of the Assumption.47 In the second half of the 17th
century, Saint-​Patern parish church in the suburbs of Vannes seems to have
undertaken an indulgence-​acquisition campaign in association with its con-
fraternities. In 1676, the confraternity of the Agonisants obtained a plenary in-
dulgence for members and for visitors to their chapel on the Annunciation; the

43 Étienne Binet, De l’estat heureux et malheureux des ames suffrantes en Purgatoire et des
moyens souverains pour n’y aller pas ou y demeurer fort peu (Rouen: 1635), 276.
44 Archives Départementales de la Loire-​Atlantique (hereafter adla) H 227, H 321. Carmes
de Nantes. Fondations.
45 adm G 878. Cléguer. Fondations.
46 Alain Croix (ed.), Moi, Jean Martin, recteur de Plouvelle; Curés journalistes de la Renaissance
à la fin du 17e siècle (Rennes: 1993), 101.
47 adm 48 G 5. Cathédrale de Vannes. Indulgences.

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Counter Reformation and Preparations for Death 187

chapel of Saint Marie-​Madeleine followed in 1685 with a pardon for its feast
day and in 1695 the confraternity of Saint-​Barbe also gained an indulgence,
again for members and for its feast.48 There were also indulgenced activities.
Participation in the Forty Hours’ devotion, for example, gave pardons to the
participants; this was introduced into Nantes in the early 1580s and into the
rest of Brittany thereafter. We see examples in Martigné-​Ferchaud in Rennes
diocese in1622 and Blain in Nantes diocese in 1665.49 These were important,
locally available means of preparing the soul for eternity.
The greatest consumers of indulgences were confraternities. Confraternities
vied with each other to provide an attractive portfolio of indulgences for their
members.50 Plenary indulgences were granted on condition that on the first day
of their entry members would repent, confess, and receive the holy sacrament.
Plenary remission was also granted to the dying if they confessed and received
the sacrament, if they were able to do so, or at least had contrition. A plenary
indulgence was also granted for visiting the chapel or altar of the confraternity
on its principal feast day, for praying for peace between princes, the eradica-
tion of heresy, and for the exaltation of the Holy Church. In addition, seven
years of pardon were granted for assisting at the four annual feasts celebrated
by the confraternity, if communion was also taken.51 Arch-​confraternities ben-
efitted from the general indulgences issued for the whole brotherhood. Thus,
in 1600, a confraternity of the Rosary was erected in Saint-​Sauveur Church of
Locminé in Vannes diocese under sponsorship of the Dominicans. It was to
receive members of both sexes “to participate in all the graces, privileges and
indulgences which the other confreres enjoyed in the other churches of [the]
order.”52 Such confraternities also sought their own, particular, pardons. Thus,
Locminé’s confraternity had access to general indulgences granted to all Do-
minican Rosary confraternities but in 1657, it obtained its own papal indul-
gence for saying rosaries in private and, in 1666, another indulgence for visitors
to its altar. Some rosary confraternities in Rennes diocese gave the obtaining
of indulgences as the prime motive for their creation.53 Membership of an in-
dulgenced confraternity was thus a powerful form of preparation for dying. In

48 adm 1053. Saint-​Patern de Vannes. Indulgences.

49 Croix (ed.), Moi, Jean Martin, 91, 190.
50 Trevor Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles: The Counter Reformation in the
Upper Palatinate (Farnham: 2009), 192.
51 Archives Départementales de Finistère (hereafter adf) 9 G 2. Chapitre de la cathédrale de
Saint-​Pol-​de-​Léon.
52 adm G1061. Locminé. Confrérie du Rosaire.
53 Jamet, “Les confréries,” 485.

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1611, an indulgence of Paul v was issued for the confraternity of the Virgin of
the chapel of Brangallo in Noyal-​Muzillac parish. The terms of the indulgence
were of the standard form, with a plenary indulgence for people visiting the
chapel on their feast of Saints Philip and James. Sixty days remission was also
given for a wide range of “good works,” such as accompanying the viaticum or
saying prayers for the dying, assisting in processions or funerals, for lodging the
poor and pilgrims, making peace between enemies, strengthening the faith of
individuals, and teaching the commandments of God to the ignorant, all clas-
sic works of mercy.54
Indulgences were therefore a popular form of post-​mortem intercession, ac-
quired mostly while alive but also by the dead, as wills evidence shows where
people left money for their acquisition. In 1663, Hervé Billou, laboureur of
Botsorhel in Saint-​Pol-​de-​Léon diocese, left 20 sous for indulgences from Paris
hospitals, showing that campaigns of indulgence were still penetrating into the
Breton-​speaking rural communities of the far west.55 They “gave more effective
control over the future –​one’s future –​by guaranteeing that Purgatory had
been provided for, that the deposit account in the Treasury of Merits would,
with luck and effort, secure a speedy transit to heaven.”56 Salvation could be as-
sured without dependence on third parties, or the vagaries of fortune. The self
could be saved, with foresight; although contingent on dying in a state of mind
and faith to allow the pardons to be activated. Indulgences were the ultimate
form of collective intercession, drawing on the merits of the whole church.

3 Last Things: The Rituals of the Deathbed

In 1542 in Ménéac in Vannes diocese, Marie Tual died. The parish priest record-
ed in the burial register that she was a “poor, old, beggar woman [who] had
nothing with which she could make provision,” that is, for her soul.57 That this
was a matter for record shows the seriousness with which the need for inter-
cession was taken, by all social groups. It also demonstrates that the site of final
preparation for death continued to be the deathbed, when terminal arrange-
ments for the soul were made. In baroque Europe, most people died at home,

54 adm G 936. Noyal-​Muzillac. Indulgences.

55 Francis Gourvil, “Le testament d’un paysan tregorois au XVIIème siècle,” Bulletin de la
Société Archéologique de Finistère 95 (1969), 117–​36.
56 R.N. Swanson, Indulgences in Late Medieval England. Passports to Paradise (Cambridge:
2007), 520.
57 Croix, Moi, Jean Martin, 16.

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Counter Reformation and Preparations for Death 189

unless they were unfortunate enough to be involved in accidents, war, or epi-

demics such as plague which required separation from the living community.
The dying were surrounded by friends, family, and neighbours, for whom con-
solation at the deathbed was a religious and social duty. While the physical and
emotional care of the dying was provided by their kin, practical preparations
also involved settling temporal matters with the law and in arranging spiritual
matters with the special ministrations of the clergy.

3.1 Making a Will and Bequests

The desire to influence the post-​mortem destination of the soul was at the
heart of the introduction of will making in the central middle ages. Privileging
the act of dying as the most important time and place for intercession for the
soul, it was important to leave bequests for masses and prayers, to assist that
journey and testamentary practice was a fundamental part of the preparation
for death. The enormous number of spiritual bequests found in the wills of the
later Middle Ages and post-​Reformation Catholic Europe show that the desire
for intercession for departed souls before God was widely internalised across
the continent.58
The physical context of will making was almost always the death bed, as it
had been in the later Middle Ages. The contents were also very similar across
western Europe, with only minor variations in phrases and formats. Wills com-
menced with a summary of the state of the health of the testator, typically
“sick in body but whole in mind” and the reason for will-​making, that “death
is certain, the only uncertainty being the hour thereof” being a common for-
mula. The ill health of the testator, as well as limited literacy in this period,
meant that there was usually a scribe, most often a professional notary, writ-
ing down the contents, simultaneously moving vernacular languages such as
Gallo and Breton into French, and using legal formulae and statements. Much
discussion has taken place about the independence of testators in this situ-
ation, the standardisation of many wills, and the reliability of their personal
content.59 However, there were usually enough witnesses present to ensure
that the wishes of the testator were recorded with some veracity. Wills are also
overwhelmingly masculine, with only ten per cent recorded by women. They
are also of the middling and upper social sort, with few pauper wills recorded.
The formats of wills changed little across the 16th and 17th centuries, and in
them we see the issues that concerned the dying and for which they needed to

58 Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford: 2002), 27.
59 For example, J.D. Alsop, “Religious Preambles in Early Modern English Wills as Formulae,”
JEH 40 (1989), 19–​27.

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prepare. First came commendation of the soul, disposal of the body, burial and
funeral arrangements, and pious bequests; once religious duties were finalised,
the dispersal of property, payment of debts, and nomination of executors were
recorded.

3.1.1 Salutation and Gaining of Intercession

The first act of the testator was to commend him or herself to God and the
saints. The vast majority of wills from Catholic contexts began with the invoca-
tion “In the Name of God, Amen,” either in Latin or in the vernacular language
of the region. In the French notarial archives, testaments are easily observed
among papers, for they are always marked at the top of the front page with a
cross. The will of Claude Le Gay, widow, in Paris in 1634, demonstrates this in
some detail:

firstly, as a good and true Christian and Catholic, she has recommend-
ed and recommends her soul to God the Creator, beseeching him by the
infinite merits and passion of his son our saviour and redeemer Jesus
Christ, wishing he would pardon her faults and offences and receive her
soul when it pleases God to call her from this world to his kingdom of
heaven … imploring to this end the prayers and intercessions of the glori-
ous Virgin Marin and of all the heavenly court of paradise.60

A small number of testators saluted specific saints, asking for their interces-
sion. In 1644 Estienne Tonnellier, a priest in Paris, made a will recommending
his soul to God, Christ, and the Virgin, but also his guardian angel, St Michael,
his patron saint, St Stephen, and the parish church patrons Saints Eustace and
Agnes.61 The primary act of will-​making was therefore to pay tribute to the
heavenly court, for its protection of the soul.

3.1.2 Burial and Funeral Arrangements

The second religious provision of wills was to arrange for burial, the nature
of which will be discussed in subsequent chapters. Details of the cortège and
its participants, burial place and ornaments, and the funeral ceremony itself,
were laid out. The main concern of the dying person was to ensure appropri-
ate rituals to accompany their body to the afterlife, in short, the foundation of
masses. All over Europe, the numbers of testators requesting masses had been

60 Reproduced in Chaunu, La mort à Paris, 506.

61 Reproduced in Chaunu, La mort à Paris, 508.

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Counter Reformation and Preparations for Death 191

high since the Middle Ages –​in the Avignon region, between the second half of
the 14th century and early 16th century, 65 to 70 per cent of testators requested
masses to be said for their souls.62 After a mid-​16th century decline, this was
again the case in the 17th century. At the end of the century, 80 per cent of
Provençal testators requested masses, for example.63 By far the most frequent-
ly requested forms of post-​mortem intercession were short-​term mass cycles.
Partly this was a result of practical economics –​individuals commissioned af-
fordable intercessory forms –​but it was also a result of views about the fate of
the soul immediately after death with particular, post-​mortem judgement.64
Thus, for example, in 1550, François Fabry, canon of Rennes, asked for 10,000
masses after his funeral and octave services.65 In his will of 1559, André Le
Gallois, a chorister at Notre Dame collegiate church of Nantes, asked for 100
masses at Notre Dame, 50 at Rouvier church, and for a trental at Saint-​Denis
in Nantes.66 In the countryside, Jean Tacquet, laboureur from the parish of
Questembert in Vannes diocese made a will in 1664 in which he asked for the
“service accustomé” for his funeral and a “huitaine” of eight services, one each
day, for a week.67 Pierre Chaunu shows that in later 17th-​century Paris, in the
parishes of Saint-​Paul and Saint-​Germain, 70 per cent of testators demanded
masses, more than half stating “as soon as possible after death.”68 A particular
concentration of intercession was requested during the three days after death,
when it was widely believed that God’s judgement was pending and it was still
possible for the prayer of the living to influence his verdict.69 Of 284 Parisian
wills for the period 1646–​72, 156 testators demanded “annuals,” a daily mass
for one year, with poorer people asking for trentals which lasted only thirty
days.70 The most striking trend of the Counter Reformation was a growth in
the numbers of masses requested over time, in all regions of Catholic Europe.
Catherine Marle’s study of Valenciennes in the later 17th century, after it had

62 Jacques Chiffoleau, La comptabilité de l’au-​delà: Les hommes, la mort et la religion dans la

région d’Avignon à la fin du Moyen Âge (c.1320-​c.1480) (Rome: 1980), 341.
63 Vovelle, La mort et l’Occident, 347.
64 Alain Croix, La Bretagne aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles: La vie, la mort, la foi, 2 vols (Paris: 1981),
2: 1151.
65 adm 55 G 2. Chapître de Saint-​Pierre, Vannes. Fondations.
66 adla G 313. Collégiale de Notre Dame de Nantes. Chapellenies et fondations pieuses;
adla H 253. Chartreux de Nantes. Fondations.
67 adm 6 E 964. Notaire Le Mauff. Questembert 1661–​65.
68 Chaunu, La mort à Paris, 424, 427.
69 Pierre Chaunu, “Mourir à Paris (XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siècles),” AESC 31 (1976), 29–​50,
on 44–​5.
70 Chaunu, La mort à Paris, 417.

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been incorporated into the French kingdom, shows that around 50 per cent of
testators asked for masses and 90 per cent of these asked for short-​term cycles,
with a figure of 100–​299 most frequently demanded.71 Concentration of prayer
near to the moment of death was considered the best insurance for salvation
for both temporal and spiritual reasons. It remained the most important in-
vestment for the soul, by the dying person in their will, across the period.

3.1.3 Post-​mortem Intercessory Arrangements

The foundation of post-​mortem intercession, especially perpetual masses by
or for an individual, was based on the expectation that ongoing intercession
was necessary after death, to help free a soul from its time-​limited resting
place in purgatory. Carlos Eire argues that there was clearly residual uncer-
tainty about the afterlife and that those who requested perpetual masses were
insuring themselves against the worst possible scenario, that the other masses
would be insufficient, and that more would have to be said, until purgatory
itself ceased to exist at the end of time.72 Thus, the organisation of permanent
intercession was an important part of the preparation for death, by at least
those individuals who could afford to do so. Perpetual masses offered a second
layer of intercession, a scheme of intervention which followed after death and
judgement of the soul, once it was lodged in purgatory. Thus, “for those who
could afford them, [perpetual] masses apparently offered a singular kind of
spiritual security. According to the complex ranking assigned to different kinds
of masses by theologians, perpetual masses were considered the best kind of
suffrage.”73
The volume and importance of perpetual masses founded in the early mod-
ern period has been understated by many studies of piety based on wills. Foun-
dations were made in large numbers but usually before will-​making occurred.
They were part of a life-​time strategy of preparation for death, to ensure firmly
and solidly that the means were in place, rather than leave them to the un-
certain priorities of executors and kin: as perpetual stipendiaries and charita-
ble bequests were complicated and expensive to found, men and women dis-
charged as much as they could themselves before they made their wills.74 For
example, in a study of 2,500 perpetual mortuary foundations in the dioceses

71 Catherine Marle, “Le salut par les messes: Les Valenciennes devant la mort à la fin du
XVIIe siècle,” Revue du Nord 79 (1997), 45–​57, on 54.
72 Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory, 201–​2.
73 Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory, 200.
74 Clive Burgess, “By Quick and By Dead. Wills and Pious Provision in Late Medieval Bristol,”
EHR 102 (1987), 837–​858.

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Counter Reformation and Preparations for Death 193

of Brittany, almost 70 per cent were notarised acts by living donors, although
these include kin and executors acting for the deceased.75
The foundation of perpetual intercession was clearly the action of the
better-​off during the early modern centuries, but it was not the sole preserve
of social elites. A wide variety of foundations was possible, with varying costs
to suit different donors. Arthur Bisseger’s study of the obits of St Paul’s church
at Villeneuve, shows that the majority of people commemorated were small
proprietors and artisans and that the majority of foundations were by people
of modest fortunes.76 Chaunu’s data shows that in Paris, testators requesting
perpetual foundations increased over the period: from 11 per cent of men in
1550–​1600, to 17 per cent in 1600–​50 and 19 per cent in the second half of the
century. Thus, almost one in five male testators requested perpetual interces-
sion.77 In Brittany, diocesan visitation records show that many parishes in the
16th and 17th centuries had foundations of weekly and/​or anniversary masses
and that they were part of the daily and weekly experience of the liturgy. A vis-
itation of the western part of the diocese of Vannes in 1633 showed that more
than one third of the rural and small-​town parishes had chantries. Whereas a
number of parishes such as Carnac had just one, others such as Kesven and
Ploemur had two and Cléguerec had four.78 By the time of the visitations of
Archdeacon Antoine Binet in the diocese of Nantes in the 1680s, there was an
average of around seven chantries and 8.6 anniversaries in each of the parishes
of the deanery of Clisson and six of each type in the parishes of the deanery
of Retz.79 Perpetual intercession was therefore more widespread and involved
more social groups than has hitherto been stressed. Again, it was part of a life-
time of preparation for eternity.

3.2 Rites of Passage: Sacraments and Prayerful Consolation

Once an individual looked certain to die, the legal officer gave place to the
priest. The most important immediate preparation for death was the reception
of the sacraments of the church, to give spiritual armour to the battle with
demons that was to come and as a final good work to count in the soul’s favour.
The sacramental observance of dying and death was the feature of Catholic

75 Elizabeth C. Tingle, Piety and Purgatory in Brittany 1480–​1720 (Farnham: 2012), see
chapter four.
76 Arthur Bisseger, Une paroisse raconte ses morts: L’obituaire de l’église Saint-​Paul à Villeneuve
(XIVe–​XVe siècle) (Lausanne: 2003), 37.
77 Chaunu, La mort à Paris, 412.
78 adm 41 G 1. Diocèse de Vannes. Visitation épiscopale 1633.
79 Ghenassia, “Les ‘chevauchées’”, 88.

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194 Tingle

mortuary culture that most marked it from Protestantism in the early modern
period.
The Last Rites, as they came to be known, comprised a series of rituals con-
ducted by a priest. The post-​Tridentine Roman ritual was established by Paul v
in 1614 and comprised three sacramental actions. First, there was confession by
the dying person and administration of the sacrament of penance, followed by
the priest’s absolution. Confession and contrition were the most important of
the ritual actions: in an emergency, confession could be made to a lay person
or simply take place in the heart, and penance could always be performed in
purgatory. The formal sacramental form was preferred, of course. Secondly, all
the five senses of the dying would be anointed with oil, in what was known as
Extreme Unction. Robert Bellarmine’s Shorter Catechisme of 1614 stated that is
function was to “blotteth out the reliques of sinnes; giveth ioye and strength
to the soule, to fight againft the diueil in the laft houer; and also helpeth to
recover bodilie health if it be so expedient for the saluation of the soule.”80 The
Douai catechism of 1649 defined Extreme Unction as “the last sacrament giv-
en to dying persons, to strengthen them in their passage out of this life into a
better.”81 Then, if the patient was well enough, the eucharist or viaticum could
be taken. All through this ritual, prayers would be said, the commendatio ani-
marum and the rite of the plenary indulgence, particularly popular in Spain.
Père Hanart summarised the ideal response of the dying: “acts of resignation
to the God’s pleasure, acts of faith, hope, confidence; invocation of Christ, the
Blessed Virgin and the saints; kissing lovingly of the crucifix, raising of the eyes
to heaven; during with a blessed candle in hand; aspersion with holy water.”82
A crucifix was placed between their hands, or held before their eyes to be seen.
At the moment when the soul left the body, the priest would offer a prayer of
commendation of the soul and asperse the corpse with holy water.
The importance of the eucharist in preparations for death can be seen in the
dignity accorded to viaticum processions to the sickbed, which were frequent
in early modern communities. When called upon for the purposes of minister-
ing to the dying, the priest would go in solemn procession, carrying a special
pyx containing the wafer, often under a canopy, accompanied by candles and
bells. People knelt as the procession passed and in theory at least, said a prayer
for the dying. In the diocese of Agen, for example, priests were enjoined by
the synodal statutes that when they were about to set out with the holy oil of
extreme unction, they should have the church bell rung a few times to alert

80 Bellarmine, Shorter Catechisme.

81 An Abstract from the Douai Catechism for Children and Ignorant People (London: 1737), 42.
82 Cited in Chaunu, La mort à Paris, 349.

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Counter Reformation and Preparations for Death 195

the neighbourhood to pray for the sick person.83 Most plenary indulgences,
commonly available to confraternity members, also made provision for forty
days of pardon to be given to people who assisted in processions and who said
prayers for the sick and dying. Their good work of intercession and assistance
was in itself a preparation for their own deaths.
The importance of giving succour to the dying was of such magnitude in the
church that is was the subject of regulation through episcopal synodal rulings.
Firstly, the residence of priests with cure of souls in their benefices was vital,
because of the need by parishioners to access sacraments, particularly for the
dying. It was a great dereliction of duty to leave communities without a priest,
lest parishioners die unshriven. The synodal enactments of Drogheda of 1614
stated that “parish priests are warned not to allow any persons [to] die with-
out the last rites of the church; and any neglect in this regard is to visited with
severe punishment.”84 The synodal statutes of the archbishop of Vienne of the
early 18th century ordered all vicars and curates “to take care that no-​one dies
in their parish, particularly those over 14 years old, without having received
extreme unction, because after having administered to them penance and the
eucharist, they show them that the Church still has another help for them,
which is the sacrament of extreme unction.” To ensure that the dying received
this while they were still able to comprehend it, priests were enjoined to visit
often; but even if a person was unconscious and unable to confess or communi-
cate, it should still be applied so long as they were not excommunicate.85 This
could be difficult in many regions, where dispersed settlement meant people
were often distant from a priest. Serge Brunet writes of priests in some of the
parishes of the Val d’Aran in the Pyrenees, who could take two hours or more
to walk to the dying, up mountains and rivers, in difficult terrain.86 But it was
still customary, as summarised in the synodal statutes of the diocese of Agen
of 1666, that priests must often remind their parishioners to alert them about
the sickness of anyone, at any time of day or night, so they could visit them out
of charity and so that they could receive the sacrament of extreme unction.
Once the sacrament had been applied, the priest was enjoined to continue to

83 Statuts et règlemens synodaux du diocèse d’Agen. Leüs and publiez depuis l’année 1666.
Renouveler and confirmer dans le synode tenu à Agen les 11 and 12 du mois d’Avril 1673
(Agen: 1673), 112.
84 Clodagh Tait, Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550–​1650 (London: 2002), 13.
85 Statuts synodaux publiés dans le synode de 1702 et les suivants tenus par M. Armand de
Montmorin, renouvellés et confirmés par … Monseigneur le Prince Henri d’Auvergne,
archevêque de Vienne (Vienne: 1730), 63.
86 Serge Brunet, Les prêtres des montagnes : La vie, la mort et la foi dans les Pyrénées centrales
sous l’Ancien Régime (Aspet: 2001), 625.

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196 Tingle

visit, right up to the end of life, so they could make commendation of the soul
to God, when the person died.87 This sacrament was without charge or fee, as
the statutes of the diocese of Agen clearly stated.
The importance of priestly ministry is also reflected in the large number
of advice manuals written by fellow clerics, to help the clergy get it right. One
such manual was Jean de Saint-​Samson, La Mort des saincts précieuse devant
Dieu ou les moyens de mourir sainctement, et dans la grâce de Dieu of 1657. The
first seven chapters were effectively a theology of suffering, how it was useful
for the sinner, and why it should be borne with fortitude as a source of grace
from God. The rest comprises prayers to be said at different stages of illness
and dying. Ministers and their assistants were advised not to refuse the dy-
ing and to offer them as much consolation as possible, including hearing their
confession as often as they required. They were to bring before the dying the
passion of Jesus and the merits of the Virgin and the saints, to read them holy
scripture and even gentle music, to comfort them.88 An ideal death therefore
was one encompassed in the sacraments of the Church, conducted with dig-
nity by clergy. Thus, the Annals of Loch Cé prepared in Connacht in the early
17th century described the death of Brian Og MacDermot 28 Jan 1636, “after the
triumph of unction and penitence, and after obtaining victory over the world
and the devil, and from the hands of very many orders and ecclesiastics; and
after assuming the habit of St Dominic.”89
In the Counter Reformation, dying a good death was also a confessional
statement, used to show the superiority over Protestantism. For example, in
Ireland Clodagh Tait has shown the importance of a ‘good’ death to reaffirm
Catholic authority. In the Annals of the Four Masters, compiled by Franciscans
in north-​west Ireland in the early 1630s, a number of ‘good’ deaths were record-
ed as envisaged by the clerics of the Irish Counter Reformation. An example is
that of Manus O’Donnell, injured in 1600, who was taken to Barnismore in Do-
negal where his wounds were found to be incurable. Franciscan monks from
the local monastery:

Were wont to visit him, hear his confession, to preach to him, and to
confirm his friendship with the Lord. He made his confession without
concealment, wept for his sins against God, repented his evil thoughts
and pride during life, and forgave all who had wounded him … Thus, he
remained for a week, prepared for death every day, and a select father of

87 Statuts et reglemens synodaux du diocèse d’Agen, 112–​13.

88 Saint-​Samson, La Mort des saincts précieuse.
89 Cited in Tait, Death,12.

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Counter Reformation and Preparations for Death 197

the said order constantly attending him, to fortify him against the snares
of the devil. He received then the body of the Lord, and afterwards died
on 22nd Oct, having gained the victory over the devil and the world.90

It was particularly important for rulers to die well, with Catholic orthodoxy, to
show their divine appointment and sovereign authority. Descriptions of the
death of Philip iii of Spain, for example, were widely circulated for this reason.
It seems that on his deathbed, Philip had a crisis of confidence in his achieve-
ments as ruler and in the fact of his salvation. He feared the judgement of God,
and all the deeds he had left undone. Father Florencia, a Jesuit, was brought
in and through the priest’s learned assurance of the great goodness and mercy
of God, he was able to console and reassure Philip. The publication of these
events for a reading public was an important way of demonstrating that the
temptations of the devil at the end of life, could be resisted successfully, with
the sacraments and prayers of the Church.91

4 Conclusions

Comfort of the sick and dying, preparing people to meet God, remained a pri-
mary function of the Counter-​Reformation Catholic Church. There were many
continuities across the 15th to the 17th centuries. While Protestantism denied
intercession and the existence of purgatory, Catholics continued to believe in
the third place as the likely destination after death and therefore the value of
spiritual assistance. Also, the material circumstances of dying remained the
same: at home, surrounded by friends and family, with a legal obligation to
dispose of body, soul and property, through will making of some sort.
Yet there were differences between the baroque and the Renaissance death
bed, certainly in France which has been the focus of this study. Lifetime prepa-
ration based on prayer, charity, and the sacrament of the eucharist, was in-
creasingly privileged over the deathbed as the main site of salvation. Clerical
management of the dying –​already important in the later Middle Ages –​was
a fundamental part of the priest’s role, with much guidance from synods and
handbooks aimed at a clerical audience, to prepare them for this activity.

90 Tait, Death, 12.

91 Didier Rault, “L’Agonie et la mort du roi d’Espagne Philippe III (1621),” in De bonne vie
s’ensuit bonne mort : Récits de mort, récits de vie en Europe (XVe-​XVIIe siècle), ed. Patricia
Eichel-​Lojkine (Paris: 2006), 221–​35.

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198 Tingle

There was also growth in confraternity membership and indulgence acquisi-

tion among all Catholics, in practical preparation for their mortal end.
The sacramental wrapping round of dying, with the eucharist the chief site
of salvation, during life and on the deathbed, while based on the traditions of
the Middle Ages, was the chief way in which Catholics separated their final
journeys from those of Protestants. Also, Catholics did not travel across the
great divide into the next world alone, they did so with the Virgin Mary, the
blessed company of heaven, and the prayerful presence of their living friends
and community members. A good baroque death was public, ritualised, and
orderly, even if for many people this was an aspiration rather than a reality.

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 ­c hapter 7

Dying, Death and Burial in the Christian Orthodox

Tradition: Byzantium and the Greek Churches, ca.
1300–​1700
Zachary Chitwood

Byzantine and Orthodox beliefs and practices associated with death, burial,
and remembrance in the late medieval and early modern period (ca. 1300–​
1700), though in many respects similar to those in Catholic and (at the end of
this epoch) Protestant Europe, were also nonetheless marked by a sense of sep-
aration. While Byzantine memorial practices up until roughly the turn of the
millennium might have been regarded as different in degree rather than kind
from those of other parts of the Christian world, theological developments in
the West, above all the doctrine of purgatory, and the subsequent Byzantine/​
Orthodox rejection of these new tenants of the faith, would ensure that the Or-
thodox Church would tread its own Sonderweg with regard to death. Unlike the
dogmatic approach of the Roman Church, Orthodox theologians were content
with a fluid, even nebulous, understanding of the transition between this life
and the next:

[D]‌espite the obvious importance of these themes, the nature of the

human and its fate after death were never authoritatively defined or for-
malized by an ecumenical council, nor were they the subjects per se
of systematic theological inquiry. Thus throughout the Byzantine world
one finds an assortment of eschatologies strewn somewhat carelessly
about.1

1 Nicholas Constas, “ ‘To Sleep, Perchance to Dream’: The Middle State of Souls in Patristic and
Byzantine Literature,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 55 (2001), 91–​124, at 119. See also the more
recent opinion of Vasilios Marinis, Death and the Afterlife in Byzantium: The Fate of the Soul in
Theology, Liturgy, and Art (Cambridge: 2017), 2: “From the outset it should be said that, for all
their reputed and professed preoccupation with the afterlife, the Byzantines never produced
a systematic theology on the postmortem fate of the soul. Or, rather, they did so only in the
fifteenth century, under duress at the Council of Ferrara-​Florence, whose goal was the union
of the Byzantine and Latin Churches.”

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004443433_009

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200 Chitwood

Medieval and post-​medieval Greek authors who attempted to describe the

hereafter were thus free to describe this unknowable sphere according to their
own personal proclivities. Such accounts of death and the afterlife, even if
broadly in agreement regarding fundamentals, often differed considerably in
particulars.
In order to explore the Byzantine and immediate post-​Byzantine relation-
ship with death, dying, and burial, this chapter begins with a brief sketch of the
development of these practices from Late Antiquity until the Fourth Crusade.
An examination of mortuary customs is then offered with a focus on the Late
Byzantine period (1204–​1453). Finally, the further development of these mores
is followed in the first centuries of Ottoman rule (1453–​1700). Over the course
of this survey several important developments in the Byzantine approach to
death and dying can be discerned: first, the increasing importance of the com-
memoration of the dead through prayer and votive masses; second, the pivotal
role the Byzantine rejection of purgatory played in funerary and commemora-
tive practice; third, the centripetal tendencies of Byzantine and post-​Byzantine
memorial practices, which were initially centred upon Constantinople and lat-
er upon Mount Athos.

1 Background Context

In order to contextualize Byzantine funerary and memorial practices after

1300, a brief excursus on their development over the preceding millennium is
necessary. Byzantine burial praxis as well as commemoration or memoria –​ the
Latin conception, though broader in scope, essentially corresponds to the Byz-
antine term mnemosyna (μνημόσυνα) –​were not comprehensively discussed
by writers and theologians of Late Antiquity (ca. 300–​800).2 Indeed, the most
influential Greek Fathers, such as the Cappadocian trio of Basil of Caesar-
ea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus, as well as John Chrysostom,
devoted little attention to death, dying, and burial in their writings, and on
the occasions they did address such topics, such as in eulogies, they empha-
sized Christians’ belief in the Resurrection and therefore the powerlessness of
death.3 The famed testament of Gregory of Nazianzus, the only complete will

2 On this topic, with treatment of both the Latin and Greek traditions, see Éric Rebillard, The
Care of the Dead in Late Antiquity (Ithaca, NY: 2009), esp. 140–​175.
3 Christian Gastgeber, “Tod und Totenklage: Der Standpunkt der Kirchenväter,” in Tod am
Nil: Tod und Totenkult im antiken Ägypten, eds Harald Feschauer, Christian Gastgeber, and
Hermann Harrauer (Vienna: 2003), 45–​56, esp. 49–​51 for the Greek Fathers.

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Dying, Death and Burial in the Christian Orthodox Tradition 201

in Greek transmitted by manuscripts and not by papyri from Late Antiquity,

makes no mention of funerary or memorial provisions.4 This is a lacuna that
has not gone unnoticed by scholars:

The most surprising aspect of Gregory’s will was his lack of concern for
his own memory. He never mentioned his own tomb, an epitaph, or com-
memorative celebrations. Instead, Gregory seems to have preferred to
look back to the memory and wishes of his parents. The focus of his will
was the church at Nazianzus, which was itself already a gift from Grego-
ry’s family.5

Some Christian customs in the context of memorial and funerary practice had
obvious pagan antecedents. This included the pagan memorial meal, at which
the living feasted and drank, so it was supposed, in the company of the dead
to celebrate their memory.6 Though Tertullian in his De testimonio animae
grasped onto the memorial meal as evidence that pagans were already familiar
with the Christian notion of the dead having a continuing existence in the af-
terlife, later Western Church Fathers, such as Ambrose of Milan and Augustine,
sharply criticized this custom and tried to redirect Christian funerary practice
towards almsgiving, a tendency that lasted long into the Middle Ages.7 The
Greek Fathers, by contrast, were more accommodating of this pagan relic, and
indeed the so-​called agape (ἀγάπη), the memorial meal, remained a fixture of
Byzantine memorial praxis from its origins onward.
One key development in the Late Roman conception of death and the after-
life that did take place at the theological level was the articulation of the “part

4 As observed by Joëlle Beaucamp, “Le testament de Grégoire de Nazianze,” Fontes Minores 10

(1998), 1–​100, on 1–​2.
5 Raymond van Dam, “Self-​Representation in the Will of Gregory of Nazianzus,” The Journal of
Theological Studies, New Series 46 (1995), 118–​48, on 131; Cf. Fotis Vasileiou, “For the Poor, the
Family, the Friends: Gregory of Nazianzus’ Testament in the Context of Early Christian Lit-
erature,” in Inheritance, Law and Religions in the Ancient and Mediaeval Worlds, eds Béatrice
Caseau and Sabine R. Hübner (Paris: 2014), 142–​57, on 156–​7.
6 On which see in particular Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Mahl und Spende im mittelalterlichen
Totenkult,” Frühmitteralterliche Studien 18 (1984), 401–​20.
7 Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Die Gegenwart der Toten,” in Death in the Middle Ages, eds Herman
Braet and Werner Verbeke, Mediaevalia Lovaniensia 1.9 (Louvain: 1983), 19–​77. Repr. in
­Andreas von Hülsen-​Esch, Bernhard Jussen, and Frank Rexroth (eds), Die Wirklichkeit und
das Wissen: Mittleralterforschung –​Historische Kulturwissenschaft –​Geschichte und Theorie
der historischen Erkenntnis (Göttingen and Oakville, CT: 2011), 99–​155, on 128–​9.

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202 Chitwood

for the soul” (psychikon).8 Originally formulated by Basil of Caesarea and then
further nuanced by the other Greek Fathers, the “part for the soul” was a doc-
trine that called for Christians to give a fraction of their estates –​sometimes
equivalent to the inheritance of an heir, sometimes a third of the estate, some-
times other amounts –​for the benefit of their souls. Initially, the psychikon had
a strongly caritative tint: it was directed above all at supporting the poor. The
“part for the soul” in the following centuries remained an essential feature of
Byzantine as well as wider Orthodox funerary and memorial praxis, including
the period with which this contribution is concerned.
Already in the Primitive Church the commemoration of the deceased was
marked by fixed rhythms of remembrance. In the so-​called Apostolic Consti-
tutions, which were composed at the end of the 4th century and reflect the
primitive practices of the Antiochene church, we find the following passage
concerning funerary practice:

Let the third [day] of the deceased be celebrated with psalms and prayers,
because of the One Who Rose after three days, and on the ninth [day] in
the memory of the living and dead, and on the fortieth, according to the
old usage. For the people thus also lamented Moses on the anniversary
day in his memory. And let there be distributions to the poor made in his
memory.9

Aside from noting that the commemoration of the deceased on the 30th day
after death was common in the medieval West (and indeed it is found as a
variant in manuscripts) but more or less unknown in Byzantium (where the
40th day was standard), it should also be mentioned that the Apostolic Consti-
tutions were not recognized as canonical until the Council in Trullo of 691–​2.
The second canon of that council noted that the Apostolic Constitutions had
to that point been suspected of heretical interpolations: thus, we cannot as-
sume the widespread acceptance of the provisions of the text, including its

8 The best analysis of the emergence of this doctrine among the Greek Fathers remains Eber-
hard F. Bruck, Kirchenväter und soziales Erbrecht: Wanderungen religiöser Ideen durch die
Rechte der östlichen und westlichen Welt (Berlin, Göttingen and Heidelberg: 1956), 1–​75.
9 Franciscus Xaverius Funk (ed.), Didascalia et Constitutiones Apostolorum (Paderborn: 1905),
vol. 1, 552, 554 (8.42). For recent overviews of scholarship on the Apostolic Constitutions and
the Canons of the Apostles, see Heinz Ohme, “Sources of the Greek Canon Law to the Quini-
sext Council (691/​2): Councils and Church Fathers,” in The History of Byzantine and Eastern
Canon Law to 1500, eds W. Hartmann and K. Pennington (Washington, DC: 2012), 24–​114, on
28–​33; Spyros Troianos, Die Quellen des byzantinischen Rechts (Berlin and Boston: 2017), 52–​3.

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Dying, Death and Burial in the Christian Orthodox Tradition 203

prescriptions for the commemoration of the dead, until the close of the 7th
century. Nonetheless, the essential features of Byzantine memoria –​ periodic-
ity (commemorations on the 3rd, 9th and 40th days after death, though these
numbers sometimes varied), prayer and distributions to the poor –​would not
be essentially different a millennium later, in the period which this chapter is
concerned with.10
We do not possess any truly elaborate descriptions of funerary provisions
and memoria in Byzantium until the 11th century, at which time a number
of wills, as well as monastic charters (typika), allow much more information
regarding memorial provisions to be ascertained. Though these documents
evidence strong continuity with late antique funerary and commemorative
practice in many respects, a far greater emphasis on the memoria of the dead
through prayer and liturgical commemoration is also apparent. Moreover, the
extraordinarily elaborate commemorative practices and descriptions of tombs
that are related in the typika of the Georgian general Gregory Pakourianos in
the 11th century for Bačkovo/​Petritzos in Bulgaria and of Emperor John ii Kom-
nenos (r. 1118–​1143) for Pantokrator in Constantinople can be compared with
the archaeological evidence at both sites (and indeed the former is still a func-
tioning monastery).
Two major events in the 13th century had a significant impact on the devel-
opment of Byzantine funerary and commemorative practice after 1300, and
together represent something of a caesura. The first of these events was the
sack of Constantinople by the warriors of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. The half-​
century occupation of the empire’s most important city by the Latin Christians
and the political fragmentation of former Byzantine territories ensured that
the political and social context of death and dying was now varied and multi-
polar: indeed, the presentation of material in what follows is not stricto sensu
in every case ‘Byzantine’, representing as it does the wider Orthodox world or
Byzantine commonwealth.
The second of these events was the development of the doctrine of purga-
tory in the Latin West, which was elevated to a dogma at the Second Council
of Lyons (1274). This teaching was intensely debated over the course of the 13th
century between members of the Latin and Greek Churches, particularly in

10 The three commemorations on the 3rd, 9th and 40th days after death appear to have been
based on the concept of the soul’s gradual departure from the body after death. On this
point see Gilbert Dagron, “Troisième, neuvième et quarantième jours dans la tradition
byzantine: Temps chrétien et anthropologie,” in Le temps chrétien de la fin de l’Antiquité au
Moyen Âge, IIIe–​XIIIe siècle, ed. Jean-​Marie Leroux, Colloques internationaux de Centre
national de la recherche scientifique 604 (Paris: 1984), 419–​30.

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204 Chitwood

mixed cultural contexts (southern Italy, Latin-​ruled Constantinople, Cyprus).11

Purgatory was never fully accepted by the vast majority of the ecclesiastical
hierarchy of the Orthodox Church and was vehemently rejected by the major
monastic communities (particularly those of Mount Athos). Opposition to this
doctrine became a touchstone of Orthodox belief, even though a comprehen-
sive doctrine of prayer for the dead was not developed by Byzantine church-
men until the Council of Ferrara-​Florence (1438–​1439).12 Byzantine commem-
orative practice as a result was not affected by certain features of the teaching
of purgatory, such as the emphasis on continuous masses in a short period
after death.
Our best evidence for memorial and funerary practices in Byzantium stems
from sovereign burials, and to a lesser extent those of the elite more generally.
From the time of Constantine i (r. 311–​337) until Constantine viii (r. 1025–​
1028), Byzantine emperors were interred in the Church of Holy Apostles in
Constantinople, which very much functioned as an imperial mausoleum
and played an important role in court ceremonial. Romanos i Lekapenos (r.
920–​944), a usurper who sought to integrate his own family within the ruling
Macedonian dynasty, was the first emperor to select (even though his eventu-
al fall from the throne likely gave him little choice in the matter) a burial site
outside of the Church of Holy Apostles. His so-​called Myrelaion contained a
monastic community as well as an almshouse. The daily distribution of 3000
loaves of bread at the Myrelaion strongly suggests the erection of a com-
memorative site. Though an outlier for the time, Romanos’s tomb prefigured
imperial burials from the second quarter of the 11th century onwards, which
focused on the commemoration of individual emperors and their immediate
family members. Recent scholarship has underlined that, despite certain sites
(Pantokrator and Lips Monastery in Constantinople) containing the tombs of
multiple emperors, in the last centuries of Byzantium there was never a con-
centrated attempt to create an imperial mausoleum along the lines of Holy
Apostles.13

11 Gilbert Dagron, “La perception d’une différence: Les débuts de la ‘Querelle du Purgatoire’,”
Actes du XVe Congrès International d’Études Byzantines. Athènes –​Septembre 1976, 4 vols
(Athens: 1979–​1981), vol. 4, Histoire communications (1980), 84–​92, on 85–​8.
12 For the Byzantine response to the doctrine of purgatory, see now Marinis, Death and the
Afterlife, 74–​81.
13 For Pantokrator, see Paul Magdalino, “The Foundation of the Pantokrator Monastery in
Its Urban Setting,” in The Pantokrator Monastery in Constantinople, ed. Sopia Kotzabassi,
Byzantinisches Archiv 27 (Boston and Berlin: 2013), 33–​55; for the Palaiologoi, see Nicholas
Melvani, “The Tombs of the Palaiologan Emperors,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies
42/​2 (2018), 237–​60.

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Dying, Death and Burial in the Christian Orthodox Tradition 205

2 The Late Byzantine Period (1204–​1453)

Before delving into specific cases from the Late Byzantine period, some features
of Byzantine commemoration and burial in this era should be mentioned. One
general problem in examining Late Byzantine burials is that burial in churches
had already been forbidden in Late Roman law, and this prohibition was then
continuously repeated throughout the Byzantine era.14 Yet burial in church-
es was extremely commonplace, thus apparently contradicting both canon
and civil law. Late Byzantine canonists sought a compromise by differentiat-
ing between ‘dedicated’ churches and oratories, whereby burial was allowed
in the latter, or by allowing burial away from the altar in the sides or narthex
of a church.15 In any case, the evidence for burial in churches is so abundant
that it is difficult to find examples where the canonical prohibition of burial in
churches was strictly adhered to.
An issue more unique to the Late Byzantine period was the problem of buri-
al and commemoration of Orthodox in churches of other Christian denomi-
nations.16 The preeminent Middle Byzantine canonist Theodore Balsamon (d.
ca. 1200), apparently with an eye towards Orthodox mixing with Miaphysites
and adherents of the Church of the East, had pronounced the worthlessness
of prayers of schismatics for the deceased. By contrast, John of Kitros (end of
the 13th and beginning of the 14th century), found nothing harmful in Ortho-
dox being buried in Latin churches and commemorated by mixed Byzantine
and Latin communities. John of Kitros’ more relaxed attitude likely reflected
not only the close links between Byzantine and Latin Christianity, but also a
sense of pragmatism, given the significant proportion of Orthodox believers
who lived under Frankish rule in the last centuries of Byzantium.
Given the comparatively abundant evidence regarding sovereign burials,
it is worth going into some detail regarding the commemorative and funer-
ary practices of the Byzantine emperors during this period, as well as sover-
eigns from other Orthodox lands. The Latin occupation of Constantinople
(1204–​1261) disrupted the, by then almost 900-​year-​old, tradition of imperial
burials in the capital. The Byzantine successor states in Epiros (north-​western
Greece), Nicaea (western Asia Minor) and Trebizond (north-​eastern Asia

14 The most comprehensive treatment of Byzantine burial and its regulation in law is Nikos
E. Emmanuelides, Τὸ δίκαιον τῆς ταφῆς στὸ Βυζάντιο, Forschungen zur byzantinischen
Rechtsgeschichte. Athener Reihe 3 (Athens: 1989).
15 Patrick Viscuso, “Death in Late Byzantine Canon Law,” Ostkirchliche Studien 51 (2002),
225–​48, on 241–​2.
16 Discussed in Viscuso, “Death in Late Byzantine Canon Law,” 237.

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206 Chitwood

Minor) all attempted to appropriate the imperial legacy in various ways, and
this included the erection of new imperial tombs. For the Nicaean Empire the
Monastery of Sosandra, founded by John iii Vatatzes between 1225 and 1241 to
commemorate victories over the Seljuk Turks and Latins, served as the main
mausoleum for the brief rule of the Laskarid dynasty.17 Since this martial and
pious emperor was buried there and later venerated as a saint, the monas-
tery functioned as the site of an imperial cult before his relics were moved to
Magnesia in the 14th century. Hagia Sophia in Trebizond, which also housed
a monastic community, was built around the same time by Manuel i of the
Grand Komnenoi (r. 1238–​1261) and it seems to have been designed as a dy-
nastic mausoleum. Interestingly, examination of the archaeological and ar-
tistic remains suggests that only the emperors were allowed burial within the
main church, while the monks and other personages were buried outside of
it. Anthony Eastmond has interpreted this development as a major change in
imperial burial praxis:

The placing of tombs in two different locations –​one inside the church,
the others in the podium niches –​indicates a revolution in imperial fu-
nerary practice. With only the emperor buried within the church, and
all others (whether members of his family or court, or the monks of the
monastery) buried around the exterior, it would suggest the beginnings
of a cult of the individual emperor, in which the hierarchical relation-
ships of life were reproduced after death.18

Imperial burials in the erstwhile capital resumed after the reconquest of Con-
stantinople by the emperor Michael viii in 1261, ending over half a century of
Latin rule. With this momentous territorial acquisition Michael avenged the
ruinous sack of Constantinople by the crusaders of 1204. The consequences
of the sack and the crusade had been economically and politically ruinous for
Byzantium, and the Byzantine churches and monasteries that had previously
housed imperial tombs had not been unaffected by the catastrophe. The capi-
tal’s famed monasteries had been ransacked, or in some cases been taken over
by the Latins, while Constantinople’s grand philanthropic institutions were
never to return to their former glory. The Sampson Hospital, for instance, had

17 The foundation, dedication and in particular the localization of the monastery are dis-
cussed in detail in Ekaterini Mistiou, “The Monastery of Sosandra: A Contribution to Its
History, Dedication and Localisation,” Bulgaria Mediaevalis 2 (2011), 665–​84.
18 Anthony Eastmond, Art and Identity in Thirteenth-​Century Byzantium: The Empire of
Trebizond, Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman monographs 10 (Aldershot: 2004), 34.

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Dying, Death and Burial in the Christian Orthodox Tradition 207

been given to a special Latin hospital order.19 The Pantokrator, another lavish
philanthropic complex that also served as a mausoleum for some members of
the Komnenian dynasty, survived only as a monastery, shorn of its earlier hos-
pital, home for the aged, and leprosarium, until the later Ottoman conquest.20
It was therefore one of Michael viii’s principal tasks to recover some of
Constantinople’s ancient splendour after he had reconquered the city by
refounding and rebuilding the capital’s churches, monasteries, and philan-
thropic institutions.21 Thus, he restored a functioning school to the famed Or-
phanotropheion, although whether he was able to re-​establish the complex’s
full range of charitable activities that had been offered after its refoundation
under Emperor Alexios i Komnenos is rather doubtful.22 Yet for our purposes
Michael viii’s most interesting act in the context of restoring the capital was
his refoundation of the familial monastery of St Michael on Mount Auxentios.
This foundation, located in the Asiatic suburbs of Constantinople southeast of
Chalcedon, had been founded by Michael’s grandfather, the megas doux Alex-
ios, who later adopted the monastic name of Anthony.23
The foundation had both a philanthropic and a commemorative function.
Rather than allowing the monastery to accumulate wealth through the gener-
ation of a surplus, the imperial founder demanded that the surplus extracted

19 For the fate of the Sampson Hospital after 1204, see Dionysios Stathakopoulos, “Stiftungen
von Spitälern in spätbyzantinischer Zeit (1261–​1453),” in Stiftungen in Christentum,
Judentum und Islam vor der Moderne: Auf der Suche nach ihren Gemeinsamkeiten
und Unterschieden in religiösen Grundlagen, praktischen Zwecken und historischen
Transformationen, ed. Michael Borgolte, StiftungsGeschichten 4 (Berlin: 2005), 147–​57,
on 147–​9. He notes that the establishment during the period of Latin rule was closer to
a western hospitale, a generalized welfare institution, than a more medically specialized
traditional Byzantine xenon.
20 On the history of Pantokrator after 1204 see Sophia Kotzabassi, “The Monastery of the
Pantokrator between 1204 and 1453,” in The Pantokrator Monastery in Constantinople, ed.
Sopia Kotzabassi, Byzantinisches Archiv 27 (Boston and Berlin: 2013), 57–​70.
21 Michael viii’s building program is described in detail in Alice-​Mary Talbot, “The Restoration
of Constantinople under Michael VIII,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 47 (1993), 243–​61.
22 Cf. Timothy S. Miller, The Orphans of Byzantium: Child Welfare in the Christian Empire
(Washington, DC: 2003), 194–​5, who relies on topoi-​laden lines describing the function
of the orphanotrophos (aiding orphans, helping the lame, assisting the blind) in a poem
of Manuel Philes as an argument for the complex’s continuing offering of comprehensive
philanthropic services.
23 Edition of the typikon in Opisanie liturgicheskikh rykopisei, vol. 1: Typika, pt. 1, ed. Aleksei
Dmitrievsky (Kiev: 1895), 769–​94 (hereafter cited as Typikon for the Monastery of St
Michael), with an English translation by George Dennis in Byzantine Monastic Foundation
Documents: A Complete Translation of the Surviving Founders’ Typika and Testaments, eds
John Thomas and Angela Constantinides Hero, Dumbarton Oaks Studies 35 (Washington,
DC: 2000), vol. 3, 1207–​36.

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208 Chitwood

from the foundation’s revenues be completely spent every year.24 The mon-
astery, in essence, was to finance charity rather than directly practicing it, a
feature which perhaps points to the increasing recognition of the economic
effectiveness of monasteries. The recipients of this largesse were to be prison-
ers, orphans, and dowry-​less maidens. This triad of beneficiaries is interesting,
because, although such needy groups had long been the target of Christian
charity, with orphans even being housed in special orphanages, this appears to
be the first recorded instance in Byzantine history that prisoners and dowry-​
less maidens benefitted from endowments.
Retaining imperial favour, even in the instance of dynastic change, would
ensure that the monastery’s primary function, namely the commemoration of
members of the Palaiologan family, would continue to be performed.25 The
monastic community, which was not to exceed 40 monks, was obligated to
pray for Michael’s grandparents and parents (his grandfather Alexios, in reli-
gion Anthony; his grandmother Irene Komnene, in religion Eugeneia; his fa-
ther the megas domestikos Andronikos, in religion Arsenios; and his mother
Theodora Komnene, in religion Theodosia). These four progenitors of Michael
were to be commemorated on 9 November, at a memorial meal at which 40
hyperpera (gold coins) were to be provided for the costs of illumination, food,
and the distribution of charity at the monastery’s gates. Michael himself ex-
pected to be included in these commemorations after his death, and as such
the foundation was above all a vehicle for familial commemoration. Michael’s
typikon also included a plea to future rulers to preserve his modest foundation,
which, he emphasized, was not over-​generously endowed.26
The (re-​)foundation of the Constantinopolitan Lips Monastery undertaken
by Michael’s wife, Theodora Palaiologina, is marked by an even greater degree
of familial integration: indeed, it was slated as a residence for female members
of the imperial family,27 and in many other respects can be viewed as a Byz-
antine Hauskloster. The empress emphasized that her children and grandchil-
dren and their consorts, if they so desired, would be allowed burial in the foun-
dation and given annual commemorations.28 Moreover, it was more lavishly
endowed, in the style, if not on the scale, of the Komnenian Pantokrator.29 To

24 Typikon for the Monastery of St Michael 783–​785; Eng. trans. 1226f.

25 Typikon for the Monastery of St Michael 787–​8; Eng. trans. 1278.
26 Typikon for the Monastery of St Michael 789–​90; Eng. trans. 1230.
27 Lips Typikon 128–​9; Engl. trans. by Alice-​Mary Talbot in Byzantine Monastic Foundation
Documents, vol. 3, 1254–​86, at 1278.
28 Lips Typikon 130; Engl. trans. 1278–​9.
29 Lips Typikon 130–​4; Engl. trans. 1279–​80.

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Dying, Death and Burial in the Christian Orthodox Tradition 209

its community of 50 nuns were attached four priests to celebrate mass in the
foundation’s two churches, as well as a hospital housing 12 patients and a staff
of 20, including three doctors, a chief pharmacist, and two apothecaries.
As recent scholarship has underlined, Palaiologan Lips as well as Komne-
nian Pantokrator had been intended as sites of burial and commemoration
for members of the immediate family, rather than as dynastic mausolea.30 In
this respect both Lips and St Michael’s were continuing traditions of imperi-
al foundations that had flourished before the Latin conquest of the capital.
Like Michael’s grander project of renovatio imperii, the tombs of the first Palai-
ologoi, though in some respects marked by the empire’s reduced means, were
aimed at restoration and retrenchment: both were refoundations, both were to
benefit immediate family and, last but not least, both were Constantinopolitan
endowments, and as such still assumed the pre-​eminence of the “Queen of
Cities” within the wider Byzantine/​Orthodox world.
Lips and St Michael’s represented a particular mode of sovereign buri-
al: foundations in which emperors and empresses would be interred and eter-
nally commemorated by the resident monastic community. Like Pantokrator,
such monastic foundations stood under considerable imperial control and
their communities exercised little independent authority. Excessive reliance
upon and interference by the imperial founding family and underdeveloped
monastic independence were to prove a deadly mixture for the long-​term suc-
cess of such imperial burial sites, as neither of these monastic foundations sur-
vived the Ottoman conquest.31
Those who could afford it, in particular Orthodox sovereigns, were there-
fore well-​advised to ensure their post-​mortem commemoration not only in the
funerary churches and chapels they had endowed, but in other, more secure
places as well. The Byzantine elite after ca. 1350, around the time the Otto-
mans had already established a beachhead in Europe, naturally reacted to the
empire’s weakness by increasingly investing their wealth, including endow-
ments and donations associated with burial and commemoration, outside of

30 Melvani, “The Tombs of the Palaiologan Emperors.”

31 Endowing or donating to vigorous reformist abbots and their communities, by con-
trast, was a recipe for the long-​term success of monastic foundations both in the
medieval West as well as in Byzantium: see Michael Borgolte and Zachary Chitwood,
“Herrscherliche Klosterstiftungen im Westen und in Byzanz: Ein Beitrag zur vergleichen-
den Reformforschung/​Royal Monastic Foundations in the West and in Byzantium: A
Contribution to Comparative Scholarship on Reform,” in Menschen, Bilder, Sprache,
Dinge: Wege der Kommunikation zwischen Byzanz und dem Westen 2: Menschen und Worte,
eds Falko Daim, Christian Gastgeber, Dominik Heher, and Claudia Rapp, Byzanz zwischen
Orient und Okzident 9.2 (Mainz: 2018), 51–​61.

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210 Chitwood

­f igure 7.1 
Patterns of sovereign patronage on Mount Athos in the late middle ages
source: created by the author on the basis of google maps

Constantinople. Instead, elite wealth began to be accumulated in the monas-

tic federations of Athos near Thessaloniki and, to a lesser degree, Meteora in
Thessaly, thereby becoming premier venues for the prestige foundations of
Byzantine founders.
Monasteries, in particular those on Mount Athos, also increasingly served as
repositories of elite wealth and vehicles for funding retirement, the latter via
the development of so-​called adelphata, or lifetime annuities. It was Nicolas
Oikonomides who termed this phenomenon “Switzerland Syndrome”: in his
analogy, Mount Athos in the 14th and 15th centuries served much the same
function as a contemporary Switzerland, in that both served as magnets for
elite wealth.32 Moreover, the Holy Mountain in this period also became an
arena for competition between Orthodox rulers, who sought to enhance their
own status by patronizing Athos and securing commemoration by the mo-
nastic communities there. This dynamic was hardly a one-​way process, as the
monks themselves left their cloistered confines to convince Orthodox sover-
eigns to richly endow their monasteries.
The feverish and even entrepreneurial environment of Athos in this period
is illustrated by the undertakings of one its most charismatic monks, Chari-
ton. When Chariton became the abbot of the Monastery of Koutloumousiou
around the middle of the 14th century (ca. 1355/​56), his community was, at

32 Nicholas Oikonomides, “Patronage in Palaiologan Mt Athos,” in Mount Athos and

Byzantine Monasticism, eds Anthony Bryer and Mary Cunningham (Aldershot; 1996), 99–​
111, on 100. Repr. in Society, Culture and Politics in Byzantium, ed. Elizabeth Zachariadou
(Aldershot and Burlington, VT: 2005), no. xxv.

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Dying, Death and Burial in the Christian Orthodox Tradition 211

least by Athonite standards, poor and unimportant. In three versions of his tes-
tament as well as a further document transmitted by the monastery’s archive,
Chariton and his patron related how he sought to secure the economic basis of
his community and increase its status by seeking patrons across the Orthodox
world.33 This charismatic abbot was able to read the writing on the wall regard-
ing the fate of the Byzantine state, and quickly surmised that the Byzantine
emperor and patrons from the empire would not be able to fund the expansion
of his monastery: “On its behalf I not only appealed to prominent Romans to
support me in this endeavour, but also those of other nationalities, from whose
donations I endowed this monastery with no small amount of possessions and
funding, as well as a fair amount of property.”34
Instead, the monastery’s key patron, who would later be designated by
Chariton and the rest of the monks of Koutloumousiou with the honorific title
of ktetor (“founder”), was Vladislav i Vlaicu (1364–​1377), prince of Wallachia.
Vladislav was ruler of a nascent Orthodox principality that had first gained in-
dependence from Hungary under his grandfather, Basarab i. Vladislav’s father,
Nicholas Alexander (r. 1352–​1364), had already began to patronize the mon-
astery, chiefly, so it would seem, by funding defensive works there. Vladislav
himself would continue his father’s patronage of the monastery, richly endow-
ing Koutloumousiou and thereby further enhancing the prestige of his new
state. Indeed, in a document outlining his patronage activity, the Wallachian
prince relates how Chariton had convinced him to become a benefactor of the
monastery by emphasizing how Athos had become the new centre of the Or-
thodox world, the oikoumene: “He [Chariton] said that it would be fitting for
my lordship to do what other lordships have already done, Serbs, Bulgarians,
Rus and Iberians, who have taken pains for their commemoration and honour
on this wondrous and holy mountain, which is, one might say, the eye of the
entire world.”35 This turn of phrase –​“The Eye of the Entire World” (ὁ ὀφθαλμὸς
ἁπάσης τῆς οἰκουμένης) –​had previously been reserved for Constantinople,
the “Queen of Cities.”36 That a Byzantine monk would now advertise the Holy
Mountain rather than Constantinople as the centre of the Orthodox universe,

33 Actes de Kutlumus, ed. Paul Lemerle, Archives de l’Athos 2 (Paris: 1945), 102–​105 (no. 26);
110–​16 (no. 29); 116–​21 (no. 30); 134–​8 (no. 36). Engl. trans. by George Dennis for nos. 29, 30
and 36 in Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents, vol. 4, 1408–​32.
34 Actes de Kutlumus 113; Eng. trans. 1414.
35 Actes de Kutlumus 102–​105, no. 26, on 103, lines 8–​10.
36 On the use of this designation for Constantinople, see Paul Magdalino, “Ο οφθαλμός της
οικουμένης και ο ομφαλός της γης,” in Το Βυζάντιο ως οικουμένη, ed. Evangelos Chrysos,
Εθνικό Ἰδρυμα Ερευνών, Ινστιτούτο Βζυαντινών Ερευνών, Διεθνή Συμπόσια 16 (Athens: 2005),
107–​23.

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212 Chitwood

and that such an argument found a ready audience in the person of Vladislav,
is reflective of the profound shift of gravity which had occurred within the ge-
ography of the Orthodox world after 1204. Athos, not Constantinople, was now
seen as the most desirable site of Orthodox commemoration.
The case of Vladislav demonstrates that, regardless of where a ruler died
and was interred –​and it does seem in almost all of the cases of sovereigns
endowing Athonite monasteries that they were not subsequently buried on
the Holy Mountain –​securing commemoration in this most prestigious of mo-
nastic centres was worth much money and effort. A well-​documented case of
this trend is that of the Grand Komnenoi of Trebizond who, though they were
buried in Hagia Sophia in the capital of their Black Sea kingdom, also sought
commemoration on Athos. Another enterprising abbot, Dionysios, a contem-
porary of Chariton, likewise sought a wealthy patron to secure the future of
the Athonite monastery he had founded shortly after the middle of the 14th
century.
Documents from the monastery’s archive as well as his vita, written in the
16th century but based on an older version, show how this intrepid monk man-
aged to attract patronage. Though Dionysios managed to attain the donation
of various properties on the island of Lemnos from the Grand Stratopedarch
George Astras Synadenos, the brother-​in-​law of the emperor John v Palai-
ologos, as well as Michael Hierakes, which were confirmed by an imperial
chrysobull in 1364, these holdings apparently did not satisfy the ambitions that

­f igure 7.2 
Present-​day view of the Monastery of Dionysiou, from the west
source: photo taken by zachary chitwood, september 2019

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Dying, Death and Burial in the Christian Orthodox Tradition 213

Dionysios had for his new monastery.37 When his brother become the met-
ropolitan of Trebizond shortly thereafter, Dionsysios visited him and, having
impressed the Trapezuntine Emperor Alexios iii with his ascetic way of life
and holiness, secured a significant endowment for his community by means of
an imperial chrysobull issued in 1374.38
In this charter, the emperor played upon the origins of the father of Athonite
communal monasticism, Athanasios (925/​930–​1001), the founder of the Great
Lavra and a native son of Trebizond: “You might say that recently Athanasi-
os was given to Athos from Trebizond, while Dionysios was given in return
from Athos to Trebizond.”39 Like Athanasios the Athonite himself, who had
acquired imperial patronage for his Great Lavra in the person of Nikephoros
Phokas, Dionysios convinced Alexios iii to lavishly endow his own founda-
tion: Trebizond would contribute 100 somia of gold, as well a further annuity
of 100 aspra (silver coins) a year. This would allow Dionysios to provide his
community with all the buildings necessary for a small monastery, including a
church, a walled enclosure, cells, and an aqueduct.40
How had Dionysios induced the potentate of this Black Sea kingdom to
display such generosity towards his monastery? One argument the abbot had
employed was a variation on Chariton’s statement that Athos had become the
“Eye of the World”: Dionysios is quoted in the charter as having stated:

For all emperors, kings and princes have made themselves renowned by
building for the Holy Mountain monasteries and cloisters for their undi-
luted memory. Since you excel many of them, it stands to reason that you
must add something fitting to this, so that you might have, like many oth-
ers, continuous commemoration and unending spiritual enjoyment.41

Indeed, commemoration of Alexios’ dynasty is heavily emphasized in the

chrysobull: his forefathers, “those famous emperors and heroes, the Grand
Komnenoi … may [the monks] intercede for and bless with a ceaseless voice.”42
Also to be commemorated were Alexios himself, his mother, consort, children,
and future descendants.

37 Actes de Dionysiou, ed. Nicolas Oikonomidès, Archives de l’Athos 4 (Paris: 1968), 447–​50
(no. 3).
38 Actes de Dionysiou 50–​61, no. 4.
39 Actes de Dionysiou 50–​61, no. 4, on 60, line 20.
40 Actes de Dionysiou 60, lines 36–​7.
41 Actes de Dionysiou 60, lines 22–​4.
42 Actes de Dionysiou 60, lines 40–​2.

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214 Chitwood

­f igure 7.3 
Artistic rendering of the Monastery of Dionysiou, with captions showing the
various parts of the monastic grounds. Printed at Venice in 1780
source: display from the byzantine museum of culture in
thessaloniki. photo taken by zachary chitwood, september 2019

Nor did the quid pro quo on the part of the monks stop at commemora-
tion: two further conditions were imposed. First, Dionysios’ new foundation
was to be called the “Monastery of the Grand Komnenos” (ἡ μονὴ τοῦ μεγάλου
Κομνενοῦ) –​a demand that, so it seems, was never actually realized.43 Second,
any subjects of Trebizond desiring to join the monastic community, provided
they were morally suitable, were to be accepted without hesitation by Diony-
sios.44 Though the Byzantine emperor also patronized Dionysiou once more
after Alexios iii had issued his charter, it would be two further Grand Kom-
nenoi who would confirm Trebizond’s special relationship with the monas-
tery, and indeed they are still commemorated by the monks of Dionysiou to
this day.

43 Actes de Dionysiou 61, lines 46–​74.

44 Actes de Dionysiou 61, lines 60–​1.

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Dying, Death and Burial in the Christian Orthodox Tradition 215

Although the source material for the last centuries of Byzantium is much
better than that of earlier periods, even this era is still marked by a dearth of
testimony regarding death, burial, and remembrance among the non-​elite.
Compared to the abundant evidence for sovereign burials, the meagre sources
for the funerary and commemorative practices of Byzantine peasants allow
only limited conclusions. Nonetheless, some glimpses are still possible.
The founding of churches or monasteries and then insisting upon burial and
commemoration in them, in the manner of Orthodox sovereigns or the elite,
was not possible on an individual basis for the majority of Byzantine peasants
and urban residents. While the collective foundation of churches in the Late
Byzantine countryside is well-​attested, a feat which seems to have been often
accomplished by whole villages, it is not clear, and by no means to be assumed,
that the individual members of such collective actions would have been guar-
anteed burial or commemorative rights in the churches they founded.45
The most comprehensive set of sources we possess regarding Late Byzan-
tine death, burial, and remembrance are the acts of the Pontic monastery of
Vazelon. The basis of the present edition of the text is manuscript no. 743 of the
State Library in St Petersburg, which contains 190 acts ranging from the years
1245 to 1704, with the vast majority of the acts stemming from before the year
1500. The peasants who lived in the Matsouka region in which the monastery
was located appear to have been relatively well-​off by Byzantine standards,
and there is no mention in the acts of dependent peasants (paroikoi), indicat-
ing a prosperous peasantry with a weak rural aristocracy.
The death and burial of peasant donors are mentioned several times in the
acts themselves; as in the typika, references to approaching death in the acts
are not infrequent. It is difficult to determine whether discussing the inevita-
bility of death was merely formulaic or whether most donors were in fact sick,
aged, or infirm when they made their donations and bequests. A second, per-
haps more unexpected reason cited by donors for making their pious bequests
was more emotional: they became inspired to donate after visiting the monks.
It is clear from the acts that men as well as women visited the monastery. There
would have been numerous reasons for laypersons to come to Vazelon: to seek

45 On the collective foundation of churches in Late Byzantine society, see in particular

Sophia Kalopissa-​Verti, “Church Foundations by Entire Villages (13th–​16th c.): A Short
Note,” Zbornik radova Vizantoloskog instituta, 44 (2007), 333–​41; and “Collective Patterns
of Patronage in the Late Byzantine Village: The Evidence of Church Inscriptions,” in
Donation et donateurs dans le monde byzantin. Actes du colloque international de l’Uni-
versité de Fribourg 13–​15 Mars 2008, eds Jean-​Michel-​Spieser and Élisabeth Yota, Réalités
Byzantines 14 (Paris: 2012), 125–​40.

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216 Chitwood

the spiritual counsel of the monks, who acted as spiritual fathers to some of
Matzouka’s residents; to visit icons or attend special services; or to consult the
monastery’s cartulary and to have the monks adjudicate local disputes.
Several acts of donation were connected with visits to the monastery.
Among the most interesting is an act of the 13th century, in which a woman,
Anna, had spent some time at the monastery, and while there became deathly
ill.46 Upon realizing that Anna would not recover from her illness, the resi-
dent monks tonsured her and gave her the monastic name of Anusia. She was
then buried in the monastery.47 The donors of this act, her father Theodore the
priest of Limbos and his son Basil the reader, donated a field as a consolation
to the monastery as well as for the salvation of Anna’s/​Anusia’s soul. Act 65
of the year 1302 recounts how the donor Anna Ephainava came to visit the
monastery because of the death of a relative, and upon seeing it “my soul loved
the place of the monastery,” whereupon she gave half of her family estate to
the monks.48 Donation was not always a pre-​meditated act, and it would be
interesting to research further the experience –​literally the act of –​convincing
oneself or others to make a pious gift, which was often the subject of monastic
critiques (e.g. Eustathios of Thessalonike).
In return for her donation, Anna requested liturgical commemoration, and
a precondition of this sort for a donation was not unusual: commemoration
(mnemosyna) appears in roughly one-​sixth of the acts of donation for Vazelon.
Far more common is the designation of a donation as intended for the salva-
tion of one’s soul –​in Greek it is more literally rendered as for one’s “spiritual
salvation” (psychike soteria). Donations are normally a “spiritual gift” (psychike
dorea) and “part for the soul” (psychikon), although other terms appear as well.
That the expressions for “commemoration” and “salvation of the soul” were

46 I cite the individual acts of Vazelon according to the reprint/​Modern Greek translation of
the original edition: Τα Άcτα της Μονής Βαζελώνος. Στοιχεία για την ιστορίας της αγροτικής
και μοναστηριακής εγγείας ιδιοκτησίας στο Βυζάντιο κατά το 13–​15 αι., eds F. I. Uspenskij
and V. N. Beneševič, trans. Ilias K. Petropoulos (Thessalonike: 2007), 226 (no. 70). Some
acts of a new edition have now appeared: Alexander Alexakis and Giannis Mavromatis,
“Eleven Documents from the Acts of the Monastery of St. John the Forerunner of
Vazelon in Trebizond,” in Myriobiblos: Essays on Byzantine Literature and Culture, eds
Theodora Antonopoulou, Marina Loukaki, and Sofia Kotzabassi, Byzantinisches Archiv
29 (Boston: 2015), 1–​24.
47 The burial of nuns in male monasteries and monks in female convents had already been
forbidden by Justinian, a prohibition that was repeated in later secular and canonical col-
lections. Yet as this case indicates, mixed burials appear to have been widespread: Viscuso,
“Death in Late Byzantine Canon Law,” 242–​3.
48 Άcτα της Μονής Βαζελώνος, 223–​4 (no. 65).

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Dying, Death and Burial in the Christian Orthodox Tradition 217

synonyms for liturgical commemoration is strongly suggested by one act in

which the two terms are used interchangeably.49
Several acts describe the specifics of how liturgical commemoration was
implemented. Donors were to have their names written in the diptychs, and
one even finds in some of the acts the term diptycharion (not for the diptychs
but rather for the monastic cartulary). Thereafter the monks were to commem-
orate them forever; only one act of the year 1291 further specifies that com-
memoration was to be performed yearly.50 No mention is made anywhere of
the commemorations customarily performed on the 3rd, 9th, and 40th days
after death, but there is no underlying reason to assume that these did not take
place as well. Distributions to the poor, which as we have seen was a major
component of Christian commemorative practice, are also curiously absent
in the acts.
It is worth discussing who in fact was commemorated in the acts of Vazelon.
First of all, while donors asking only for their own commemoration were not
rare, they were certainly nonetheless in the minority. By far the most com-
mon category of commemorated person consisted of a donor’s ancestors or
forefathers, their goneis (γονεῖς). While one might be tempted to translate this
word as “parents,” and perhaps in many cases that is in fact what it meant, in
one act (number 66 of the first half of the 14th century) the donor specifically
distinguishes his mother and his goneis.51 In general it seems to have been a
generic term for one’s ancestors. Children, by contrast, appear much less fre-
quently, and one gets the impression that a good number of the donors were
childless, or at least there are some donations which do not account for the
property claims of children on the inheritance. The profile of persons com-
memorated in the acts as well as the language of the acts themselves suggests
that liturgical commemoration was in Matsouka primarily a backward-​looking
phenomenon: for the most part donors honoured their mothers, fathers, and
ancestors with their bequests. Children sometimes represented a danger: the
acts frequently enjoin a donor’s children to be content with their share of the
inheritance and not to disturb the monks of the Vazelon, lest their commem-
orations be impeded.
A final set of considerations regarding funerary and memorial customs
among the non-​elite during the Late Byzantine period concerns the develop-
ment of canon law, and in particular how the understanding of the “part for
the soul” mentioned at the beginning of this contribution shifted. In an utterly

49 Άcτα της Μονής Βαζελώνος, 269–​70 (no. 116).

50 Άcτα της Μονής Βαζελώνος, 229–​30 (no. 78).
51 Άcτα της Μονής Βαζελώνος, 224–​5 (no. 66).

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218 Chitwood

singular instance in Byzantine history, the patriarch Athanasios i (1289–​1293,

1303–​1309) in 1304 sent a list of ordinances concerning various topics to the
emperor Andronikos ii (r. 1282–​1328) for approval, who gave it legal sanction
as a “novel” two years later. This piece of legislation is known in scholarship as
the “Novel” of Athanasios i, a bizarre instance of a patriarch employing a mode
of imperial legislation.52 The inclusion of the short recension of the novel in
the Hexabiblos (1345) of the Byzantine canonist Constantine Harmenopou-
los meant that it became part of the most popular collection of Byzantine
canon law.
Inter alia this law prescribed remarkable new regulations for the “part for
the soul”: it now became strongly connected with the commemoration of the
dead. Section One of Athanasios’ “Novel” regulated the inheritance of wid-
owed, childless men and women. More specifically, this provision concerned
the status of such persons who were also dependent peasants, subject to either
the state or a local lord. Upon the death of such peasants, their estates were to
be divided into three parts, with one part each going to their lords, commem-
orative rites (mnemosyna), and surviving relatives, respectively. In the absence
of next of kin entitled to the inheritance, one half of the estate would be ear-
marked for their overlords or commemorative rites, respectively.53 A widower
or widow with a child, however, whose child died retained all of the child’s
property, both the matrimonial and patrimonial shares.54 Yet even so one-​third
of the mother’s dowry would go to the child’s commemorative rites, while her
parents would retain a second third, and the final third would go to the surviv-
ing spouse.
Though judging the actual implementation of the “Novel” shortly after its is-
suance is not possible, these provisions of Patriarch Athanasios for peasant in-
heritances would have had momentous consequences for dependent peasants.
In the cases described above, a significant portion of the estate would have
been dedicated to commemoration. Moreover, this “Novel” appears to have

52 V. Laurent, Le patriarcat byzantin: Recherches de diplomatique, d’histoire et de géogra-

phie ecclésiastiques /​publ. par l’Inst. d’Etudes Byzantines des Augustins de l’Assomption
(Kadiköy-​Istanbul). Série 1, Les regestes des actes du patriarcat de Constantinople. Vol.
1, Les actes des patriarches 4, Les regestes de 1208 à 1309 (s.l.; 1971), 389–​95 (no. 1607); cf.
Eleutheria Sp. Papagianne, “Περὶ ‘ψυχικῶν’ καὶ ‘μνημοσύνων’: τὸ νομικό ὑπόβαθρο μιᾶς ἠθικῆς
ὑποχρέωσης,” Επιστημονική Επετηρίδα Θεολογικής Σχολής 13 (2008), 171–​81, on 171.
53 Κωνσταντίνου Ἁμενοπούλου Πρόχειρον Νόμος ἢ Ἑξάβιβλος, ed. Konstantinos G. Pitsakes,
Byzantina kai Neoellenika Keimena 1 (Athens: 1971), 312 (5.8.95); cf. Papagianne, “Περὶ
‘ψυχικῶν’,” 180.
54 Κωνσταντίνου Ἁμενοπούλου Πρόχειρον Νόμος, ed. Pitsakes, 312 (5.8.9). Cf. Papagianne, “Περὶ
‘ψυχικῶν’,” 180–​2.

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Dying, Death and Burial in the Christian Orthodox Tradition 219

deprived dependent peasants of testamentary capacity: there is no indication

that Athanasios’ ordinances only concerned intestate succession, where such
provisions regarding the “part for the soul” normally appear in Byzantine law.
These inheritance provisions in the “Novel” of Patriarch Athanasios also par-
allel the broader trends regarding care for the dead in the other cases during the
Late Byzantine period discussed above, in that commemoration now featured
much more prominently than charity. Indeed, Athanasios no longer terms this
portion as a psychikon, but instead describes it as a share for the commemora-
tive rites of the deceased. While caritative distributions might still be supposed
to have accompanied commemorative rites, it was the commemoration of the
deceased that was now firmly emphasized.

3 The Post-​Byzantine Period (1453–​1700)

The gradual collapse of the Byzantine state, culminating in the Ottoman cap-
ture of Constantinople by Sultan Mehmet ii in 1453, does not appear to have
significantly affected Greek-​speaking Orthodox funerary and commemorative
practices. However, it should also be noted that studies on care for the dead
in this epoch are sparse. Yet one might nonetheless highlight a few features of
this period’s commemorative and funerary practices.
Unlike in early modern Europe, where the theologians of the Protestant Ref-
ormation challenged and rejected many features of late medieval memorial
culture, no parallel theological development emerged in the Greek Church,
though the patriarch Cyril iii (1620–​35, 1637–​8) did express some sympathy for
Protestant views. Orthodox theologians, embittered by the last major attempt
at the union of the Eastern and Western Churches at the Council of Ferrara-​
Florence, continued to reject vehemently Catholic doctrines regarding the af-
terlife, especially purgatory.55
Byzantine sovereign burials, which are relatively well-​attested compared
with other social groups, ceased with the Ottoman conquest and the subse-
quent subjugation of most Greek-​speaking Orthodox Christians under Turkish
rule (Tourkokratia). Instead of Byzantine emperors or other Orthodox poten-
tates (like the emperor of Trebizond), one of the best-​documented examples
of preparation for death and commemoration comes from a Serbian princess

55 See the extremely impressive and competent treatment of Greek Orthodox theology in
this period of Gehard Podskalsky, Griechische Theologie in der Zeit der Türkenherrschaft
(1453–​1821): Die Orthodoxie im Spannungsfeld der nachreformatorischen Konfessionen des
Westens (Munich: 1988).

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220 Chitwood

who became the wife and then the stepmother of a sultan, Mara Branković
(ca. 1418–​1487), who in many respects spans the transition from the Byzantine
to the Ottoman world.56 The daughter of the despot Djuradj Branković (1373/​
75–​1456), for political and diplomatic reasons she was given as a bride in 1436
to the Ottoman sultan Murad ii. Their union remained childless, and after the
latter’s death she was supposed to marry the last emperor of Byzantium, Con-
stantine xi, but two years later Constantinople was captured by her stepson,
Mehmet ii. Enjoying good relations with Mehmet, she spent the second half
of her life (1457–​1487) in the Ottoman Empire, and in particular at her estate in
what is now Daphni, in the western portion of the Greek region of Macedonia.
Her family had enjoyed close patronal relationships with two Athonite
monasteries, Chilandar and St Paul, for around a century by the time she
herself began making benefactions to these monasteries in the 1460s. On 21
May 1466, she had an act of donation drawn up in Church Slavonic in which
she donated the incomes of her villages of Ezeba and Marabintzion, both
of which she had received from Sultan Mehmet ii, to Chilandar (three por-
tions) and St Paul (two portions), in exchange for the commemoration of
seven members of family, including herself.57 Most interestingly of all, the
revenues from the villages were to support young girls she had raised on her
estate (presumably orphans), and the monasteries were to see to it that they
became nuns.58
Though the use of an endowment to support young, probably orphaned
girls is interesting –​and calls to mind the provisions of Michael viii’s founda-
tion of St Michael’s, in which the surplus revenues were to support prisoners,
orphans, and dowry-​less maidens –​her patronage activity, by which she sought
to secure commemoration for herself and her family, was in most respects very
much in line with Byzantine tradition. Yet the fact that almost three years later
(between 4 and 13 February 1469) she had another act of donation drawn up
in Arabic, this time donating all of her property to the two monasteries (again
three portions to Chilandar, two to St Paul’s), brings our attention to the fact
that she was addressing two different cultures and legal traditions: a character-
istic even more apparent in another donation she made that year.59

56 For her life, see Mihailo St. Popović, Mara Branković: Eine Frau zwischen dem christlichen
und dem islamischen Kulturkreis im 15. Jahrhundert, Peleus 45 (Mainz: 2010).
57 Discussion of the donation in Popović, Mara Branković, 136–​8.
58 Popović, Mara Branković, 138 convincingly argues that Mara’s raising of (probably)
orphaned girls on her estate was modelled after Jelena, the consort of King Uroš I
(r. 1243–​76).
59 Discussion of the donation in Popović, Mara Branković, 138.

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Dying, Death and Burial in the Christian Orthodox Tradition 221

­f igure 7.4 
Present-​day view of the Monastery of St Paul, from the west
source: photo taken by zachary chitwood, september 2019

On 1 March 1469, she had a further act of donation drawn up (in Greek)
whereby she donated a metochion, a dependent monastery, to St Paul in ex-
change for the commemoration of herself and her parents.60 The metochion
was located in the district of Proaulakas and included a tower and mill, which
she had purchased for the not inconsiderable sum of 30,000 aspers, or around
667 Venetian ducats. A little over two years later, between 16 and 15 October
1471, she had two Ottoman confirmations of this donation composed: one in
Turkish, in which the sale of the metochion to Mara before she herself donated
it to St Paul was discussed, and a second in Arabic, which emphasized that
the donation of the metochion was a valid legal act.61 Finally, she eventually
retired to a house in Constantinople which she made into a vakif (Arabic waqf),
which was to support herself while she lived and whose surplus was to go to
the monks of another Athonite monastery, Vatopedi, who would inherit it after
her death.62
The provisions Mara undertook for her commemoration very much reflect-
ed the two worlds of the Byzantine twilight and Ottoman ascendancy that her

60 Discussed in Popović, Mara Branković, 143–​4.

61 English translation of the second document in Phokion P. Kotzageorgis. “Two Vakfiyyes of
Mara Branković,” Hilandarski Zbornik 11 (2004), 307–​23, on 318–​19.
62 English translation of the document in Kotzageorgis, “Two Vakfiyyes,” on 319–​21.

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222 Chitwood

life had straddled, not least of all in the way she had endowment and donation
charters drawn up initially in Greek or Slavonic, and then in Turkish or Arabic:

Thus, the sparsity observed in the Ottoman documents may be interpret-

ed as being due to the existence of documents in the languages of the
two people involved (Serbian, Greek), where a more detailed description
of the clauses and the purposes of the bequest is found. The Ottoman
document functioned simply as a confirmation of the legal transaction
and it provided the weight of official authority.63

Her endowments are the first recorded vakifs of any Christian woman in the
Ottoman Balkans. In addition to the hybrid nature of her patronage, her foun-
dations also represent the culmination of long-​term Byzantine/​Orthodox com-
memorative trends. This included a continuing shift of patronage, which often
touched upon funerary and commemorative aspects, from Constantinople to
Mount Athos: as far as we can discern, all of her endowments went to Athonite
monasteries (Hilandar, St Paul and Vatopedi).
Regarding the burial practices of the non-​elite, an act of Patriarch Jeremi-
ah i (1522–​24, 1525–​45), the longest-​serving patriarch of the immediate post-​
Byzantine period, deals with the complaints of priests on the island of Lesbos
who objected to having to perform funerary and commemorative rights for
parishioners who had given a portion of their estates to monasteries.64 In their
view it was the monks who had the responsibility of burying such donors. The
act can be construed as evidence for the continuing monasticization of the
Orthodox Church, a process that had been underway by that point for over a
millennium. Burial in monasteries and commemoration by monks had already
been viewed by some authors as superior to interment in regular churches and
memorialization by priests even in the Middle Byzantine period.
Like the acts of the Monastery of Vazelon in the Late Byzantine period, an-
other well-​preserved corpus of sources in connection with a single monastery
allow us significant glimpses into the commemorative practices, if not neces-
sarily the burial, of the non-​elite of the Orthodox population under Ottoman
rule as well. The so-​called “Codex B” of the Monastery of St John Prodromos in
Serres, Macedonia, contains acts of donation which are clustered in the period

63 The contents of the various versions of these charters also vary considerably in length and
detail. According to Kotzageorgis, “Two Vakfiyyes,” 310–​11.
64 Michael Stroumpakes, Iερεμίας A’-​ Πατριάρχης Kωνσταντινουπόλεως (1522–​1546). O Bίος και
το Έργα του (Athens; 2005), 306–​7 (no. 19).

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Dying, Death and Burial in the Christian Orthodox Tradition223

­f igure 7.5 
Wooden commemorative register (brebeion) from the Church of Forty Martyrs,
near Saranda (contemporary southern Albania), 1593–​4
source: display from the byzantine museum of culture in
thessaloniki. photo taken by zachary chitwood, september 2019

­f igure 7.6 
Wooden commemorative register (brebeion) from the Convent of the Life-​giving
Fountain in Thessaloniki, 1731. In this case the register was apparently never
filled in (or the names were later painted over). The central panel of the register
divides the names of those to be commemorated by category, including priests,
ordained monks, and regular monastics.
source: display from the byzantine museum of culture in
thessaloniki. photo taken by zachary chitwood, september 2019

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224 Chitwood

1601–​1664.65 In a development paralleled by contemporaneous monasteries in

Russia, though to the knowledge of the author not practiced before the early
modern period, the price for commemoration by the monks had become fixed,
fluctuating between 8000 and 5000 aspers (and in the process perhaps follow-
ing the value of the currency) over the course of the 17th century.66

4 Conclusions

In summation, practices regarding death, burial and remembrance among

Greek-​speaking Orthodox Christians in the Late Byzantine and early mod-
ern periods underwent a number of interesting developments. Perhaps the
greatest change from Primitive Christian praxis over these centuries was the
marked commemorative turn in burial and memorial customs: in both Late
Antiquity and the Middle Byzantine period charitable distributions to the
poor on behalf of the deceased were an important component of Christian
funerary practice. The commemoration of the dead in liturgies and prayer was,
by contrast, less emphasized in Early Christian tradition, yet became more pro-
nounced over time.
The rejection of purgatory in the Orthodox tradition, in which many au-
thors did, however, conceive of an intermediate state of the soul before the
Final Judgment, had an effect on commemorative practice. Though the preva-
lence in Latin Europe of repeated votive masses held continuously after death
quickly to better the state of the deceased in purgatory has been exaggerated –​
annual commemoration remained an important part of memoria in the Ro-
man Church –​in the Byzantine and Orthodox tradition regular, theoretically
eternal, commemoration remained the basic goal of every founder and donor.
Most commemorations were annual, celebrated on the day of death, though
daily and weekly commemorations were not unknown.
Finally, the centre of gravity in the Orthodox world, the oikoumene, shifted
in the period under examination from Constantinople to Mount Athos. Athos
had become, as we have seen, the “Eye of the World” in the minds of many Or-
thodox Christians. Correspondingly, commemoration and patronage associat-
ed with funerary practice were increasingly focused upon the Holy Mountain,
and not on the “Queen of Cities.”
65 Paolo Odorico, “Le prix du ciel: Donations et donateurs à Serrès (Macédoine) au XVIIe
siècle,” Balkanika 27 (1996), 21–​44.
66 Odorico, “Le prix du ciel,” 30–​3.

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 chapter 8

Death, Burial and Remembrance: The Christian

Orthodox Tradition in the East of Europe

Ludwig Steindorff

The chapter will examine death, burial, and commemoration in the territo-
ries of Muscovy and of Ruthenia, that is, the Orthodox territories of Poland-​
Lithuania. The main focus is on the Muscovite territory, reflecting the exper-
tise of the author and because a richer contemporary historiography exists for
Muscovy on these topics. This includes a case study from Muscovy: the unique
system of liturgical commemoration bound to a rich pragmatic writing culture
which developed from the 16th century, similar to practices which flourished
in western Europe in the high Middle Ages.1 Differences and commonalities
will be examined in attitudes to death, burial and commemoration in the me-
dieval and early modern Latin west on the one side and in the Orthodox world
of eastern Europe on the other. Finally, we examine differences between prac-
tices in Ruthenia and Muscovy.

1 Geographical and Religious Contexts

1.1 Territorial Framing

Muscovy and Ruthenia2 were territories inhabited mainly by East Slavic pop-
ulations and relied upon the tradition of the Kievan Rus’, whose ruler Grand

1 The term is chosen by me in correspondence with the German term “Pragmatische Schrift-
lichkeit,” which is frequently used in German medievalist research from the late 1980s on-
wards. It refers to the production of texts which serve concrete, actual purposes of admin-
istration and are subject to changes and additions, unlike liturgical books or chronicles.
Notarial books and urban statutes are classical examples of pragmatic writing literature in
the secular sphere. The various books and lists for the administration of donations and com-
memoration form a central part of the pragmatic writing culture in the ecclesiastical sphere.
On this topic, see the programmatic volume by Hagen Keller (ed.), Pragmatische Schriftlich-
keit im Mittelalter: Erscheinungsformen und Entwicklungsstufen, Münstersche Mittelalter-​
Schriften, 65 (Munich: 1992).
2 Roughly the present-​day regions of central and northwestern Russia, Belarus’ and Ukraine.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004443433_010

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226 Steindorff

Prince Vladimir was baptized by the Byzantine rite in 988 and where a sta-
ble Orthodox hierarchy developed from the 11th century onwards. Liturgy was
celebrated in Church Slavonic. A mainly religious book culture developed in
Cyrillic script.3
The Kievan Rus’ principalities developed on the trade routes along the
rivers from the Baltic Sea to Constantinople, and towards the silk roads in
central Asia. In the 12th century, the Rus’ expanded to the northeast. The
city of Moscow is mentioned for the first time in 1147. At the same time,
the different principalities of Rus’, all of them in the hands of members of
the dynasty of the Riurikovichi, increased their own power and gained more
independence.
All territories of the Kievan Rus’ were affected by the Mongol invasion in
1237–​40. But only the principalities in the north and northeast remained under
tributary rule of the Mongols for two and a half centuries. From the beginning
of the 14th century, the princes of Moscow succeeded in gathering the Russian
lands by successively subduing the other principalities in the north, including
the trading city of Novgorod in 1478. The process was supported by the cir-
cumstance fact that from 1328, the princes of Moscow secured for themselves
the title of the grand prince, and in 1325, the metropolitan of Kiev and all Rus’
transferred his see to Moscow, after residing at Vladimir to the east of Moscow
from 1299.4 We should mention as further caesurae the de facto autocephaly
(ecclesiastical independence) of the church of Muscovy since 1448, the coro-
nation of Grand Prince Ivan iv Vasil’evich in 1547 as tsar, and the official recog-
nition of the autocephaly of the church in 1589, including granting the title of
patriarch to the metropolitan.
The southern principalities of the former Kievan Rus’, from Kiev in the east
to L’viv (Russian form L’vov, Polish form Lwów) in the west, were integrated
into Lithuania and Poland respectively until the end of the 14th century. After
the Polish-​Lithuanian union of 1386 they were mostly under one ruler. While
expanding to the southeast, both realms incorporated territories with pop-
ulations following Orthodox traditions, and after some earlier attempts the

3 For more detailed information concerning these topics see for example: Maureen Perrie, (ed.),
From Early Rus’ to 1689, The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. i (Cambridge: 2006); Serhii
Plokhy, The Origins of the Slavic Nations: Premodern Identities in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus
(Cambridge: 2006); Serhii Plokhii, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (New York: 2015);
Andreas Kappeler, Ungleiche Brüder: Russen und Ukrainer: Vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart
(Munich: 2017).
4 I use the Russian form “Kiev” which corresponds to the form used in pre-​modern sources.
The modern Ukrainian form is Kyiv.

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The Orthodox in the East of Europe 227

Lithuanian princes succeeded in establishing their own Orthodox hierarchy

for these territories at the end of the 15th century.
While the Muscovite church was de facto autocephalous from 1448, the met-
ropolitan of Kiev was under the jurisdiction of the patriarchate of Constanti-
nople. Thus, the situation of the Orthodox population in Ruthenia was quite
different from that in Muscovy, which despite certain contacts with Europe
from the late 15th century, remained quite isolated from western cultural influ-
ences until the 17th century. Muscovy was proud of being the only politically
independent Orthodox state at that time.
In Ruthenia, the Orthodox experienced life in a state under a Catholic ruler,
and especially in the larger cities different religious denominations were used
to living side by side. The coexistence increased after the Union of Lublin in
1566, which led to a firmer political integration of the Lithuanian nobility into
the Polish-​Lithuanian composite state and resulted in territorial changes. Also,
the east of Ruthenia including Kiev became a part of Poland within the Union,
rather than part of Lithuania.
The Union of Brest in 1596 aimed at a firmer integration of the Orthodox
population into the state. The church hierarchy was to recognize the pope as
head of the church, while the rites and the use of the Church Slavonic language
in liturgy could remain. But the new Greek-​Catholic church was not general-
ly accepted by either the hierarchy or the believers, so from the 17th century
there existed three clerical establishments: the Orthodox, the Greek-​Catholic,
and the Roman-​Catholic.
The attempt to establish a Cossack state independently from Poland under
the protection of the tsar of Muscovy in 1654 quickly failed. In 1667, Kiev and all
territories east of the Dnepr came under Muscovite rule, and in 1686 the patri-
arch of Constantinople delegated the right of consecration of the metropolitan
of Kiev to the patriarch of Moscow. The western parts of Ruthenia remained
within the Polish-​Lithuanian Commonwealth until the partitions of Poland be-
ginning in 1772. The experience of coexistence with western religious and secu-
lar culture from the late Middle Ages turned out to be among the preconditions
for the formation of the modern Ukrainian and Belorussian nations.

1.2 Religious Framing

Although there were closer contacts with western Christianity in Ruthenia
than in Muscovy, the religious framing of death, burial, and remembrance was
much the same across the whole Orthodox east of Europe. As elsewhere, Chris-
tianization included the change to burial ad sanctos at least among the elite,
around or even within churches, as early as the era of the Kievan Rus’. One
of the first motives for building churches and founding monasteries was to

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228 Steindorff

secure a burial place and commemoration.5 After the first centuries of Chris-
tianization, certainty in the expectation of salvation declined, to be replaced
by a belief in the need for ‘managing’ the salvation of the soul. Already in the
period of the Kievan Rus’ we see all elements of medieval Christian memorial
culture: the care for the deceased through donations, prayer including litur-
gical commemoration, and charity. These interlinked actions were to aid the
soul to secure salvation at the Last Judgement.6
In contrast to the west, however, a concept of purgatory did not devel-
op, and in general, eschatology remained more pluralistic.7 But there was
a rich imagery around the ‘small’ eschatology, the state of the soul during
the 40 days immediately after death, from the separation of the soul from
the body until God’s decision about the place in which the soul would re-
side to await the day of the Last Judgement. As shown also on 15th-​century
icons of the Last Judgement, the soul had to pass the heavenly “tollbooths”
referring to different sins. Only good deeds performed during a lifetime and
the prayers of the living helped to compensate for sin and thus paid the
“toll” for the soul. While in Muscovy the tollbooths were shown on top of a
snake, which had replaced earlier depictions of the River of Fire, in Polish-​
Lithuanian territory the new motif was quickly transformed into a zigzag

5 Gerhard Podskalsky, Christentum und theologische Literatur in der Kiever Rus’ (988–​1237)
(Munich: 1982), 52; cf. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-​Wetzor (trans. and
eds), The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text (Cambridge, MA: 1953), 137, entry for
the year 6545 (1037) about the Grand Prince Yaroslav Vladimirovich: “[…] During his reign,
the Christian faith was fruitful and multiplied, while the number of monks increased, and
new monasteries came into being. Yaroslav loved religious establishments and was devoted
to priests, especially to monks.”; 141, entry for 6531(1051) about the foundation of the Kievan
Cave monastery: “Many monasteries have indeed been founded by emperors and nobles and
magnates, but they are not such as those founded by tears, fasting, prayer, and vigil.”
6 Ludwig Steindorff, Memoria in Altrußland: Untersuchungen zu den Formen christlicher Toten-
sorge, Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte des östlichen Europa 38 (Stuttgart: 1994), 24–​9,
136–​56. The triad of donation, commemoration and charity is frequently summarized under
the research term Memoria in German historiography, see for instance the programmatic vol-
ume by Karl Schmidt, Joachim Wollasch (eds), Memoria: Der geschichtliche Zeugniswert des
liturgischen Gedenkens im Mittelalter, Münstersche Mittelalter-​Schriften, 48 (Munich: 1984).
For research in English on Memoria in the medieval West see for instance Barbara Rosen-
wein, To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter: The Social Meaning of Cluny’s Property, 909–​1049 (Itha-
ca, NY: 1989); Giles Constable (ed.), The Abbey of Cluny: A Collection of Essays to Mark the
Eleven-​Hundredth Anniversary of its Foundation, Vita regularis, 43 (Berlin: 2010).
7 For an overview of this imagery see Steindorff, Memoria, 87–​91. The Uniates also do not
mention purgatory in their testaments; see Lilya Berezhnaya, “ ‘True Faith’ and Salvation in
the Works of Ipatii Potii, Meletii Smotryts’kyi, and in Early-​Modern Ruthenian Testaments,”
Cahiers du Monde Russe 58 (2017), 435–​464, on 460.

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The Orthodox in the East of Europe 229

road or ladder of boxes, the ladder resembling the Ladder of Divine Ascent
by John Chrysostom.8
Of course, we must remember that Christianization was a long process,
starting with the urban centres and the elite and only slowly penetrating re-
mote areas. Burial places far outside of rural settlements were not unusual
even into the 16th century. Ancient customs on the basis of the pre-​Christian
concept of the presence of dead among the living survived within a syncretic
practice, condemned as dvoeverie (“double faith”) by ecclesiastical authors,
and described as bytovoe pravoslavie (“everyday Orthodoxy”) by modern
ethnographers.9

2 Death Preparation, Dying, and Burial

The ideal of a good death was the same as we know it from medieval west-
ern sources: death follows a short phase of illness and weakness. The person
discerns the approach of death and is not alone during the last days: there is
opportunity to reconcile oneself with relatives, neighbours, and followers, to
make dispositions about property and the funeral, if this has not been settled
beforehand in a will or testament.10
There are two wonderful texts describing the last days of a person in a sur-
prisingly realistic manner, far from a hagiographic style. The first of these is the
Tale about the Death of Pafnutii of Borovsk, who founded the monastery of the
Dormition of the Mother of God near Borovsk in 1444 and who had been its
first igumen, abbot.11 Soon after Pafnutii’s death on 1 May 1477 his disciple Inno-
kentii wrote down an account of the last week in the life of Pafnutii, beginning

8 David M. Goldfrank, “Who Put the Snake on the Icon and the Tollbooth on the Snake? –​
A Problem of Last Judgment Iconography,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 19 (1995), 180–​99;
Lilya Berezhnaya and Paul Himka, The World to Come: Ukrainian Images of the Last Judge-
ment (Cambridge, MA: 2014), xviii, xxiv–​xxv.
9 Steindorff, Memoria, 38–​40.
10 As summarized by Philippe Ariès, Studien zur Geschichte des Todes im Abendland (1980)
(Munich: 1981), 19–​31 in the subchapter “Der eigene Tod” (“La mort de soi”).
11 Text: L.A. Dmitriev, (ed.), “Rasskaz o smerti Pafnutiia Borovskogo,” in Pamiatniki liter-
atury Drevnei Rusi: Vtoraia polovina XV veka, ed. D.S. Likhachev (Moscow: 1982), 478–​
512; T. Allen Smith, “Death and Transfiguration: The Final Hours of Muscovite Monks,”
Canadian Slavonic Papers 48 (2006), 119–​36. For a German translation with commentar-
ies: Ludwig Steindorff, “Die Erzählung vom Tod des Pafnutij Borovskij,” url: https://​www
.histsem.uni-​kiel.de/​de/​das-​institut-​1/​abteilungen/​osteuropaeische-​geschichte/​materi-
alen/​Die%20Erzaehlung%20ueber%20den%20Tod%20von%20Pafnutij%20Borovskij.
pdf (last accessed 28/​6/​2020).

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230 Steindorff

from the moment on Thursday, 24 April, when Pafnutii gave instructions to

Innokentii on how to repair the dam of the monastery’s fishpond. But when
Innokentii asked Pafnutii to supervise the work, the latter answered: “I cannot
care about this, because an urgent matter is waiting for me.” Some hours later
he told Innokentii: “You do not know what is pressing me, the shackles want to
come loose.” But Innokentii did not yet guess the meaning of these words. The
following days are described in detail: the services Pafnutii attended; which
of the brethren was by his side in the cell; what Pafnutii said and to whom. As
a gesture of modesty Pafnutii refused any visits from outside the monastery,
even by emissaries of the Grand Prince Ivan iii Vasil’evich, his mother Mariia
Yaroslavna, and his wife Sofiia Pаleolog. The funeral service in the church and
the burial of Pafnutii are included in the Tale, but these events were of no real
interest to Innokentii, because they followed normal practice.
The second text refers to a secular person, the Grand Prince Vasilii iii Iva-
novich, who died on 4 December 1533. The Tale of the Illness and the Death
of Vasilii Ivanovich was written by an eyewitness who was present throughout
most of the events. It starts at the end of August 1533, shortly before the out-
break of the grand prince’s illness, an abscess most probably due to periostitis.
We can follow the itinerary of the grand prince and his family, the first vain
attempts to continue life as before, the return to Moscow, the call for doctors
(one among them certainly a foreigner from Lübeck), consultations with his
entourage, the increasing consciousness about his impending death, the com-
position of a new testament, the goodbye to his wife, the “Office at the parting
of the body from the soul.”12 Shortly before death Vasilii desired to be tonsured.
This practice of dying as a monk became increasingly popular in Muscovy
from the 14th century, although less among the princely families than among
the service nobility and other social groups. Vasilii was the first grand prince to
adopt this practice. Despite the hesitant attitude of secular attendants, finally
the metropolitan Daniil fulfilled the wish and Vasilii died as the monk Var-
laam.13 He was commemorated in liturgy later under this name. Among the fu-
ture rulers of Muscovy only his son Ivan iv Vasil’evich the “Terrible” and Boris

12 This testament is lost. See Robert Craig Howes (ed. and trans.), The Testaments of the
Grand Princes of Moscow (Ithaca, NY: 1967), 299; the translation of an older version from
1523 on 299–​303.
13 Text: N.S. Demkova, (ed.), “Povest’ o bolezni i smerti Vasiliia III,” in Pamiatniki literatury
Drevnei Rusi. Seredina XVI veka, ed. D.S. Likhachev (Moscow: 1985), 18–​46; Isolde Thyrêt,
“The Tale of the Death of Vasilii Ivanovich and the Evolution of the Muscovite Tsaritsa’s Rule
in 16th Century Russia,” in Dubitando. Studies in History and Culture in Honor of Donald
Ostrowski, eds Brian J. Boeck, Russell E. Martin, and Daniel Rowland (Bloomington,
IN: 2012), 209–​24.

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The Orthodox in the East of Europe 231

Godunov followed his example and died as monks, Iona in 1584 and Bogolep
in 1606 respectively. Like his predecessors and his later successors, Vasilii iii
was buried ad sanctos, in the Church of the Archangel, the sepulchral church
of the dynasty, within the Kremlin of Moscow. Again, the account of the burial
itself is not worked out in detail. Despite the specific circumstances in which
the two tales happened, they certainly corresponded to a general practice of
preparation for death which comprised the settlement of questions of inheri-
tance and succession, confession, reconciliation and farewell, communion and
accompanying rites.
It may be questioned to what degree believers at that time had internalized
the Church Slavonic text of the “Office at the parting of the body from the soul,”
which is similar in images and ideas to the western late medieval ars morien-
di, but which relies on the corresponding Greek rite, in which the text alter-
nates between moments which evoke despair and appeals to hope.14 In about
1500, the Middle Low German Dialogue between Life and Death was translated
into Old Russian at Novgorod. The widely distributed Tale about the Quarrel
between Life and Death, a later version from the middle of the 16th century,
integrated motifs from the Greek-​Slavonic tradition.15 The successful transfer
of the motifs of a Western text into Old Russian literature serves as proof of
the common basis of religious experience in pre-​modern societies: despite all
hope of salvation the fear of something horrifying is inextinguishable.
As proved on the basis of testaments and sermons from Ruthenia, fear of
the moment of death in Orthodox documents was less expressive than in
Catholic ones, and this is confirmed by the Muscovite material as well.16 While

14 Steindorff, Memoria, 87–​8. For an English translation of the rite see: The Office at the
Parting of the Soul from the Body, url http://​orthodoxinfo.com/​death/​service_​parting.
aspx (last accessed 28/​6/​2020); following the edition by Isabel F. Hapgood, Service book of
the Holy Orthodox-​Catholic (Greco-​Russian) Church (Cambridge: 1906), 360–​7.
15 R.P. Dmitrieva, Povesti o spore zhizni i smerti (Moscow: 1964); Theodor Lewandowski, Das
mittelalterliche Zwiegespräch zwischen dem Leben und dem Tode und seine altrussische
Übersetzung: eine kontrastive Studie, Slavistische Forschungen 12 (Cologne: 1972).
16 I.V. Dergacheva, Posmertnaia sud’ba i “inoi mir” v drevnerusskoi knizhnosti (Moscow: 2004),
146–​87, on the basis of sinodiki, memorial books from the Muscovite territory (see below);
Lilya Berezhnaya, “Sin, Fear and Death in the Catholic and Orthodox Sermons in the 16th–​
17th Century Polish-​Lithuanian Commonwealth (An Attempt at Comparison),” in Être
catholique –​être orthodoxe –​être protestant: Confessions et identités culturelles en Europe
médiévale et moderne, eds Marcus Derwich and Michael V. Dmitriev (Wrocław: 2003),
253–​84; M.S. Cherkasova, “Pozemel’nye akty kak istochnik dlia izucheniia religioznogo
soznaniia srednevekovoi Rusi,” Drevniaia Rus’. Voprosy medievisti 8/​2 (2000), 35–​47; Olga
E. Kosheleva, “Death: Emotional Undercurrents in the Wills and Letters of Seventeenth-​
Century Russian Aristocrats,” in Das Individuum und die Seinen: Individualität in der

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232 Steindorff

in Catholic sermons God appears as severe judge or even avenger, in the Ortho-
dox text he is merciful and a friend of mankind:

The most essential is the idea of reconciliation to death, an appeal not

to feel fear of its coming and to prepare oneself for the passage to the
better world. […] The main effect of the Fall is mortality, not corruption
of a human nature, as it was usually described in the Catholic sermons.17

Usually the burial took place the first day after death. The rites differed, de-
pending whether the deceased had been a layperson, a parish cleric, or a
monk.18

2.1 Burial Places

When writing about burial customs in Muscovy, Western travellers were espe-
cially surprised by the expressive death laments and by the custom of putting a
letter of indulgence, a kind of permit, into the coffin. These letters are also well
known from Ruthenia. Travellers recorded the custom of a meal at the burial
place after the funeral and on memorial days, a custom present also in other
Orthodox regions, corresponding to syncretic conceptions of the continuing
presence of the dead among the living.19
Local graveyards of the lower urban classes and the rural population were
not kept in any great order. Also, in contrast to the late medieval and ear-
ly modern west, the elite did not develop a culture of representational se-
pulchral monuments. The most prestigious monuments were sarcophagi as
mentioned in the records of the Church of the Archangel in the Kremlin, the
burial church of the ruling dynasty.20 Normally, grave sites within a church

okzidentalen und in der russischen Kultur in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, eds Yuri
l. Bessmertny and Otto Gerhard Oexle (Göttingen: 2001), 216–​30. No hyphen: 17th-​century?
17 Berezhnaya, “Sin, Fear and Death,” 274.
18 S. Ju. Shokarev, “Russkii srednevekovoi nekropol’: Na materialakh Moskvy XVI-​XVII vv.,”
in Kul’tura pamiati. Sbornik nauchnykh statei, eds E.A. Shupelova and A.V. Sviatoslavskii
(Moscow: 2003), 141–​88, on 149–​54.
19 Steindorff, Memoria, 93–​ 4, 96–​
7; Nikolaos Chrissidis, “Between Forgiveness and
Indulgence: Funerary Prayers of Absolution in Russia,” in Tapestry of Russian
Christianity: Studies in History and Culture, eds Nickolas Lupinin, Donald Ostrowski,
and Jennifer B. Spock (Columbus, OH: 2016), 261–​93; for Ruthenian practice see Leonid
Volodymyrovych Tymoshenko, “Tradyciia i praktyky pomynannia pomerlykh u Kyivs’kii
metropolii v druhij polovyni XVI –​pershii polovyni XVII st. Vnesok tserkovnych bratstv,”
Drohobyts’kyi kraieznavchyi zbirnyk 14–​15 (2011), 123 [I thank Kyrill Kobsar for turning my
attention to this publication.]
20 Shokarev, “Russkii srednevekovoi nekropol’,” 165–​6.

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The Orthodox in the East of Europe 233

or in the courtyard of a prestigious monastery were covered by limestone

slabs incised with an inscription and modest decoration.21 Even if the in-
scriptions or plates are lost nowadays, we are sometimes able to identify a
burial place from contemporary lists of burial grounds. These were needed
for liturgical purposes, since on the occasion of an annual commemoration
the monks and clerics would have a procession to the grave of the commem-
orated person.22
We may even surmise a correlation between the comparatively modest se-
pulchral culture and the flourishing practice of liturgical commemoration. We
do not see any interest in the dead body itself in the sources, except for the
question of how to dress it before laying out and burial.23
We can see an evolution over time in elite practice: while earlier generations
were buried in small churches on their own estates, from about 1450 it became
more usual to be buried in a large monastery, because liturgical commemo-
ration would be secured more firmly there.24 Although it did not correspond
with canon law, some women were also buried in male monasteries, and vice
versa, and this practice was even confirmed by the Hundred Chapters church
council at Moscow in 1551.25 The burial practice of the Orthodox in Ruthenia
also corresponded to this pattern. The majority of the szlachta [lesser nobility]

21 T.D. Panova, Tsarstvo smerti: Pogrebal’nyi obriad srednevekovoi Rusi XI –​XVI vekov
(Moscow: 2004); Sergei Z. Chernov, “Die Nekropolen der großen koinobitischen Klöster
der Moskauer Rus’ des 15.-​16. Jahrhunderts als Spiegel des Prozesses der Verkirchlichung
der Gesellschaft,” in Monastische Kultur als transkonfessionelles Phänomen. Beiträge
einer deutsch-​russischen interdisziplinären Tagung in Vladimir und Suzdal’, eds Ludwig
Steindorff and Oliver Auge, Veröffentlichungen des Deutschen Historischen Instituts
Moskau 4 (Berlin and Boston, MA: 2016), 193–​216.
22 Cf. the archaeological identification of burial sites by S.Z. Chernov, “Nekropol’ Iosifo-​
Volokolamskogo monastyria v svete arkheologicheskikh issledovanii 2001 god: Staryi i
novyi pridely,” in Prepodobnyi Iosif Volotskii i ego obitel′, eds Sergii Hegumen (Voronkov),
Panteleimon Monakh (Dementienko) and G.M. Zelenskaia (Moscow: 2008), 269–​314,
on the basis of the Feast Book of the monastery: Ludwig Steindorff (ed., transl.), Das
Speisungsbuch von Volokolamsk. Kormovaia kniga Iosifo-​Volokolamskogo monastyria: Eine
Quelle zur Sozialgeschichte russischer Klöster im 16. Jahrhundert, Bausteine zur Slavischen
Philologie und Kulturgeschichte, NF, B 12 (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 1998), 367–​74.
23 Shokarev, “Russkii srednevekovoi nekropol’,” 149.
24 Examples in Steindorff, Memoria, 158.
25 Shokarev, “Russkii srednevekovoi nekropol’,” 144; A.D. Gorskii, (ed.), Zakonodatel’stvo
perioda obrazovaniia i ukrepleniia russkogo tsentralizovannogo gosudarstva, Rossiiskoe
zakonodatel’stvo X–​XX vekov 2 (Moscow: 1985), 311. “Hundred chapters,” in Russian
Stoglav, because the decisions of the council were presented in the form of answers to a
hundred questions of the tsar.

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234 Steindorff

was buried in larger churches and monasteries.26 Only a few of them chose a
small village church on their hereditary lands.27
Numerous travellers to Muscovy mentioned the open mass graves in which
the corpses of people without relatives, or those who had drowned or frozen to
death, were interred. These mass graves are well known from Muscovite sourc-
es under the names ubogyi dom, “house for the poor,” Bozhi dom, “house of
God,” or skudel’nitsa, “pottery field,” referring to the Gospel of Matthew (Matt.
27:10). As most frequently reported, these graves were closed on the semik, on
Thursday before Whitsunday, which was devoted especially to those who had
not obtained a regular funeral service and burial, because of the circumstanc-
es of their sudden death. From about 1581, the monks of St Spiridon monas-
tery for poor people, a dependency of the Monastery of the Dormition near
Volokolamsk, were obliged, following the rule of the latter, to collect corpses
and to bury them in their Bozhii dom, in this case a small chapel, and even to
commemorate them if their names were known.28 The care for those who had
died a “bad” death was an act of charity, parallel to the distribution of alms to
the poor.
We should mention also burials in caves, beginning from the 12th century in
the Kievan Cave monastery. Hermits living near the monastery lived in natural
caves in the sandstone hillsides above the Dnepr/​Dnipro and enlarged them.
Soon, the caves served as burial places as well, and through the centuries a
labyrinth of caves, serving as an underground cemetery, developed.29 Anoth-
er famous cave cemetery exists within the compound of the Holy Dormition
Pskov-​Caves Monastery at Pechory about 35 miles west of Pskov in the north-
west of Russia, which was founded in 1473. About 10,000 persons –​monks and
from 1528 laypersons as well –​were buried there through the centuries. About
350 plates of stone or ceramic from the 16th until the beginnings of the 18th
century, have been preserved.30

26 The Polish and Lithuanian nobility into which noble Orthodox families were also
integrated.
27 Berezhnaya, “ ‘True faith’ and Salvation,” 460–​1.
28 Steindorff, Memoria, 71–​8; Shokarev, “Russkii srednevekovoi nekropol’,” 145–​7.
29 Vadym Pavlovsky, “Kyivan Cave Monastery,” Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, url: http://​
www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/​previous.asp?bottomMenuDisplay=pages%5CK%-
5CY%5CKyivanCaveMonasteryGospel.htmandKidNumer=7130 (last accessed 1/​11/​2019).
The article corresponds to the printed Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1989), and includes
historical maps and photographs of the caves.
30 M. Tolstoi, “Sviato-​ Uspenskii Pskovo-​ Pecherskii muzhskoi monastyr’,” in Russkie
Monastyri, vol. 2, eds A.A. Feoktistov and A.A. Antonov (Novomoskovsk: 2002), 41–​58, on
54–​6; Shokarev, “Russkii srednevekovoi nekropol’,” 171–​2.

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The Orthodox in the East of Europe 235

3 Commemoration Immediately after Death

In the West-​European tradition we know of special commemoration for the

deceased on the 3rd, 7th, and 30th day after the death of an individual. The
commemoration days in the Orthodox tradition, the 3rd, 9th and 40th day, are
of corresponding importance. Both series of days are of pre-​Christian origin
but are explained by various dates from the Bible and patristics, for instance
the Resurrection of Christ, the Appearance of Christ to the apostle Thomas,
and the Assumption.
In literary prefaces to the sinodiki, memorial books, discussed in detail be-
low, the sequence of obsequies correlates to the soul’s journey from the mo-
ment of its separation from the body until God’s decision about where the soul
was to rest in preparation for the day of the Last Judgement.31 The Western
tricenarius, the Trental, a series of 30 masses, has its equivalent in the Forty
Liturgies, in Russian sorokoust, which sounds like “40 mouths,” but in fact it is
a vernacular form deriving from the Middle Greek word sarakoste, “forty.” The
answers of the Bishop Nifont to the Novgorodian priest Kirik from the 12th
century in the Voproshanie Kirikovo (“Questionary of Kirik”), deal among oth-
er topics with the practice of the sorokoust. Bishop Nifont explained to Kirik
that sorokousty were also adequate in the case of the death of a still innocent
child: “We do not sing because of the sins, we sing for the deceased, as if the
person was a saint.”32 Nifont recommended a price of six kuny for one soroko­
ust, which corresponded to 40 grams of silver. He gave detailed instructions for
the use of wine, incense, and candles.33
The mid-​15th century saw the advent of a richer tradition of testamentary
practice. Wills offer information on subjects such as the distribution of prop-
erty to relatives, the freeing of serfs debts and loans, and frequently they re-
fer to the three dates after death as well as to the sorokoust.34 Testamentary

31 For the composition of the prefaces and the origins of the texts see I.V. Dergacheva,
Drevnerusskii Sinodik Issledovaniia i teksty (Moscow: 2011). Compared to Muscovy, such
prefaces are not common in the pomianniki, (memorial books) from Ruthenia, for which
see Tymoshenko, “Tradycia i praktyky,” 120–​1, 123.
32 Leopold Karl Goetz, Kirchenrechtliche und kulturgeschichtliche Denkmäler Altrusslands
nebst Geschichte des russischen Kirchenrechts, Kirchenrechtliche Abhandlungen 18–​19
(Stuttgart: 1905, repr. Amsterdam: 1963), 263 (§ 51). The edition of this source within the
monograph (pp. 209–​342) presents the Old Russian text, a German translation and rich
commentaries.
33 Goetz, Kirchenrechtliche und kulturgeschichtliche Denkmäler 213 (§ 3); for necessary cor-
rections of the translation cf. Steindorff, Memoria, 106–​7.
34 Daniel H. Kaiser, “Death and Dying in Early Modern Russia,” in Major Problems in Early
Modern Russian History, ed. Nancy Shields Kollmann (New York: 1992), 217–​57. Kaiser

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236 Steindorff

directions include special memorial services, the distribution of alms to clerics

and to the poor, and sometimes also festive meals for the brotherhood of a
monastery at the “three days’ mind.”
In many cases the testators ordered sorokousty in numerous churches and
monasteries, sometimes even more than 20 and up to 40. They chose these
places because they felt bound to them as a result of family tradition or per-
sonal experience. Normally these churches were scattered around the region
where the deceased person lived. The princess Agrafena Semenevna Ros-
tovskaia, born Lykova, disposed in her last will of 9 December 1568 that 18
churches should obtain money for a sorokoust around the city of Tver’, north-
west of Moscow, but 12½ roubles were to be sent to a monastery at Sviazhsk on
the Volga about 450 miles from Tver’. The family had been banished there by
Tsar Ivan iv the Terrible from 1566 to 1567.35
Executors of wills were expected to distribute the means for the sorokoust.
Financing a sorokoust during the lifetime of a person, or even worse, singing
it, was strictly forbidden, since it would suggest that the person was already
dead. The directions about burial, the three special dates of commemoration,
and the sorokoust referred to the belief in the ‘small eschatology’ of the first
40 days after death, during which the soul was said to need help on its way
to the throne of God. Consequently, the allocated sums in testaments were
relatively small, compared to donations referring to the ‘great eschatology’, the
Last Judgement. Normally the allocation for one sorokoust in Muscovy was be-
tween a half and two roubles, i.e. between 33 and 132 grams of silver.36
Testaments are, however, not very helpful sources regarding permanent
commemoration in expectation of the Last Judgement. Large donations were
usually made long in advance, during a lifetime, even if the donor remained
usufructuary until his or her death. The donor was expected to experience the
sacrifice him or herself. So, beside prescriptive texts and the rich “pragmatic
writing” or legal literary culture concerning the administration of the names
to be commemorated, special deeds and donation books are the main sources
of information on large donations. Testaments only rarely repeat or specify the
dispositions of these deeds, which became more common at the same time as
written testaments.37

bases his study on a large number of testaments. He has published a catalogue of pre-
served published testaments, url: http://​web.grinnell.edu/​individuals/​kaiser/​wills.html
(last accessed 1/​11/​2019).
35 A.A. Zimin, (ed.), Akty feodal’nogo zemlevladeniia i khoziaistva. Chast’ 2 (Moscow: 1956),
349–​51 (no. 332). See Steindorff, Memoria, 114–​16 with further examples.
36 Steindorff, Memoria, 103–​18; for the value in silver see p. 107.
37 Steindorff, Memoria, 167–​9; Shokarev, “Russkii srednevekovoi nekropol’,” 157.

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The Orthodox in the East of Europe 237

3.1 Remembrance –​General Commemoration

Remembrance, all acts of maintaining, securing, and creating the memory of a
deceased person, takes place first in an informal individual form, but we are not
often able to trace such remembrance in the sources. Exceptions are the afore-
mentioned tales about the deaths of Pafnutii Borovskii and Grand Prince Vasi-
lii iii. In the accounts of the eyewitnesses, we can recognize moments of per-
sonal, individual remembrance. Accordingly, we will concentrate on the forms
of institutionalized remembrance which are recognized by a group based on
convention. Looking at the Orthodox Eastern Europe, remembrance formed a
part of the Orthodox religious tradition which included syncretic forms.
There were general memorial days which are still observed today: Butter
Saturday, the last Saturday when meat is allowed before Great Lent, i.e. the Sat-
urday before cheese week, eight weeks before Easter. Radunitsa on the Mon-
day or Tuesday in the second week after Easter was originally a pre-​Christian
spring feast which was integrated into the Christian calendar of the Eastern
Slavs in Muscovy as well as in Ruthenia. The “screams at radunitsa” were still
condemned by the Hundred Chapters church council at Moscow in 1551.38
The next traditional day of general commemoration was Saturday before
Whitsun. It was called vselenskaia subbota (“ecumenical Saturday”) because it
was celebrated like Butter Saturday in all Orthodox countries. Besides the Or-
thodox liturgical practice there remained syncretic customs as well: the coun-
cil of 1551 condemned screaming, music, and dancing at burial sites on that
day. A confessional “mirror” or handbook from the 17th century even advised
the priest to enquire as to whether the sinful practice of heating the bathhouse
for the dead had been committed on that feast day.39
In autumn, a general feast was celebrated on Dmitrievskaia subbota, the Sat-
urday before the feast day of St Demetrius on 26 October. The feast is probably
of South Slav origin. In Muscovy, although not in Ruthenia, the feast was soon
linked to the remembrance of Grand Prince Dmitrii Donskoi and the blessing
he received in 1380 from Sergii of Radonezh before departing for the victorious
battle of Kulikovo against the Tatars.40
While in the church calendar liturgical commemoration was reduced
during the period of the twelve days from Christmas to Epiphany due to the
joyful feasts, popular culture was full of customs which suggested the care tak-
en by the living to fulfil the physical demands of the dead, who were imagined

38 Gorskii, (ed.), Zakonodatel’stvo, 310.

39 A. Almazov, Tainaia ispoved’ v pravoslavnoj vostochnoi tserkvi, vol. 3: Prilozheniia
(Odessa: 1884), 170.
40 Steindorff, Memoria, 54–​8, 66–​8, 78–​80.

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238 Steindorff

as being not far away from the living. While in the syncretistic vision direct
contact between the living and the dead appeared to be possible, the standard
Christian memorial culture is based only on indirect relations. As summarized
above, care for the deceased was carried out through donations, prayer, liturgi-
cal commemoration, and charity.41

3.2 Remembrance –​Individual Commemoration

The most fascinating aspect of remembrance is what I would like to call ‘dele-
gated remembrance’, liturgical commemoration in monasteries and churches
based on donations. The mention of the individual donor’s name should evoke
remembrance by God. The first trace of this delegated remembrance reaches
back to the era of the Kievan Rus’ and was borrowed from Byzantine tradition.
In it, we can see the rise of commemorative practice in Muscovy and Ruthenia
as a continuation and further development of older practices. But new forms
of an elaborated commemoration, evident from the end of the 15th century
in Muscovy, were at the same time closely bound to the development of the
monastic landscape in the north, which began with the work of Sergii of Rado­
nezh in middle of the 14th century. This ‘ascetic age’ was characterized by the
idea that life as a monk was the most secure way to salvation and that the
prayers of monks were the most efficacious means of achieving this.
While in former times monasteries in Rus’ had only been founded close to
urban settlements, foundations from the 14th century were made in remote
and far less developed areas. In the 15th century, the wave of foundations
reached the White Sea. Because of the attraction of monasticism, the prima-
ry intention of ascetic retreat from the world soon lost its importance. The
monasteries became centres of colonization, partly in competition with the
local population. They proved to be important factors of the economic and
cultural development of Muscovy, comparable to the role played by monastic
landscapes of the high Middle Ages in the West.42
It was a matter of piety and prestige for the elite to make donations for
themselves and their relatives to large monasteries, and in return donors ex-
pected elaborate liturgical commemoration. Serving as centres of care for
the deceased became one of the central functions of monasteries. Similar
to the West, there was a time lag between the first large-​scale patronage of

41 Steindorff, Memoria, 84, 246–​7.

42 For the rise of the most important monastery in Muscovy see. Pierre Gonneau, La maison
de la Sainte Trinité: Un grand-​monastère russe du Moyen-​Âge tardif (1345–​1533) (Paris: 1993);
David B. Miller, Saint Sergius of Radonezh, his Trinity Monastery, and the Formation of the
Russian Identity (De Kalb, IL: 2010).

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The Orthodox in the East of Europe 239

monasteries to the growth in requests for individual commemoration. A dif-

ferentiated organization of commemoration started only when the first mon-
asteries of the colonization era had existed for more than a century, that is, in
the middle of the 15th century.43
Individual commemoration relied on the Byzantine tradition of using dip-
tychs, originally a double table-​plate containing the names of living and dead
persons to be commemorated, and later, by a metonymic shift, to mean any
list with this function. From the 12th century we meet the loan translation
pominanie, literally “the remembering,” in sources from the Rus’, later also po-
miannik (South Slav variation pomenik; modern Ukrainian form pomiannyk).
Among the Northern Rus’ this word was later frequently replaced by the des-
ignation as sinodik. While the term is widely present in sources from Muscovy,
it does not appear in Ruthenia at all. Another term used in in Ruthenia was
subbotnik, e.g.“the list for subbota, Saturday,” the day which is devoted to the
individual commemoration of the dead within the weekly liturgical cycle.44
In its original sense the name sinodik refers to a synodos, the church coun-
cil of 843, which condemned iconoclasm. The Greek synodikon contained the
decisions of the seven ecumenical councils and listed people under anathema
as well as high-​ranking persons who deserved well-​being on earth and, if de-
ceased already, eternal memory. This text was read only once a year, within the
Orthodox rite, on the first Sunday of Lent. We know of adopted translations of
the synodikon from Georgia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and from the Rus’.45 The latter is
also called sinodik pravoslaviia, “sinodik of the Orthodoxy,” or vselenskii sinodik,
“ecumenical sinodik” –​a very specific kind of remembrance. While it was not
meant to secure the salvation of the commemorated persons, it served the self-​
assurance of the commemorating community: it defined the border between
those who belonged to the community and those who did not.

43 Rosenwein To Be the Neighbor, 39; Ludwig Steindorff, “Donations and Commemorations

in the Muscovite Realm –​A Medieval or Early Modern Phenomenon?” in Religion und
Integration im Moskauer Russland: Konzepte und Praktiken, Potentiale und Grenzen, 14.–​
17. Jahrhundert, ed. Ludwig Steindorff, Forschungen zur Osteuropäischen Geschichte 76
(Wiesbaden: 2010), 477–​98, on 486.
44 Tymoshenko, “Tradyciia i praktyky pominannia,” 122–​3; Steindorff, Memoria, 52.
45 For the date of the translation see V.V. Dergachev, “K istorii russkikh perevodov
Vselenskogo Sinodika,” in Stanovlenie povestvovatel’nykh nachal v drevnerusskoi litera-
ture XV–​XVII vekov (na materiale sinodika), ed. Irina Dergacheva, Specimina Philologiae
Slavicae 89 (Munich: 1990), 165–​88 (placing it ca. 1275); K.A. Maksimovich, “K utochneniiu
korpusa drevnerusskikh domongol’skikh perevodov s grecheskogo: Sinodik v nedeliu pra-
voslaviia,” Drevniaia Rus’. Voprosy medievistiki 4/​46 (2011), 77–​86 (placing it in the era of
the Kievan Rus’).

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240 Steindorff

As mentioned above, in the northern Orthodox communities the word sino-

dik received a second meaning, denoting a list of many names. Therefore, look-
ing at sources from Muscovy we must distinguish carefully between the types
of sinodik we refer to. In practice the two types are easy to distinguish, since
the sinodik pravoslaviia enumerates the names in the dative: anafema (“a curse
upon”), and vechnaia slava (“eternal glory”). In the other sinodik, in the dip-
tychs the names appear in the accusative corresponding to the call: Pomiani,
Gospodi, (“Remember, O Lord!”), or simply in the nominative. From the mid-
dle of the 15th century donors asked more frequently for commemoration in
their deeds, and the large monasteries in particular had to deal with increasing
numbers of names to be commemorated. This ultimately required the use of
two separate lists of commemoration of different liturgical value, depending
on the size of the donation.
The sources which best illustrate the functioning of this system in detail
for the first time come from a comparatively young monastery, the aforemen-
tioned Monastery of the Dormition near Volokolamsk, founded by Iosif Sanin
in 1479, and also called the Iosifov Monastery in the English-​language historiog-
raphy. The practice at Iosifov relied upon the experience of older large monas-
teries, but the Iosifov Monastery played a crucial role in its systematization.46
Iosif himself mentioned the practice in his Rule, and between 1506 and 1510
he explained it in detail in a long letter to the Princess Mariia Golenina, who
had complained about the high cost and the allegedly small liturgical “gifts”
she received in return.47 The most elaborated normative text from Muscovy
concerning donation and commemoration is to be found in the Obikhodnik of
Iosifov and dates from about 1581. The Obikhodnik is a kind of rule, outlining
the specifics of individual monasteries, and is similar to the Western monastic
consuetudo, beside the general Rule. Chapter five is devoted to the burial of

46 See Ludwig Steindorff, “What Was New about Commemoration in the Iosifo-​Volokolamskii
Monastery? A Reassessment,” in Iosif Volotskii and Eastern Christianity: Essays Across
Seventeen Centuries, eds David Goldfrank, Valeria Nollan, and Jennifer Spock (Washington,
DC: 2017), 137–​52.
47 David M. Goldfrank (ed., trans.), The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky, revised edition,
Cistercian Studies Series 36 (Kalamazoo, MI, Spencer, MA: 2000), 277, 309–​11; for details
on this letter see Ludwig Steindorff, “Princess Mariia Golenina: Perpetuating Identity
through Care for the Deceased,” in Culture and Identity in Muscovy, 1359–​1584/​Moskovskaia
Rus′ (1359–​1584): Kul′tura i istoricheskoe samosoznanie, eds A.M. Kleimola and G.D. Lenhoff,
ucla Slavic Studies, New Series 3 (Moscow: 1997), 557–​77; German translation with
commentaries in the collection: Ludwig Steindorff (trans.), “Quellen zu Stiftungswesen
und Totengedenken im Moskauer Russland,” url: https://​www.histsem.uni-​kiel.de/​de/​
das-​institut-​1/​abteilungen/​osteuropaeische-​geschichte/​materialen/​Quellen%20zu%20
Stiftungswesen%20und%20Totengedenken.pdf (last accessed 28/​6/​2020).

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The Orthodox in the East of Europe 241

the brothers, to the types of mortuary or commemoration lists, the practice of

reading, and the fees for the entry of names.48
Notwithstanding the fact that the terminology is not completely uniform
even within one monastery, while describing the system, I shall keep to the
terms most frequently used at the Iosifov Monastery. The lowest level of com-
memoration was based upon an entry in the vechnyi sinodik, the “eternal sino-
dik.” The price for the entry was a quarter of a rouble, and it included the whole
family. Because the vechnyi sinodik grew very quickly and soon contained tens
of thousands of names, it was read during the longer sections of the day, out-
side of the ongoing liturgical offices.49 The second level was the entry in the
povsednevnyi spisok, the “list for every day.” The price was one rouble per per-
son for one year, at a time when you could buy an entire village for 50 roubles.
Only a donation of 50 roubles in cash, or the equivalent value of land or mov-
able property, secured an entry in perpetuity. Of course, this list grew much
more slowly, so it could be read at the corresponding hours during the daily
liturgical cycle.
The extant copy of the “list for everyday” from Iosifov dating to about 1600
contains around 1000 names, grouped by monks and nuns on the one hand
and laity on the other. These groups are further differentiated as members of
the family of the grand prince and tsar, princely and other families. In prin-
ciple, the names follow the chronological order of death. Because the family
name is written in small red letters above the baptismal name or the monk’s
name is given alongside his religious affiliation, it is frequently possible to
identify persons by cross-​referencing to other sources.50
The highest level in this system was an annual korm, literally a “feeding,” a
feast in memory of the donor or of the person in whose memory the donor
had established the feast, normally on the saint’s day or on the day of death
of the donor or the person to be commemorated. The price of one korm was
an enormous 100 roubles. On the day of commemoration by a korm, the name
was read aloud in the corresponding services and at the end of the meal. The

48 Full publication: E.E. Golubinskii: Istoriia russkoi tserkvi, vol. 2, 2 (Moscow: 1911, repr.
The Hague, Paris: 1969), 577–​80; German translation with commentaries within the col-
lection: Ludwig Steindorff (trans.), “Quellen zu Stiftungswesen und Totengedenken im
Moskauer Russland,” url: https://​www.histsem.uni-​kiel.de/​de/​das-​institut-​1/​abteilun-
gen/​osteuropaeische- ​geschichte/​materialen/​Quellen%20zu%20Stiftungswesen%20
und%20Totengedenken.pdf (last accessed 28/​6/​2020).
49 Presentation of the tariffs in detail in Steindorff, “What Was New,” 138–​9, 148, note 5.
50 For a detailed analysis of the composition of this list see Steindorff, Memoria, 191–​2;
Ludwig Steindorff, “Commemoration and Administrative Techniques in Muscovite
Monasteries,” Russian History 22 (1995), 439–​41.

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242 Steindorff

kormovaia kniga, the Feast Book, contained detailed instructions for what
should be served during the meal, depending on the size of the donation and
the prestige of the person.51 Commemoration on a higher level always includ-
ed lower-​level rituals as well. So, every person registered in the Kormovaia kni-
ga appears in the “List for every day” as well, but not vice versa.
Despite the more limited sources for other monastic communities com-
pared to those available for the Iosifov Monastery, we have enough reliable
proofs that other large monasteries, among them the Troitse-​Sergiev Monas-
tery and the Kirillo-​Belozerskii Monastery, followed the same system of three
levels of commemoration, and the prices were the same everywhere. The pric-
es in the normative texts are confirmed by corresponding sums of 50 or 100
roubles in deeds and in the donation books.
The practice was bound to an abundance of pragmatic or legal texts and we
can verify how carefully the different lists were kept at least in large monas-
teries of Muscovy. The most useful aids for modern research are the donation
books which were regularly kept in many monasteries from the 1560s onward,
following the ruling of the church council in 1551 which obliged monasteries
to fulfil their obligations to donors “in memory of their souls and those of their
relatives for eternal commemoration and for the inheritance of the eternal
goods.”52
The introduction of two lists of different value was an answer to how to cope
with the ever-​rising number of names to be commemorated. Medieval monas-
teries in the West had been confronted with such a phenomenon as well, but
the solution was different. Instead of keeping Libri vitae, similar to the vechnyi
sinodik, the individual commemoration was limited to one day per year, to the
day of death of the individual, and names were registered in the necrology in
the form and order of a calendar.53
We can trace the practice of two lists also outside Muscovy, from the Kievan
Cave Monastery.54 But, compared to Muscovy, the corresponding pragmatic

51 Published and translated into German by Steindorff, Kormovaia kniga. The Feast Book
appears as ­chapter 6 in the Obikhodnik.
52 Gorskii (ed.), Zakonodatel’stvo, 352 (Stoglav, glava 75).
53 See Steindorff, “Commemoration and Donation,” 483–​9.
54 Steindorff, Memoria, 198; Ludwig Steindorff, “Desirable Ubiquity? Family Strategies of
Donation and Commemoration in Muscovy,” Cahiers du Monde Russe 57 (2016),: 2–​3, 641–​
665, especially 661–​662. My student Kyrill Kobsar has analysed the oldest pomiannik from
the Kievan Caves monastery in his master’s thesis and is preparing a dissertation about
liturgical commemoration of the dead by the Orthodox church in Poland-​Lithuania in the
later Middle Ages and the early modern period. His results will offer much more detailed
information on the memorial practices of the Orthodox in Polish-​Lithuania.

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The Orthodox in the East of Europe 243

literature was not as elaborate, and donation books are largely missing.55 The
reason why this literature was not as elaborate among the Orthodox in Poland-​
Lithuania may be due to the weaker economic position of the Orthodox elite,
and to the fact that nobles had converted to Protestantism or Catholicism. But
it may also fit with the influence from the West, where such an expression of
care for the dead had lost its attractiveness already and had been replaced by
the “visible” commemoration of a splendid sepulchral culture. On the other
hand, there is no doubt that the practice of commemoration and of keeping
pomianniki in churches and monasteries was no less popular than in Muscovy.
Who felt obliged to secure delegated permanent remembrance, and for
whom? From the middle of the 16th century the vechnye sinodiki in Muscovy
and the pomianniki in Ruthenia were often grouped by sections of just one
family, normally containing between five and twenty names, that is, compris-
ing about two or three generations. Sometimes people from outside the family
were included, as a sign of gratitude and friendship. However, for the elite, an
entry in the vechnyi sinodik was neither of high-​prestige nor of high-​liturgical
value; an entry in the “list for every day” or even the establishment of a feast
was of much greater significance.
An analysis of the donation book of the Iosifov Monastery shows that most
commemorations in the “list for every day” were based upon donations by the
donors themselves. Next in order of frequency were donations for father, moth-
er, and husband. The most frequent combinations of donations for more than
one person are: donor –​father –​mother; male donor –​wife; donor –​father,
female donor –​husband; father –​mother. Fewer than 10 per cent of donations
were made by women. But about 25 per cent of the names commemorated
in the “list for every day” were of women, normally due to a donation by the
husband.56 Other research shows that the rates are surprisingly similar in all
large monasteries.57
Donation and foundation patterns correspond to Western medieval prac-
tices. Securing permanent commemoration was exclusively a family matter,
consanguinity was a stronger link than marriage, except for the married couple
itself. In kinship bonds, male and patrilinear relations were dominant.58 We

55 A preliminary result of the research by Kyrill Kobsar.

56 Steindorff, “Wer sind die Meinen?” 239–​52, on the basis of the “list for every day,” the
donation book and the feast book from Iosifov.
57 Kaiser, “Death and Dying,” 217–​57, especially 244; David B. Miller, “Motives for Donations
to the Trinity-​Sergius Monastery, 1392–​1605: Gender Matters,” Essays in Medieval Studies
14 (1997), 91–​107.
58 For a case study of a woman as donor see Ludwig Steindorff, “Equality under Reserve: Men
and Women in Donations and Commemoration in Muscovite Russia,” Canadian-​American

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244 Steindorff

can also see that the higher the status of the family, the greater the share of
women being commemorated. However, the practice was flexible and allowed
exceptions to these rules. Securing remembrance was concentrated on a circle
of people surprisingly close to the modern nuclear family.59
Questions might be asked about the choice of a site of liturgical commem-
oration for patronage purposes. Looking at elite practice in Muscovy, we can
determine a hierarchy of preference among monasteries. In first place were the
Troitse-​Sergie and Kirillov Monasteries.60 In the sinodiki of smaller monaster-
ies the geographical catchment area was limited to the neighbouring region.61
Donors tended to concentrate their large donations on one monastery. They
avoided scattering their fortunes and tried instead to secure a high level of
commemoration in one monastery.
We know of donations to the Kievan Cave Monastery from individuals in
Muscovy. Tsar Ivan iv even made donations to the patriarch of Constantinople
and to the Monastery Hilandar on Mount Athos, and Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich,
to the Sinai Monastery.62 However, in general, the network of places where
people from Muscovy were commemorated was contained within the territory
of Muscovy. The social and religious practice of donation and commemoration
was a means of integrating the elites of the region and of the state. In contrast,
I have not found any donations from the Polish-​Lithuanian territory to a Mus-
covite monastery in sources from the late 15th and 16th century, which are the
focus of my research. Future research could look at how practices of donation
and the regional distribution of commemoration changed, with the integra-
tion of the eastern parts of Polish-​Lithuanian territories, including Kiev, into
the Muscovite state in 1667.

Slavic Studies 49 (2015), 193–​210; Maria Hillebrandt, “Stiftungen zum Seelenheil durch
Frauen in den Urkunden des Klosters Cluny,” in Vinculum Societatis: Joachim Wollasch
zum 60. Geburtstag, eds Franz Neiske, Dietrich Poeck, and Mechthild Sandmann
(Sigmaringen: 1991), 61–​3.
59 Ludwig Steindorff, “Wer sind die Meinen? Individuum und Memorialkultur im frühneu-
zeitlichen Rußland,” in Das Individuum und die Seinen: Individualität in der okzidentalen
und in der russischen Kultur in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, eds Yuri l. Bessmertny and
Otto Gerhard Oexle, Veröffentlichungen des Max-​Planck-​Instituts für Geschichte 163
(Göttingen: 2001), 231–​58, especially 241–​52; Steindorff, “Desirable Ubiquity,” 659.
60 This was worked out on the basis of a case study from Iosifov by Steindorff, “Desirable
Ubiquity.”
61 For example, Nikita V. Bashnin, “Sinodiki mittelgroßer Klöster und die Möglichkeit ihrer
Erforschung (am Beispiel des Dionisij-​Glušickij-​Klosters in Vologda und des Nikolaus-​
Klosters in Staraja Ladoga vom 16. bis 19. Jahrhundert),” in Monastische Kultur als
transkonfessionelles Phänomen, 261–​76.
62 Steindorff, Memoria, 196–​8.

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The Orthodox in the East of Europe 245

Furthermore, also before the time of Tsar Ivan iv the Terrible (1547–​1584),
Muscovite rulers made numerous donations, but the value of the donations did
not exceed significantly that normally given by other members of the elite. It
was only from the 1560s and with the increasing persecution of alleged or real
enemies of the tsar, that the amounts given grew rapidly. The tsar himself gave
donations for the victims of persecution, for those he had deprived of a ‘good’
death and of a decent burial. In 1583, the tsar established commemoration in
the sinodik opal’nykh, the “sinodik of the disgraced” as an act of repentance.
He ordered the composition of a list of victims of his persecutions. The list
comprises 1240 names, and when figures for unnamed victims are added, this
made 2060 people. Copies of this list and large donations were sent to many
monasteries, which entered these names in their sinodiki and included them in
their regular commemoration.63 Remembrance by commemoration was also
secured for fallen warriors, first in the Sinodik pravoslaviia, and from the 17th
century also in the vechnyi sinodik.64 It was also in the 17th century that the tsar
confirmed his status as ruler by being the most generous donor and by taking
care to secure lavish commemorations for the members of the dynasty.65
How did families recollect the names for which they had commissioned or
might one day commission commemoration? Despite the lack of preserved
documents from that time, it is likely that, parallel to the rise of the monastic
book-​keeping of names, families also started to keep small private memorial
booklets. Such books are extant from the 17th century. Adam Olearius, author
one of the best-​known travelogues about Muscovy, describes how in 1634 in
Narva, women gave such books to a priest who would read them in the Or-
thodox cemetery on Whit Saturday.66 So far, we know of just one document in
which a family systematically registered the donations made for the commem-
oration of family members. The list from the house of the Mstislavskii princes,

63 Text in: R.G. Skrynnikov, Oprichnyi terror (Leningrad: 1969), 266–​88; Robert Payne and
Nikita Romanoff, Ivan the Terrible (New York: 1975), 394–​9; Steindorff, Memoria, 226–​31.
64 Steindorff, Memoria, 226–​34.
65 Russell E. Martin, “Gifts and Commemoration: Donations to Monasteries, Dynastic
Legitimacy, and Remembering the Royal Dead in Muscovy,” in Religion und Integration im
Moskauer Russland: Konzepte und Praktiken, Potentiale und Grenzen, 14.–​17. Jahrhundert, ed.
Ludwig Steindorff, Forschungen zur Osteuropäischen Geschichte 76 (Wiesbaden: 2010),
499–​525; Russell E. Martin, “Praying for the Dead in Muscovy: Kinship Awareness and
Orthodox Belief in the Commemorations of Muscovite Royalty,” in Tapestry of Russian
Christianity: Studies in History and Culture, eds Nickolas Lupinin, Donald Ostrowski, and
Jennifer B. Spock (Columbus, Ohio, IL: 2016), 189–​226.
66 English translation of the passage by Samuel Baron in The Travels of Olearius in Seventeenth
Century Russia (Stanford: 1967), 40–​1.

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246 Steindorff

which covers the years from 1550 to 1625, shows some upheavals, when import-
ant members of the family died, and numerous years without any donation.67
As early as the 17th century, memorial culture in the sense of an elaborate
system of liturgical commemoration of the dead and corresponding pragmatic
writing culture declined and played a less important role as a factor of socio-
political integration. This development was due to the rise of new forms of a
more individual piety and to the fact that donating and asking for entry in the
sinodik became a part of popular religious culture. At the same time, donations
for religious acts gradually lost their function of expressing the prestige of the
donor. In the elite culture which developed after the era of Peter the Great, me-
morial culture in the old sense played a marginal role. Yet, giving for individual
commemoration za zdravie i za upokoi, “for health and eternal peace,” remains
an aspect of the religious practice of Russian Orthodox believers even today.
Somehow it still appears as a means of integrating Russian Orthodox people
into a cultural community.
As discussed above, there is less evidence for the sort of elaborate system
of Orthodox elite commemoration in Ruthenia similar to the one practised
in Muscovy from the end of the 15th until the second half of the 17th century.
But there are abundant materials proving the importance of remembrance by
commemoration as part of religious life in urban as well as in rural areas in
Ruthenia. Despite the change of hierarchy of a church or a monastery from
the Orthodox to the Uniate rite, commemoration of Orthodox ancestors con-
tinued.68 What we also see in this region is an intertwining of Catholic and
Orthodox traditions in the commemoration of the dead. Following the Catho-
lic pattern, Orthodox brotherhoods were founded from the middle of the 15th
century; some of them joined the Greek-​Catholic church later, but some were
founded within this church. Brotherhoods were active at L’viv and Kiev and in
many smaller cities. Most of them were formed around parish churches as par-
allel organizations of laymen. The brotherhoods helped to bind the population
to the parish and to consolidate their ethno-​confessional identity.69

67 Russell E. Martin, “Gifts for the Dead: Death, Kinship and Commemoration in Muscovy
(The Case of the Mstislavskii Princes),” Russian History 26 (1999), 171–​202.
68 Berezhnaya, “ ‘True Faith and Salvation,” 459–​60.
69 For the practice of commemoration by the brotherhoods see the well-​documented arti-
cle by Tymoshenko, “Tradyciia i praktyky pomynannia.” Iaroslav Isaievych, Voluntary
Brotherhood: Confraternities of Laymen in Early Modern Ukraine (trans. from Ukrainian)
(Edmonton, AB: 2006) is an excellent overview of the brotherhoods, but without any infor-
mation on burial practice and commemoration. For some information on the Orthodox
and Uniate brotherhoods at Polotsk (Belorussian: Polatsk) see Stefan Rohdewald, “Vom
Polocker Venedig”: Kollektives Handeln sozialer Gruppen einer Stadt zwischen Ost-​und

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The Orthodox in the East of Europe 247

One of the functions of the brotherhoods beside catechization, education,

and charity was to secure a decent burial and commemoration of the mem-
bers.70 Numerous pomianniki of the brotherhoods are preserved from the sec-
ond half of the 16th century onwards and may serve as helpful sources for the
social composition of their membership. Instead of clerics, the brotherhoods
were responsible for keeping the books. Statutes of the brotherhoods mandate
that the brothers should enter their deceased parents and other relatives in
the pomiannik and that the priest should read the book regularly, for instance
“in the morning service and in the evening service on the days of [general]
commemoration and during Great Lent,” as pointed out in the Statute of the
Brotherhood of the Dormition at L’viv following the dispositions of the charter
from 1586 by Patriarch Yоakhim of Antiochia for the brotherhood. The priest
should celebrate the Divine liturgy, i.e. a eucharistic service, twice a year za
zdravie i za upokoi, “for health and eternal peace,” of the brothers.71
If we look for particular features of Orthodox church life in Ruthenia, we
have to mention the flourishing memorial practices of the Orthodox broth-
erhoods, which were formed following the pattern of Catholic brotherhoods.
However, in terms of religious practice, the brotherhoods were certainly part
of the Orthodox world.

4 Conclusion

Looking at the period of 400 years from about 1300 until 1700 in the Orthodox
Eastern Europe we do not see a watershed like the Reformation in central and
northern Europe. Only within the Orthodox Polish-​Lithuanian territories was
religious discourse influenced to some degree by ideas from Protestantism.
As for the practices of preparation of the dying, of death, burial, and remem-
brance, continuity with the Orthodox tradition clearly dominated. This was
also true of the Greek-​Catholic Church.
We may summarize the development as a general process of churchification
(in German Verkirchlichung) and as increasing ecclesiastical socialisation. This
included the organization of time in correspondence with the church year, par-
ticipation in the Orthodox rites, the development of the monastic landscape

Mitteleuropa (Mittelalter, frühe Neuzeit, 19. Jahrhundert bis 1914), Quellen und Studien zur
Geschichte des östlichen Europa (Stuttgart: 2005), 254–​8.
70 For this aspect cf. Antoni Mironowicz, “Charitable Work of the Orthodox Church in the
Polish-​Lithuanian Commonwealth (16th-​17th c.),” Acta Poloniae Historica 87 (2003), 43–​54.
71 Tymoshenko, “Tradyciia i praktyky pomynannia,” 119–​21.

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248 Steindorff

and later of a dense network of parishes. The role of the monasteries as centres
of care for the deceased, the practice of donation and commemoration, and
the rise of pragmatic literacy in this field influenced each other. Surviving syn-
cretic elements were not an indication of a beginning of dechristianisation,
but of a not fully developed churchification.
Dechristianisation started in the 18th century on the territory of the Rus-
sian Empire, especially due to the reforms of Peter the Great. However, the old
world of traditions around death, burial, and remembrance was only damaged
from the second half of the 19th century and particularly during the Soviet era.
Still, surprisingly perhaps, much of this world, especially the practice of re-
membrance, has survived and has even been revitalised as part of religious life
during the last decades in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus’. Fernand Braudel dis-
tinguishes three levels of history: structure, conjoncture and évènement.72 The
longue durée is characterized by extremely stable structures. Certainly, through
the centuries, changing conjonctures presented in this chapter were quite dif-
ferent from and not simultaneous with those affecting the Western churches,
especially in Muscovy and to a lesser degree in the Polish-​Lithuanian territory.
Notwithstanding these differences and the non-​simultaneity, the conjonctures
relied upon the common longue durée of attitudes towards death, burial, and
remembrance in Christianity.
72 Fernand Braudel, “Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue durée,” in idem, Écris sur l’his-
toire (Paris: 1969), 41–​84 (first published in 1958).

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 pa rt 2
Cultural and Emotional Responses
to Loss: Grief and Commemoration

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 ­c hapter 9

Body, Liturgy, and Tomb Monuments in the Later

Middle Ages

Robert Marcoux

This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.

luke 22:19

∵
These words of Jesus to the apostles, which instituted the eucharist, point to
two major concepts upon which medieval civilization draws its social dynam-
ics and artistic and cultural production: memory and materiality.1 While the
death of the Saviour has been celebrated through mass since the early Chris-
tian period, by the late Middle Ages its liturgical commemoration had become
increasingly material. Settling a debate going back to the Carolingian period,
the Fourth Lateran Council first declared, in 1215, that the consecrated wafer
was the corporeal body of Christ. This, in turn, led the host to develop into a
primary devotional object, which the faithful worshipped through a myriad of
images, vessels, and structures.2 Although they operate on an entirely different

1 Research on both topics is vast. Studies on memory as a liturgical and cultural trait of medi-
eval society were undertaken in the 1980s by the Fribourg-​Műnster School with the notable
work of Gert Tellenbach, Karl Schmid, and Otto Gerhard Oexle, leading to the programmat-
ic volume by Karl Schmid and Joachim Wollasch (eds.), Memoria, Der geschichtliche Zeu-
gniswert des liturgischen Gedenkens im Mittelalter (Munich: 1984). It was notably followed
in the United States by the work of Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and
Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton: 1994). In addition to the classic study of
Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: 1966), the mnemonic aspect of memory was si-
multaneously explored by Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge: 1990) and The
Craft of Thought (Cambridge: 1998). As for the question of materiality, research on the topic
is best exemplified by the more recent work of Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Material-
ity (New York: 2011) and that of Beth Williamson, Material Culture and Medieval Christianity
(Oxford: 2014).
2 In addition to the work of Bynum cited above, see on the subject Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi.
The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: 1991), Henk van Os, The Art of Devotion in

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004443433_011

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252 Marcoux

level, funeral monuments underwent a similar evolution. Far from being pas-
sive memorials, late medieval tombs provide the dead with a bodily presence
with which the viewers are compelled to interact.3 As will be argued in this
chapter, the interaction between the living and the dead is reciprocal. Through
their material characteristics, iconography, and settings, the tombs act as loci
of articulation between the past of the deceased, the future of their souls, and
the present of their community.

1 Body and Self

The end of the Middle Ages is readily associated with the unsettling iconogra-
phy of decayed flesh and bones.4 The artistic phenomenon is often attributed
to the anxiety brought about by the many wars and diseases that plagued
the period. To be sure, the political and social turmoil of the 14th and 15th
centuries –​and most of all the traumatic experience of the Black Death –​re-
kindled the moral rhetoric of the memento mori that is openly at play in such
themes as the Three Living and the Three Dead and the Dance of Death.5
However, as evidenced by the fact that many such images adorn sumptuous
objects such as prayer books and monumental tombs, the representation of

the Late Middle Ages in Europe (Princeton: 1994) and Beth Williamson, “Altarpieces, Liturgy,
and Devotion,” Speculum 79/​2 (2004), 341–​406.
3 Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (Cambridge: 1996); Clive Burgess,
“ ‘Longing to Be Prayed For’: Death and Commemoration in an English Parish in the Later
Middle Ages,” in Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Mod-
ern Europe, eds Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (Cambridge: 2000), 44–​65. For an archaeo-
logical perspective on the material culture of death and remembrance, see Howard Williams,
Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain (Cambridge: 2006), 215–​21.
4 An image forcibly painted by Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919; repr. and
trans. London: 1924), who sees in the macabre signs of moral crises and the bitterness of
material loss.
5 The influence of the plague on art was famously studied by Millard Meiss, Painting in Flor-
ence and Siena after the Black Death (Princeton: 1951). Meiss, however, dealt less with maca-
bre imagery than with the stylistic and iconographic impact of the epidemic on traditional
religious themes. At the same moment, Alberto Tenenti, La Vie et la mort à travers l’art du XVe
siècle (Paris: 1952) associated the macabre iconography with a “love of life,” an idea reprised
and further developed by Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle
Ages to the Present (Baltimore: 1974). For a critical assessment of Huizinga’s and Ariès’ influ-
ence on interpretations of the macabre, see Binski, Medieval Death, 123–​33. The correlation
between the calamities of the late Middle Ages and macabre iconography was convincingly
disproved by Jean Wirth, “Il macabro nell’arte occidentale: Saggio d’interpretazione,” Fonda-
menti: Rivista quadrimestrale di cultura 11 (1988), 41–​58.

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Body, Liturgy, and Tomb Monuments in the Later Middle Ages 253

a human corpse does not necessarily reflect contempt for the material world,
and much less for the dead body. On the contrary, the content of wills and tes-
taments of the late Middle Ages suggests that the fate of the latter is a matter
of great concern.6 If the multiplication of pro anima bequests is a sign that
spiritual salvation is of utmost importance, testators rarely omit to acknowl-
edge the issue of their physical remains. Indeed, most of them begin their
wills by simultaneously commending their soul to heaven and their body
to the earth. Although the preamble is formulaic, it is also indicative of the
Christian conception of the individual as a psychosomatic unity. According
to this notion –​which the scholastic age greatly helped develop –​death is a
temporary and unnatural state of separation between the body and the soul.7
Thus, despite its inevitable decay and dissolution, the dead body stays rele-
vant as an intrinsic part of the deceased.8 Accordingly, and even when they
describe it as food for worms, a majority of wills give precise instructions for
the handling of the corpse. While they provide for their souls by demanding
masses and prayers, testators often ask that their bodies be buried in specific
places. Many scholars have focused on the spiritual and social strategies be-
hind such requests.9 Fundamentally, fixing the location of one’s body ensures
a certain control over its destiny, an issue that becomes significant in the
wake of crises with the looming threat of mass burials.10 With the likely fear

6 As observed in France by Martin de La Soudière, “Les Testaments et actes de dernière volo-

nté à la fin du Moyen Âge,” Ethnologie française 5 (1975), 57–​80; and Marie-​Claude Marandet,
“L’élection de sépulture et les croyances relatives à ‘l’après-​mort’ dans la région toulousaine
entre 1300 et 1450 d’après les testaments,” Archéologie du Midi médiéval 3 (1985), 103–​22.
7 As expressed, for example, by Thomas Aquinas, Compendium theologiae, pars 1, 151: Necesse
est autem hoc quod est animam a corpore separatam esse, per accidens esse et contra natu-
ram. For discussion on the topic, 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), 221–​70; Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western
Christianity, 200–​1336 (New York: 1995), 229–​78.
8 Katherine Park, “The Life of the Corpse: Division and Dissection in Late Medieval Eu-
rope,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 50 (1995), 111–​32. More recent-
ly, Remedio Schmitz-​Esser, Der Leichnam im Mittelalter: Einbalsamierung, Verbrennung
und die kulturelle Konstruktion des toten Körpers (Ostfildern: 2014) has brought to the fore
the relevance of the dead body in medieval culture.
9 Christopher Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England 1066–​1550 (London: 1997), 87–​
115; Robert Kinsey, “The Location of Commemoration in Late Medieval England: the Case
of the Thorpes of Northamptonshire,” in Memory and Commemoration in Medieval En-
gland, eds C.M. Barron and C. Burgess (Donington: 2010), 40–​57.
10 Samuel Cohn, “The Place of the Dead in Flanders and Tuscany: Towards a Comparative
History of the Black Death,” in The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in
Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall
(Cambridge: 2000), 17–​43, quoting the works of Jacques Chiffoleau, La comptabilité de

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that anonymous graves lead to neglect and oblivion, demands for “holy” or
“ecclesiastical” burial in the hallowed ground of cemeteries or churches tend
to localize the body’s resting place with greater accuracy. Depending on the
cultural area from which they come, testators specify whether they wish to
join the tomb of immediate family members (wife or husband and sometimes
children) or that of their parents and ancestors. Despite regular attempts at
banning the practice, many testators also indicate the exact site of their buri-
als within the church, usually close to an altar or shrine. Their objective here
was to profit from the presence of the eucharist or relics, and of the liturgy
and prayers they give rise to.11
Proximity to loved ones or to spiritually charged sites thus suggests that the
dead body retains a certain agency in terms of social and ontological identi-
ty: it preserves the familial bond of the deceased and channels benefits to his
or her soul. In other words, far from being reviled carrion, the corpse clearly
functions as the physical locus of a commemoration that is both retrospec-
tive and prospective.12 On the one hand, it perpetuates the memory of the de-
ceased among the local community, and on the other, it acts as a mediator for
salvific performance. This, of course, operates fully during the liturgy for the
dead. Essentially composed of vigil, mass, and burial, the funeral gathers the
living around the body of the deceased to initiate the process of mourning and
assist the soul’s transition into the afterlife.13 Subsequent commemorative ac-
tivities further these objectives by re-​enacting the funeral at regular intervals,
traditionally three, seven, and 30 days after the funeral, and annually thereaf-
ter.14 Again, the body is at the centre of most of these commemorations. When
it is not next to an altar for the celebration of masses and offices, the burial
place is often the setting for complementary actions that too involve members
of the clergy.

l’Au-​delà: Les hommes, la mort et la religion dans la région d’Avignon à la fin du Moyen
Âge (vers 1320–​vers 1480) (Rome: 1980) and Jean-​Pierre Deregnaucourt, Autour de la
mort à Douai: Attitudes, pratiques et croyances, 1250–​1500, unpublished PhD dissertation
(Université de Lille-​3: 1993).
11 Christopher Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England 1066–​1550 (London: 1997), 86–​91.
12 On the dialectic of retrospective and prospective commemoration, see Robert Marcoux,
“Memory, Presence and the Medieval Tomb,” in Revisiting the Monument: Fifty Years Since
Panofsky’s Tomb Sculpture, eds Ann Adams and Jessica Barker (London: 2016), 49–​67.
13 In the Christian beliefs of the medieval period, it is commonly held that the soul’s separa-
tion from the body is a gradual process that is completed after one year, when the flesh is
entirely decomposed, see Park, “The Life of the Corpse,” 115.
14 Knud Ottosen, The Responsories and Versicles of the Latin Office of the Dead (Copenhagen:
1993), 44.

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Body, Liturgy, and Tomb Monuments in the Later Middle Ages 255

The will of Perrin d’Auxon, a citizen from Besançon who died in 1459, con-
tains most of the details pertaining to the role of the body beyond death:

The burial of my body I elect and want and order that my body be bur-
ied in the parochial church of Saint-​Jean-​Baptiste in Besançon in front
of the chapel founded in said church in honour of saint Denis, under the
tomb under which my beloved wife Ysabel, daughter of Jehan Tarevelot,
formerly burgher of Noroy, was and is buried. […] Also, I want and order
that on the day of my death and on the eve of its third, seventh, thir-
tieth and anniversary days, be well and devotedly said the Vigil of the
dead with nine psalms and nine lessons in the aforementioned church of
Saint-​Jean-​Baptiste in Besançon by priests or vicars and chaplains of the
said church, and on the day of the aforementioned third, seventh, thirti-
eth and annual obits be said and celebrated a Requiem Mass on the main
altar of said church by said priests or vicars, and after the celebration of
each of the said masses, I want and order that the Aperite15 be said by the
aforementioned priest or vicars and chaplains on the tomb under which
I shall be buried, as ordained; […] and I want that each and every priest
celebrating Mass, after the celebration, be kept to say De profundis16and
the Oratio fidelium17 on the tomb in which my body shall be buried, and
sprinkle it with holy water.18

As these excerpts demonstrate, the testator focuses intently on the fate of his
own remains. He first orders that his body be buried in his wife’s grave near a
chapel within the parochial church. Though it is unclear whether the gravesite
is where the clergymen must recite the vigil of the dead on the eve of every
commemoration mass, Perrin clearly establishes it as the culmination point of
the latter. It is here, above the body of the deceased, that prayers are to be said

15 Antiphone taken from Ps. 117:19–​20: “Aperite mihi portas justitiae: ingressus in eas con-
fitebor Domino. Haec porta Domini: justi intrabunt in eam.” On its use in the context of
burials, Frederick S. Paxton, Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early
Medieval Europe (Ithaca: 1990), 42.
16 Responsory from the Office of the Dead taken from Ps. 130:1–​2: “De profundis clamavi
ad te, Domine. Domine, exaudi vocem meam: Fiant aures tuae intendentes, in vocem
deprecationis meae.”
17 Oratio from the Office of the Dead: “Fidelium Deus omnium conditor et redemptor,
animabus famulorum famularumque tuarum remissionem cunctorum tribue peccato-
rum: ut iudulgentiam, quam semper optaverunt, piis supplicationibus consequantur. Qui
vivis et regnas in saecula saeculorum.”
18 Personal translation.

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256 Marcoux

and holy water sprinkled in a re-​enactment of the interment. More exactly,

the performance of these cyclical actions are to take place on the tombeau of
the deceased, certainly the same tombeaulx underneath which already lies his
wife. While there is no description of the monument itself, its use as a marker
is explicit: first by situating the gravesite desired by the testator (that of his
wife), then by locating the commemoration of his burial. In both instances, the
corpse is therefore dependent upon the material trace of a memorial. It is be-
cause of the monument that the body is able to avoid dissolving into complete
oblivion, taking with it the memory of the deceased.

2 Memory and Materiality

Church writers acknowledged the mnemonic role of tombs as early as the 5th
century. In his De cura pro mortuis gerenda (“On the care of the dead”), written
around 422, St Augustine calls upon the etymological evidence to explain that
funeral monuments (‘memoriae’ vel ‘monumenta’) serve to “remind someone
of” the deceased.19 The same explanation finds itself alongside comments on
other sepulchral terms in Isidore’s Etymologies and Rabanus Maurus’ De Uni-
verso.20 A shift in meaning however occurs between the 12th and 13th century
in the work of liturgists. Focusing on the term monumentum, writers such as
Jean Beleth, Sicard of Cremona, and Guillaume Durand associate the mne-
monic function of the tomb to that of a memento mori: the monument moves
the viewer to remember that he or she is dust and shall return to dust.21 In

19 Augustine, De cure pro mortuis gerenda, iii, 6d., in Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum
Latinorum, 41, ed. Joseph Zycha (Vienna: 1900), 630: “Sed non ob aliud vel Memoriae
vel Monumenta dicuntur ea quae insignita fiunt sepulcra mortuorum, nisi quia eos qui
viventium oculis morte subtracti sunt, ne oblivione etiam cordibus subtrahantur, in
memoriam revocant, et admonendo faciunt cogitari: nam et Memoriae nomen id aper-
tissime ostendit, et Monumentum eo quod moneat mentem, id est, admoneat, nuncu-
patur. Propter quod et Graeci μνημεĩον vocant, quod nos Memoriam seu Monumentum
appellamus; quoniam lingua eorum memoria ipsa qua meminimus μνήμη dicitur.” See
also Paula Rose, A commentary on Augustine’s De cura pro mortibus gerenda. Rhetoric in
Practice (Leiden: 2013), 192–​99.
20 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive Originum, xv, 11, in PL, 82, 552A; Rabanus Maurus,
De Universo, xxviii, PL, 111, 408C.
21 Jean Beleth, Summa de ecclesiasticis officiis, clix, PL, 202, 157A: “Monumentum vero
nominatur a monendo, quod nos praetereuntes qui in monumentis et sepulcris sunt,
admoneant, et se olim fuisse et perinde mortales, ut et nos meminerimus, quod cineres
simus et in cineres revertimur, pulvis et in pulverem redibimus”; Sicard of Cremona, Mitralis
de officiis, ix, 50, Gábor Sarbak and Lorenz Weinrich (eds), CCCM, 228 (Turnhout: 2008),
673, 221–​3: “Dicitur et monumentum, quasi monens mentem cuiuslibet transeuntis, quod

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Body, Liturgy, and Tomb Monuments in the Later Middle Ages 257

other words, according to the liturgists, the memory of the deceased prompted
by the tomb would serve above all a moralistic purpose.
In addition to the etymological considerations of the Church authors, the
tombs themselves manage to reveal information about their own role and
function through the inscriptions they bear. Indeed, with the epitaphic content
provided by the collection of French genealogist and antiquarian François-​
Roger de Gaignières (1642–​1715), which holds over 1500 drawings of medieval
tombs, it is possible to get a better understanding of the dynamics between
body, monument, and memory.22
The vast majority of tomb inscriptions follow a standard formula. They be-
gin with (a) the deictic hic jacet (here lies) followed by the name and titles of
the deceased. They then give (b) the date of death most often according to
the liturgical calendar, before ending with (c) the traditional blessing requi-
escat in pace (may he/​she rest in peace). Although formulaic, the structure of
the text confirms the importance of the dead body by immediately locating
its resting place, sometimes described as tumba, tumulus, sepultura, fossa or,
more rarely, terra and locus. The fact that the name of the deceased generally
follows the deictic suggests a strong identification to the material remains of
the individual. However, some inscriptions make explicit mention of the latter
with words such as corpus (body), carnis (flesh), ossa (bones) or cineres (ashes)
and pulveris (dust). Negative references to the body as putrid (putris) or “food
for worms” (vermibus) also exist but are quite rare, suggesting that the macabre
rhetoric is a marginal trend in funeral art.
If the first part of the inscription locates the body of the deceased in space,
the second one situates his or her memory in time. By detailing the date of
death, it implicitly establishes its annual commemoration (obit) and, in some
cases, associates it with a chantry. For example, on the tomb slab of Etienne de
la Cheze, formerly in the cloister of La Ferté abbey, the inscription mentions
that the esquire died “on the year 1463, the fifth day of March [and that he]
has founded an anniversary mass to be celebrated each year on the day that
he passed.”23

cinis sit et in cinerem reuertetur”; Guillaume Durand, “Rationale Divinorum Officiorum,”

i, v, 8, Anselme Davril and Timothy M. Thibodeau (eds) CCCM, 140 (Turnhout: 1995), 59,
57–​59: “Monumentum dicitur, quia monet mentem cuiuslibet inspicientis ut recordetur
quia cinis est et in cinerem reuertetur.”
22 On the Gaignières Collection, Anne Ritz-​Guilbert, La collection Gaignières: Un inventaire
du royaume au XVIIe siècle (Paris: 2016).
23 bnf Paris, fr. 8226, fol. 205: cy gist noble seignieur estienne/​ de la cheeze
escuier qui trespassa /​ lan mil quatre cens lxiii le cinquiesme iour du
mois de mars lequel a fonder un anniversaire dune messe a celebrer

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Finally, the last part of the inscription gives meaning to the previous one
in that it wishes for the deceased to find his or her rest, an objective towards
which the commemorative liturgy is primarily dedicated. Indeed, even though
it is not specified, the “peace” hoped for by the requiescat in pace formula is
that of the soul. This is made clear in the French inscriptions which almost
systematically end with the words “que Dieu ait son âme” (may God have his
or her soul).
In short, the content of most tomb inscriptions establishes that the body
firmly lies in a specific locus while the soul’s repose remains uncertain and
therefore dependent upon the commemoration of the deceased. Within this
logic, it is possible to surmise the role of the funeral monuments by consid-
ering the words used to describe them. Contrary to the liturgists, the terms
memoria and monumentum are largely absent from the inscriptions. Rather
than their mnemonic function, the vocabulary of tombs focuses on their mate-
riality. Often the words directly refer to the matter from which the monument
was made, primarily lapis and petra (stone) but sometimes also marmorea
(marble) and aes (copper). In many of these cases, the inscriptions locate the
deceased (or their body) underneath (sub, subjacet) these materials, therefore
likening these to a physical cover. In addition to the occasional use of the term
“slab” (tegmine in Latin or lame in French), other inscriptions reinforce this
material conception of tomb monuments through adjectives concerning the
remains of the deceased. Indeed, when it is not described simply as “buried”
(humatus, coopertus), the body is said to be “entombed” (tumulatus, intumu-
latus, sepultus), “enclosed” (claudius, seratus), “preserved” (conditus) or else
“concealed” (tectus) and “veiled” (velatus). Thus, according to the vocabulary
of tomb inscriptions, the fundamental role of the funeral monument would
be to protect and conceal the dead body; that is, to insure its rest until the day
of its resurrection, and to veil the process of its corruption until the time of its
regeneration.
Such protective function is in full accordance with the burial liturgy.
According to Jean Beleth and Guillaume Durand, tombs tend to attract
demons who seek to unleash their fury on the remains of the deceased.24

chascun an a tel quil trespassa/​ au monastere de ceans dieu par sa pitie

veille mettre en vray lieu son ame.
24 Jean Beleth, Summa de ecclesiasticis officiis, clxi, PL, 202, 163D: “Deinde vero ponitur in
sepulcrum, et isthic aqua apponitur benedicta, ac prunae cum thure. Et profecto aqua
benedicta ideo ne ad corpus daemones accedant, quos hujusmodi aqua abigit ac pro-
pellit”; Guillaume Durand, Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, vii, xxxv, 38 CCCM, 140B
(Turnhout: 1995), 99, 413–​419: “Deinde ponitur in spelunca in qua, in quibusdam locis,
ponitur aqua benedicta et prune cum thure. Aqua benedicta ne demones, qui multum

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Body, Liturgy, and Tomb Monuments in the Later Middle Ages 259

That is why, during the burial, holy water is sprayed upon the tomb. It is
meant to ward off the demonic threat and allow the body to lie in peace.
The re-​enactment of the ritual requested by many testators is a way to con-
solidate this state. As mentioned, it is performed two or three times during
the month following the entombment (i.e. when the soul is said to remain
near the corrupting flesh), before becoming an integral part of most annual
commemorations.
In this sense, one may consider that the tomb monument assumes the mne-
monic function of the memorial recognized by Augustine and reprised by the
liturgists. To ensure the repose of the dead body, it not only protects and con-
ceals, but also marks its location in order to perpetuate its rest. In other words,
the monument acts as a sign of the deceased’s corporal presence; it is, to recon-
figure and reinterpret the Pythagorean and Platonian play of words, the soma’s
sema. Perhaps this explains why another term commonly used to describe it,
both in tomb inscriptions and wills, is tumulus. Like its adjective form tumula-
tus, the word may sometimes refer simply to the tomb, as when the deceased
is said to rest in tumulo.25 However, on many occasions, it clearly corresponds
to the monument under which lies the body.26 As such, the term is in perfect
agreement with its medieval etymology. According to Isidore of Seville, tumu-
lus derives from tumens tellus, meaning “swollen ground.”27 To this, Guillaume
Durand later adds that the mound is actually formed by the presence of the

eam timent, ad corpus accedant; solent namque deseuire in corpora mortuorum ut quod
nequiuerunt in uita, saltem post mortem agant. Thus uere ibi ponitur propter fetorem
corporis remouendum, seu ut defunctus Creatori suo acceptabilem bonorum operum
odorem intelligatur obtulisse.”
25 Tomb of Jean de Charonne, abbot of Jouy (d. 1351), bnf, Paris, Est. Réserve Pe 1o, fol.
38: i(ohannes) de carrona pater in tumulo iacet isto sic placebat christo
qui det sibbi celica dona cum bene sit certum quem terra fine mortuari
nil valet incertum cor mundo nil venerari mors persuarsa fecit quod
fuit iste et erit hec fecit spectra quem tegit ista petra.
26 Tomb of Jean de Nanteuil, bishop of Troyes (d. 1298), BNF, Paris, Est. Réserve Pe 1n
fol. 1 and fr. 17029 fol. 110: ecce sub hoc tumulo sunt presulis ossa johannis
trecensi populo qui multis prefuit annis cujus nantolium fulsit per
progenitores nam genus egregium, sed sensus nobiliores hic humilis,
mundus largus fuit atque jocundus moribus angelicus clemens cunctis
et amicus si duo demantur trecenti milleque dantur anni tune moritur
quando stephanus reperitur.
27 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive Originum, xv, 11, PL, 82, 552A: “Tumulus dictus, quasi
tumens tellus.” The etymology appears afterwards in Raban Maur and in the work of the
liturgists quoted above, with the exception of Jean Beleth who derives tumulus from terra
tumens, possibly by using Titus Livius as reference.

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buried body.28 In other words, he defines the tumulus as the visible trace left
on the surface of the tomb by the corporal remains of the deceased. In this
light, the funeral monument is more than just a tomb marker; it is a physical
reminder of the tomb’s content.

3 Salvation and Identity

Within the psychosomatic logic of Christian ontology, standing in for the dead
body is not detrimental to the soul of the deceased. As mentioned, the body lies
in a state of rest secured by a proper burial (and its re-​enactment) until Judge-
ment Day: such is the sense of the hic jacet formula. Conversely, the state of the
soul is in the meantime uncertain and one can only hope (and intercede) for its
rest: such is the sense of the requiescat in pace formula. What the epitaphic in-
scriptions here express verbally to the reader, the monuments manage to com-
municate implicitly to the viewer. By revealing the resting (and decomposing)
body of the deceased, the monumental tomb likewise becomes an indexical
sign for the disembodied soul that is potentially in need of intercession. To put
it simply, recognition of the former arouses thoughts of the latter.
That this visual transaction of meaning relies fundamentally on the physi-
cality of the monument can be surmised by the numerous tomb slabs that bear
little else other than an inscription.
Beyond questions of financial constraints and humility, such austerity
brings to the fore the evocative power of their rectangular format. Espousing
the surface of the tomb, the shape alone alludes to its content and suffices to
enable the commemorative function of the memorial. Moreover, by enclosing
the body in the ground, the slab is suggestive of the transient nature of the
tomb.29 Once sealed after burial, the tomb is meant to be reopened solely at
the end of time, for the resurrection and final judgement. While it is closed,
focus should therefore turn to the soul and its fate in purgatory. Such rationale
rests upon the concept of the “double judgement” (duplex iudicium), notably
discussed by Thomas Aquinas.30 According to this concept, the judgement of

28 Guillaume Durand, Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, i, v, 8, CCCM, 140 (Turnhout: 1995),

59, 55–​7: “Tumulus dicitur quasi tumens tellus, quoniam homine in terra sepulto terra ali-
quantulum eleuatur.”
29 On the transient nature of the Christian tomb and the “open-​close” dialectic, see Georges
Didi-​Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde … (Paris: 1992), 9–​25.
30 Thomas Aquinas, Quodlibet X, quaestio 1, articulus 2: “Dicendum, quod iudicium ordi-
natur ad retributionem praemiorum: unde secundum duplex praemium, scilicet ani-
mae et corporis, est duplex iudicium Dei.” Brian Davies and Turner Nevitt (eds), Thomas
Aquinas’s Quodlibetal Questions (Oxford: 2019), 130.

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Body, Liturgy, and Tomb Monuments in the Later Middle Ages261

­f igure 9.1 
Tomb slab of Perrin de Reugney (d. 1342), Saint-​Seine-​l’Abbaye
source: france © m. rosso, ministere de la culture et de la
communication –​ drac de bourgogne –​ sri, 2006 © service
inventaire et patrimoine, region bourgogne-​f ranche-​c omte

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262 Marcoux

the soul after death is restated at the end of time, when applied to the psycho-
somatic unity of the raised body. Using a concept developed by Reinhart Kosel-
leck, Jérôme Baschet convincingly argued that, within this dual logic, the Last
Judgement works therefore as a “horizon of expectation,” i.e. a cultural and ex-
istential backdrop against which the disembodied soul emerges as a clear and
present concern.31 In this perspective, the tomb monument would then find
its meaning and agency in the prospect of the resurrection of the dead. Viewed
through the same open-​close dialectic that is at play in the vocabulary of the
inscriptions, the memorial points to the current needs of the soul, while the
body awaits the final judgement. The Breviary of Louis de Guyenne epitomizes
this whole idea in a famous miniature accompanying the Office of the Dead.32
Placed above the lectio prima taken from Job 7:17–​21, which refers to the cor-
ruption of the body, the image depicts a monumental tomb set in a cemetery.
The surface of the monument is a simple slab bearing a peripheral inscription,
while its side is composed of three niches, each containing a skull associat-
ed with a member of the social elite, i.e. a pope, an emperor, and a prince.
Between the two sections, the content of the monument reveals itself to the
viewer. Lying on its back, a decaying corpse appears against a dark backdrop
suggestive of the tomb’s interior. Like the three skulls, the cadaver serves here
as a memento mori, reminding the reader of the vanity of earthly life and the
frailty of the flesh. However, enclosed in the tomb monument, it also empha-
sizes its state of waiting in accordance with the responsory of the first reading,
which expresses faith in the resurrection (Qui Lazarum resuscitasti a monu-
mento foetidum […], “You who raised Lazarus from the stinking tomb […]”).
However, it is with the detail of the monk or friar that the image manages to
stress efficiently the correlation between the temporary repose of the body
and the intercession needed for the soul of the deceased. By lying atop the
stone slab, the cloaked and hooded figure acknowledges the tomb as a sealed
location in which the recumbent corpse decays. Concurrently, by reading what
is likely a breviary –​and perhaps even the very passage associated with the
miniature –​the monk or friar recognizes the site as a designated locus to com-
memorate the deceased. In other words, the image operates a mise en abyme

31 Jérôme Baschet, “Jugement de l’âme, Jugement dernier: Contradiction, complémen-

tarité, chevauchement?” Revue Mabillon 6 (1995), 159–​203; and “Une image à deux temps:
Jugement Dernier et jugement des âmes au Moyen Âge,” Images Re-​vues hors série 1,
(2008): http://​journals.openedition.org/​imagesrevues/​878 (last accessed 28/​6/​2020).
32 Châteauroux, Médiathèque Équinoxe, ms. 2, fol. 395v. The open-​close dialectic also
informs the other iconographic themes used for the Office of the Dead, mainly the litur-
gical scenes of obsequies and burial and the biblical scene of the Raising of Lazarus.

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Body, Liturgy, and Tomb Monuments in the Later Middle Ages263

­f igure 9.2 
Miniature from the Office of the Dead (detail), Breviary of Louis de Guyenne
(1410–​1413). Châteauroux, Médiathèque Équinoxe, ms. 2, fol. 395v
source: © institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes –​cnrs

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264 Marcoux

that expounds the ontological implications of death in order to give meaning

to the liturgical text it accompanies. More importantly, it clearly uses the tomb
monument as a visible extension of the buried body, which becomes the set-
ting for commemoration and intercessory prayer for the dead.
Although the monument can fulfil this function solely through its material
shape, the role of iconography is not superfluous. Indeed, depicting the de-
ceased on the surface of a monument further evokes the presence of the body
underneath it. This is specially the case with the tombs of monks and cler-
gymen. According to their customaries, members of religious orders are first
exposed and then buried in their monastic habit.
The same is true of priests and bishops whose corpses are clad in their sac-
erdotal vestments in order to present their virtuous status before God, accord-
ing to Guillaume Durand.33 In the case of ecclesiastical burials, the appearance
of the effigy on the tomb would therefore match that of its content, a con-
cordance often verified by archaeological evidence. In particular, the materi-
al found in the tombs of bishops often corresponds directly to the attributes
worn by the effigies depicted on their monuments: chasuble, sandals, pallium,
crozier, ring, etc.34
Of course, funeral iconography does more than evoke what lies underneath
the memorial. It also individualizes and personalizes the tomb’s content by
communicating the deceased’s social identity. From burghers to kings and
queens, from monks to archbishops and cardinals, the effigies typically bear
distinctive attributes that reflect the hierarchy of late medieval society. Herald-
ry provides further means of identification by associating the deceased with
a specific lineage. In short, the iconography of the tomb translates into visual
cues the principle information given by the epitaphic inscription: presence of
the body, social status and function, familial affiliation. The tomb monument of
Bishop Jean de Blaisy in the abbey church of Saint-​Seine best exemplifies this.
The deceased appears as a recumbent skeleton with arms crossed on the
chest, an image akin to the remains once buried underneath the large stone
slab in front of the main altar. The crozier at his side, combined with the ton-
sure still garnishing his skull identify him as an abbot, while the emblazoned
shield to his right designates him as a member of the Blaisy family. Though
they cast aside the contribution of the deceased to his abbey and the date of

33 Guillaume Durand, Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, vii, 35, 41, CCCM, 140B (Turnhout:
1995), 100, 453–​456: “[…] vestes enim sacerdotales virtutes significant cum quibus prae
ceteris sunt Domino presentandi.”
34 See for example Christian Sapin, “Une inhumation exceptionnelle mise à jour à Saint-​
Germain d’Auxerre,” Icauna 14 (2005), 2–​3. Also, Binski, Medieval Death, 84.

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Body, Liturgy, and Tomb Monuments in the Later Middle Ages265

­f igure 9.3 
Tomb slab of Eudes de Bèze (d. 1419), Saint-​Seine-​l’Abbaye
source: france © m. rosso, ministere de la culture et de la
communication –​ drac de bourgogne –​ sri, 2006 © service
inventaire et patrimoine, region bourgogne-​f ranche-​c omte

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266 Marcoux

­f igure 9.4 
Tomb of Jean iv de Blaisy (d. 1439), Saint-​Seine-​l’Abbaye
source: france © m. rosso, ministere de la culture et de la
communication –​ drac de bourgogne –​ sri, 2006 © service
inventaire et patrimoine, region bourgogne-​f ranche-​c omte

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Body, Liturgy, and Tomb Monuments in the Later Middle Ages 267

his death, these details cover the essential elements of the monument’s pe-
ripheral inscription, e.g. those that are traditionally condensed at the begin-
ning of the text35: “Here lies brother Jean de Blaisy, doctor in law, abbot of this
church of Saint-​Seine in the year 1398, who used his power and his time in the
service and for the restauration of this said church, who died in the year 1439
on May Fourth. Pray God for him.”36
The iconography also manages to expound the call for prayer that ends the
inscription. It does so by placing above the skeleton of the deceased an image
of his soul arriving at the threshold of heaven. Like the miniature from the
breviary commented on above, the iconography plays with the concept of psy-
chosomatic unity in opposing the resting body in the ground to the uncertain
fate of the soul in the hereafter, a display that is likely to prompt the viewer
into taking action for the salvation of the deceased. To this end, the presence
of speech scrolls which stem from both the soul and the skeleton seems even to
show the way. Carrying prayers addressed to the Virgin and Christ, they too be-
come visual cues that complement the content of the inscription by express-
ing the need for intercessory prayers.37
The location, material, and iconography of late medieval tomb monu-
ments do not answer only to a number of liturgical or para-​liturgical impera-
tives determined by the prospective logic of what Jacques Chiffoleau coined
the “accounting of the hereafter.”38 To be sure, the monuments do play a pri-
mary role in the commemorative dynamics of the church space. As argued
here, they provide the mnemonic setting for the cyclical re-​enactment of the
funeral and the performance of other intercessory actions by visually locat-
ing the site of the deceased’s physical remains, those that lie in wait while
the fate of the soul requires assistance from the living. However, tomb mon-
uments also serve earthly interests. Occupying the public space of churches,
often in combination with stained-​glassed and painted images, they not only
perpetuate the memory of the deceased, they glorify it through the impor-
tance of their location, the quality of their materials and the artistry of their

35 Vincent Debiais, Messages de pierre: La lecture des inscriptions dans la communication

médiévale (XIIIe-​XIVe siècle) (Turnhout: 2009), 263–​8.
36 cy gist frere iehan de blaisy docteur en/​ decret abbe de ceste eglise de
saint seingre en lan mil ccc iiiixx xviii lequel a employe/​ de son pouoir
son temps au service et/​ reedification de ceste dicte eglise qui tres-
passa lan m cccc xxxix en may le iiii pries dieu pour luy.
37 mater dei miserere mei peccatorum advocatrix sis pro me mediatrix, iesu
christe miserere mei redemptor mundi parce michi peccatori.
38 Chiffoleau, La comptabilité.

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268 Marcoux

iconography. With the crowding of churches through the piling of monu-

ments and objects of all kinds, the use of sculpture in the round and of cano-
pies, in particular, becomes the firm sign of a preeminent status. The benefits
of such glorification obviously go beyond the reputation of the deceased.
Through their dominating images and structures, the greater memorials of-
ten support the construction of collective identities, those of families and
institutions.39 They become lieux de mémoire through which the retrospec-
tive memory of an individual and that of a group coalesce. In addition to the
spiritual needs of the deceased, they remind the living of the part he or she
played in the history of the local community. Thus, in the abbey church of
Saint-​Seine, the great-​canopied monument with sculpted effigy and various
statues that once rose next to the tomb slab of Jean de Blaisy celebrated the
memory of Guillaume de Vienne (d. 1407), a former abbot who successively
became bishop of Autun (1379–​1387), bishop of Beauvais (1387–​1389) and,
finally, archbishop of Rouen (1389–​1407).
Although the prestigious titles kept him away from Saint-​Seine, Guil-
laume richly endowed the abbey and participated in the restoration of its
church. Along with numerous shields bearing the Vienne family arms, the
monumental tomb likely stands as a testimony of this contribution. Some-
what compensating for his long absence, it boasts Guillaume’s loyalty to the
monastic community.40 While the deceased would certainly gain spiritual
profit from all this, notably by rallying the prayers of his former brothers, the
ostentatious appearance of the tomb monument suggests the importance
of worldly concerns. It establishes a retrospective narrative that binds the
identity of the deceased and of his family to that of his former abbey where
henceforth his body lies.
Memorials of founding figures tend to take this commemorative function
further yet, as they are often commissioned many years, even centuries after
their deaths. Such is the case of Nicolas d’Estouteville’s monument in the ab-
bey church of Valmont. Although Nicolas died around the year 1177, his memo-
rial bears the distinctive features of late 15th century tomb sculpture, in both
its style and iconography.41

39 Marcoux, “Memory, Presence and the Medieval Tomb,” 50–​8.

40 Robert Marcoux, “Looking Beyond the Face: Tomb Effigies and the Medieval
Commemoration of the Dead,” in Picturing Death, 1200–​1600, eds Stephen Perkinson and
Noa Turel (Leiden: forthcoming).
41 Still extant, the monument underwent major modifications in the 19th century but its
overall aspect matches the one given by the drawing of the Gaignières Collection, bnf,
Paris, Est. Réserve Pe 8 fol. 471.

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Body, Liturgy, and Tomb Monuments in the Later Middle Ages269

­f igure 9.5 
Tomb of Nicolas d’Estouteville (d. 1177?), Valmont Abbey
source: drawing from the gaignières collection. paris,
bibliotheque nationale de france, est. reserve pe 8 fol. 471
© bibliotheque nationale de france

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270 Marcoux

As its founder, Nicolas would have been included in the commemorative

liturgy of the Benedictine community of Valmont for the sake of his soul and
those of his ancestors, as the foundation charter confirms.42 It is possible that
the late medieval monument replaced a former one that served as a locus for
the liturgical commemoration of Nicolas (possibly destroyed during the Hun-
dred Years’ war). However, its commission more than three centuries later rath-
er appears as an attempt to reassert the link between the abbey of Valmont and
the Estouteville family.43 Indeed, in addition to the ostentation of the family
coat of arms on the tabard of the effigy and the heraldic display in the middle
portion of the sarcophagus, the monument exhibits an impressive maquette of
the abbey church. Originally placed at the foot of the effigy, the model summa-
rizes in a way the monument’s objective. Its architectural details are not those
one would expect to find on the church founded by Nicolas at the end of the
12th century but is in keeping with the flamboyant style of the late medieval
period. Consequently, the prominent feature expresses the idea of continuity
by renewing the narrative of the abbey’s foundation. In other words, the tomb
monument uses the prospective channel of the commemoration of the dead
to act primarily as a retrospective device for the benefit of both the Estouteville
family and the Valmont monastic community.

4 Conclusions

The funeral monument of Nicolas d’Estouteville brings to the fore the dual
impetus of the liturgical commemoration of the dead. Since the institution
of the eucharist, liturgy has involved an interpenetration of temporalities in a
sacred space. To put it briefly, the eschatological future informs the commem-
oration of the past in the present. With the resurrection of the flesh and the Fi-
nal Judgement working as a horizon of expectancy, commemorating the dead
actualizes both the past life of the deceased and the present status of his or her
soul. As the designated locus for such remembrance –​in both its liturgical and
para-​liturgical forms (those of ritual performance and individual prayers), the
tomb thus becomes the nexus of retrospective and prospective strategies. In
answer to these, the monument materializes the body of the deceased in the

42 Archives Départementales de la Seine-​Maritime. Fonds de l’abbaye de Valmont, 19 H 2.

43 Bernard Beck, “Le mécénat des d’Estouteville,” in L’Architecture de la Renaissance en
Normandie I: Regards sur les chantiers de la Renaissance. Actes du colloque de Cerisy-​la-​
Salle (30 septembre –​4 octobre 1998), eds Bernard Beck, Pierre Bouet, Claire Étienne, and
Isabelle Lettéron (Caen: 2003), 23–​40, on 28.

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Body, Liturgy, and Tomb Monuments in the Later Middle Ages 271

space of the church. Its presence therefore binds the dead with the living in an
interactive relation, one that involves the spiritual issue of individual salvation
and temporal matters of collective identity. More than mnemonic tools used
to prompt pre-​arranged commemoration and personal prayers, tomb monu-
ments embody, stabilize, and perpetuate the values, practices, and tensions of
late medieval society.

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 ­c hapter 10

Images of Death in Art and Literature in Late

Medieval and Early Modern Europe (1300–​1700)

Christina Welch

The range of literary and visual material produced on the topic of death be-
tween 1300 and 1700 across Europe is vast, and this chapter seeks to explore
a representative cross-​section of it, highlighting continuing themes, notably
the influence of Christian theology (both official and vernacular), and areas of
difference, such as the gender of Death. Divided into two sections, the chap-
ter explores visual representations of death and the dead before moving on to
literary representations of death and the dead; it draws on the existing schol-
arship, but also includes some new readings of death imagery, including me-
dieval illuminations and medical illustrations, and adds some background to
literary tropes, such as the reasons for the medieval disdain for the elderly and
the prevalence of corpse medicine in early modern works. Because literature
during this time was often illustrated, the second section also includes some
references to illustrations, notably in relation to Books of Hours where imag-
ery not only elucidated the written word but, through the use of symbolism,
magnified the meaning of the text, highlighting the connections between this
life and the afterlife.
Art as a designation is loaded with culturally contextualised notions of
what might count as aesthetically valuable High Art, and what might not. On
the one hand, The Ambassadors (1533), an oil-​on-​oak painting by Renaissance
artist Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–​1543), depicts Jean de Dinteville and
Georges de Selve in a form of what is normally considered High Art. Replete
with the symbolism of death, including an anamorphic skull, this memento
mori represents a consideration of the transient earthly vanities of life in re-
gard to human mortality and the eternal afterlife; interestingly, memento mori
was the personal motto of de Dinteville (1504–​1555).1 Nevertheless, this very
same memento mori theme can also be found in more homespun church wall
paintings, often considered Low or Vernacular Art, owing to its naïve style: an

1 Libby K. Escobedo, “Holbein’s Memento Mori,” in Dealing with the Dead; Mortality and Com-
munity in Medieval and early Modern Europe, ed. Thea Tomani (Leiden: 2018), 366–​78.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004443433_012

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Images of Death in Art and Literature 273

example here would be the painting of man depicted as a dandy paired with a
figure representing death, decorating the south nave wall in a window recess
in St Cadoc’s church, Llancarfan, Wales.2 This artificial division can affect lit-
erature too, with the works of Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343–​1400) and William
Shakespeare (1564–​1616) set apart from vernacular folktales, and clerical ser-
mons. Yet visual and textual sources of all kinds informed people on every level
of society about death and dying. As such, this chapter does not seek to enter
into the debates over High versus Low culture, although it will acknowledge
levels of proficiency in regard to visual imagery, not only in terms of overall
artistic representation of the dead or dying body, but also in terms of observ-
able anatomical knowledge of the human form. Visual representations during
the period 1300 to 1700 vary widely with realistic portraiture (verism) being a
notable introduction. Further, the scientific dissection of the human form led
not only to better knowledge of it, but to more accurate depictions of the living
and the dead.
The examples of late medieval and early modern visual and literary repre-
sentations of death in this chapter have been taken geographically from across
northern and southern Europe to provide as broad a spectrum of coverage as
possible. However, the art included in this chapter is constrained by what has
survived. Due to shifts in attitudes towards visual culture during this period
in parts of northern Europe, a dramatic change occurred. Because of the Ref-
ormation, in places such as Germany, Britain, and Scandinavia, lavish Roman
Catholic depictions of saints were hidden or destroyed in the shift towards
more austere Protestant churches, whilst subsequent iconoclasms added to
the destruction of a good deal of overtly religious art.

1 Visual Representations of Death and the Dead

Visual representations of death date to the early 14th century and took the
form of anonymous skeletal figures.3 The “Three Living and the Three Dead”
memento mori imagery that typically, but not always, depicted three living aris-
tocratic men meeting three animated dead counterparts in differing stages of
decay, could be seen in book illuminations and illustrations, and on church
murals. Although the origins of the imagery is unknown, there is a “dazzling

2 Christina Welch, “Let’s Talk of Graves, of Worms, and Epitaphs: Afterword,” in, Dancing with
Death: An Awful Warning in a Welsh Church, ed. Madeline Gray (Llancarfan: 2016), 25–​27.
3 Ashby Kinch, Imago Mortis: Mediating Images of Death in Late Medieval Culture (Leiden: 2013),
111–​14.

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274 Welch

variety and scope of [extant] images” from across mainland Europe, with addi-
tional, now destroyed, images in this style referred to in historical texts.4 One
of the best-​known of the visual representations in the “Three Living/​Three
Dead” genre is from the De Lisle Psalter (ca. 1308-​ca. 1340) held in the British
Library.5 This miniature illumination accompanies a poem in Anglo-​Norman
French entitled Compaynouns ueez ceo ke ieo uoy which translates as “compan-
ions see what I see.” The depiction shows three crowned women in fine gowns
on one page facing three corpses on the opposite page. The woman and corpse
closest to each other have direct eye contact. This corpse is part skeletal, part
dressed (in rags), hands crossed over the chest with eight maggot-​like creatures
on its belly. The woman, who holds a falcon, grabs the hand of the lady behind
her. The second skeletal figure is shrouded and, like the second woman, has its
eyes cast to the ground. This skeleton rests its right hand on the left shoulder of
the first skeleton, so the touch of the two women is mirrored by the two skele-
tons. The third skeleton is naked, without a shroud, and is eviscerated with the
inside of the spine showing inside the open belly. It looks outwards at the view-
er/​reader engaging them directly. Like the third woman, it stands disconnected
from the other two figures in the group; the third lady gazes upwards towards
the heavens. These artworks were highly symbolic: the third woman’s upward
gaze, coupled with the third skeleton’s direct gaze, was designed to remind the
viewer/​reader to consider their post-​mortem spiritual fate.
Although the direct gaze as an artistic concept is more generally present
in paintings from the Renaissance and later eras, it is evident in this pre-​
Renaissance memento mori illumination.6 The symbolism is clear, the imag-
ery relates to us. Furthermore, the fact that the first skeleton and the first lady
hold each other’s gaze is also symbolic, as if to suggest that as the skeleton
now is, so the lady shall be. Additionally, the falcon that this lady holds was
an allegory of romantic love and of male genitalia in this period.7 Here then

4 Ashby Kinch, “Image, Ideology, and Form: The Middle English ‘Three Dead Kings’ in its
Iconographic Context,” The Chaucer Review 43/​1 (2008), 48–​81, on 49.
5 De Lisle Psalter, England (ca. 1308-​ca. 1340). BL. Arundel MS 83, f. 127v. The digitised man-
uscript can be seen at: https://​www.bl.uk/​collection-​items/​the-​three-​living-​and-​the-​three
-​dead-​princes-​from-​the-​de-​lisle-​psalter (last accessed 28/​6/​2020).
6 Eugene Dwyer, “Gaze,” in Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography: Themes Depicted in
Works of Art, ed. Helene E. Roberts (Chicago, IL: 1998), 357–​62; Colum P. Hourihane, “Gender
Studies in Medieval Art,” in The Grove Encyclopedia of Medieval Art and Architecture, vol.1
(Oxford: 2012), 646–​9.
7 Diane Wolfthal, “Picturing Same-​Sex Desire: The Falconer and His Lover in Images by Petrus
Christus and the Housebook Master,” in Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality and Sight in Medi-
eval Text and Image, eds Emma Campbell and Robert Millis (Basingstoke: 2004), 17–​46, on 23.

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Images of Death in Art and Literature 275

we can see the sin of eros (love, lust, and erotic passion) come eye to eye with
Thanatos (death). The inevitable consequence of fecund life is shown in the
creatures of decay on the skeleton’s belly added to heighten the impact of the
juxtaposition. “As you are now, I once was,” and “as I am now, so shall you be,”
is the message of the visual exchange between the two figures. As noted, the
middle figures look penitently to the earth, the place of burial and decom-
position, whilst the outer figures turn their eyes to God and to the viewer/​
reader, effectively asking them to think on the effects of earthly materiality
and its inherent sinfulness. Indeed, in the vernacular text that accompanies
the diptych illumination, the women declare that they are afraid, imagining
that what they see are devils. But the corpses reply that they were once fair
like the women, and that the women will in time become corpses like them.
One even warns, “For Godes Love bewer by me” (For God’s love, beware by me).
These powerful images acted as a stark reminder to the, undoubtedly wealthy,
owner of this prestigious text, to think about their death and their own after-
life, for as the Bible reminded many times, money could not buy a place in
the hereafter.8
A similar, although less sophisticated, “Three Living/​Three Dead” illumina-
tion can be found in the Taymouth Book of Hours.9 Here three men, again one
with a falcon, meet three skeletal figures in varying stages of decay who pass on
the “as I am so shall you be” warning. This genre of artwork peppered not only
expensive manuscripts informing the wealthy of their fate, but also graced
churches across Europe in the form of wall paintings that allowed the general
population to benefit similarly from the admonition.10 This type of mortuary
didacticism was of course not limited to the 14th century, indeed it stretched
into the 1500s and was popular across Europe, where it survived the Protes-
tant Reformation at least in literary form through a transformation of Books of
Hours into devotional texts.11 Widely popular before the Reformation, Books
of Hours contained prayers to be said at the canonical hours in honour of the
Virgin Mary, that is, the times of daily Christian prayer.
It is likely that the “Three Living/​Three Dead” genre started in France, which
is notable for another typical form of mortality art, the danse macabre, or

8 For example, Matt 19:24–​28, Luke 16:19–​24, 1 Tim 6:9–​10, Proverbs 11:28.
9 The Taymouth Hours (second quarter of the 14th century). BL. Yates Thompson MS 13,
f. 127v. f 123v.
10 Willy F. Storck, “Aspects of Death in English Art and Poetry, I,” The Burlington Magazine
for Connoisseurs, 21, 113 (1912), 254–​6.
11 Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers 1240–​1570 (New Haven:
2006), 121–​40.

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276 Welch

“Dance of Death” mural.12 One of the most famous of these murals was paint-
ed onto the wall of the cemetery of Les Saints Innocents in Paris (1424–​25),
a ‘sought-​after’ cemetery where bones were regularly exhumed and placed
in charnel houses or ossuaries, some of which were founded by wealthy cit-
izens such as Nicolas Flamel, an alchemist to whom we shall return shortly.13
Although no longer extant, woodcuts of the mural dating from 1485 give, ac-
cording to art historian Sophie Oosterwijk, “a fairly reliable impression.”14 The
danse typically consisted of a series of male characters flanked on each side
by a genderless skeletal figure. However, there were variations. The English
poet John Lydgate (1370–​1451) is notable for adding female characters to one of
his versions of the poem (ca. 1430), while an elderly female representation of
death leads away a canon in a danse mural painted by the Swiss artist, Nicholas
Manuel Deutsch (1484–​1530), for the Dominican Abbey in Berne in 1517.15 The
danse genre featured people from all levels of society (although predominantly
the social elite), but in essence pronounced that death came to all, from babies
to bishops. No matter what one’s rank and status, death was the ultimate social
leveller.
The danse as a visual memento mori spread throughout northern Europe
and into the Baltic countries, with notable examples inside an Estonian
church in the city of Tallinn, and in rural churches around the Swiss city of
Lucerne, which was a heartland of proto-​Reformation thought.16 Perhaps the

12 Candace A. Reilly, “Bonne de Luxembourg’s Three Living and Three Dead: Abnormal
Decompositions,” Inquiries 3/​7 (2011) at: http://​www.inquiriesjournal.com/​articles/​555/​
bonne-​de-​luxembourgs-​three-​living-​and-​three-​dead-​abnormal-​decomposition (last
accessed 28/​6/​2020); Christine M. Kralik, “A Matter of Life and Death: Forms, Functions
and Audiences for ‘The Three Living and the Three Dead’ in Late Medieval Manuscripts”
(University of Toronto, PhD diss.: 2013) at: https://​tspace.library.utoronto.ca/​bitstream/​
1807/​68951/​1/​Kralik_​Christine_​M_​201306_​PhD_​thesis.pdf (last accessed 28/​6/​2020).
13 Sophie Oosterwijk, “ ‘Fro Paris to Inglond’? The Danse Macabre in Text and Image in Late-​
Medieval England” (Leiden University, PhD diss.: 2009), at: https://​openaccess.leide-
nuniv.nl/​handle/​1887/​13873, 60 (last accessed 28/​6/​2020).
14 Oosterwijk, “Fro Paris to Inglond”? 64.
15 Oosterwijk, “Fro Paris to Inglond”? 36; Christina Welch, “Death and the Erotic Woman: The
European Gendering of Mortality in Times of Major Religious Change,” Journal of Gender
Studies 24 (2015), 399–​418, on 404.
16 Sophie Oosterwijk, “Of Corpses, Constables and Kings: The Danse Macabre in Late-​
Medieval and Renaissance Culture,” Journal of British Archaeological Association 157
(2004), 61–​90; Sophie Oosterwijk and Stefanie Knoll (eds), Mixed Metaphors: The Danse
Macabre in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Newcastle-​upon-​Tyne: 2011); Elina
Gertsman, “The Dance of Death in Reval (Tallinn): The Preacher and His Audience,”
Gesta 42/​2 (2003), 143–​159; Rolf P. Drier, “Dances of Death in the Small Parishes of Rural
Lucerne,” e-​Sharp 7: Faith, Belief and Community (2006). An example of the genre from

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Images of Death in Art and Literature 277

best known of this genre, however, is the series of 41 Totentanz woodcuts by

Hans Holbein the Younger, completed in 1525 but not published until 1538.17
The series begins with Creation, followed by the Temptation of Adam and Eve.
In the third woodcut death appears, for biblically it was not until the first cou-
ple were ejected from Eden that death came into the world. Holbein’s fourth
Totentanz woodcut depicts the consequences of the Fall, with Adam tilling the
earth and Eve nursing a child, whilst the fifth shows a crowd of skeletons sum-
moning humans to their inevitable fate: the grave. Woodcuts six to 33 show
men and women, old and young, from a variety of social classes in the com-
pany of skeletal death; some go quietly, some resist. Woodcut 39 shows death
taking a small child from its distraught parents; an hourglass in the foreground
is symbolic of the inevitable transience of human life. Woodcut 40 shows the
Last Judgement, and 41 the Escutcheon of Death. In these images, Holbein is
keen to show how death is connected only to earthly sinfulness and the out-
come of the Original Sin: the disobedience of Adam and Eve in the Garden
of Eden.
Holbein is famous for a further depiction of death: The Body of the Dead
Christ in the Tomb (1521–​22).18 Painted in oil and tempera on limewood, Hol-
bein images a slightly larger than life-​size recumbent Christ in the early stages
of decomposition. Emaciated and naked bar a loincloth to preserve his mod-
esty, this particular representation can be considered alongside the Transi
genre of artistic representations of death. Transi imagery includes mortuary
brasses and memorial sculpture that show a dead, emaciated and frequently
decomposing, naked corpse laid on a burial shroud. Common across northern
Europe, in England they had largely disappeared as a form of memorial by the
time Queen Elizabeth I took the throne in 1558.19 However, in France, Germa-
ny, and Ireland, they remained as a form of memorial well into the 1600s.20
Transi were a form of memento mori, reminding all who looked on them
that death was inevitable and thus the afterlife should be at the centre of one’s
earthly thoughts and deeds. Transi sculpture, which started in France in the

The National Gallery, Ljubljana, can be seen at: https://​www.ng-​slo.si/​si/​stalna-​zbirka/​

1200–​1600/​mrtvaski-​ples-​janez-​iz-​kastva?workId=3707 (last accessed 28/​6/​2020).
17 Hans Holbein (with an introductory note by Austin Dobson), The Dance of Death
(Adelaide: 2014).
18 Hans Holbein’s ‘The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb’ (1521–​22), Kunstmuseum, Basel.
19 Christina Welch, “Exploring Late-​Medieval Memento Mori on the Effigial Corpse, Carved
Cadaver Sculptures,” in, Dealing with the Dead: Mortality and Community in Medieval and
early Modern Europe, ed. Thea Tomani (Leiden: 2018), 331–​65.
20 Kathleen Cohen, Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol: The Transi Tomb in the Late Middle
Ages and the Renaissance (Berkeley, LA: 1973), 189–​94.

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278 Welch

­f igure 10.1 Transi effigy of Sir John Fitzalan (d.1434); in the Fitzalan Chapel Arundel Castle,
England
source: © lampman. creative commons licence

late 1390s, could either just depict a naked, emaciated corpse, or juxtaposed
this with a carved effigy of the individual en-​vie (in-​life).
The en-​vie figure conformed to the norms of day, acting as a status symbol
memorial representing the deceased in garb that emphasised their social
position.21 The reason why most memorial effigies depicted an individual
en-​vie was that in Christianity there was the promise of eternal life post-​
mortem through the grace of God and belief in the saving power of Jesus
Christ.22 However, this did not mean that death was welcome, for earthly
life was bound up with sinfulness through the Fall and the dead had to ac-
count for, and purge, their earthly misdeeds. This was done in purgatory,

21 Nigel Llewllyn, The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual, c.1500–​c.1800
(London: 1991), 22.
22 Clive Burgess, “ ‘Longing to Be Prayed For’: Death and Commemoration in an English
Parish in the Later Middle Ages,” in The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late
Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (Cambridge:
2000), 44–​65, on 57.

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Images of Death in Art and Literature 279

the initial afterlife in Roman Catholicism for all bar the sainted and the
damned.
By the time Transi had become popular as a form of memorial, purgatory
had become an increasingly complex theological issue that revolved around a
community of prayer involving both the living and the dead, although the val-
ue of praying for the dead was only officially adopted by the Catholic Church
at the Council of Trent (1545–​63).23 The communal economy of prayer during
this time is evident from the “pray for me” request on many of the extant Tran-
si sculptures, and also from contemporary wills. In effect, if the living prayed
for the dead they were carrying out one of the seven spiritual acts of mercy
and this could help lessen the pains of, and time spent in, purgatory; the dead
would similarly benefit from these prayers and as such there was a mutual de-
pendence between the living and the dead based on the power of prayer.
Transi were a form of memorial for the socialite elite as they were, in all their
forms, expensive to commission. They imaged an individual person and often
had an element of verism. Many of the continental Transi sculpture featured
rotting or verminous cadavers to bring home visually to the viewer the reality
of individual death and the need for prayer and performing good works in this
life, and prayers for the dead in the after-​life. An early illustration of a vermin-
ous cadaver can be found in the Lay de la fragilité humaine, a vernacular verse
published in 1383 by the French poet Deschamps (1346–​1406/​07). The featured
cadaver echoes the words of Pope Innocent iii (1198–​1216) (Lotario dei Segni
b.1160/​61), showing how human sinfulness manifests itself in rot. In the illus-
tration by Pierre Remiet (1350–​1430) the upper limbs of the cadaver inside the
tomb are wrapped by worms or serpents, whilst toads or frogs crawl towards
the corpse.24 However, not all continental Transi depicted verminous corpses,
one notable example being the memorial for the previously mentioned scribe
and alchemist Nicholas Flamel (1340–​1418) whose tombstone features an in-
cised Transi. Originally located in the church of Saint-​Jacques-​de-​la-​Boucherie
where Flamel was buried, it is now located in the Musée de Cluny, Paris. Like
most of the incised Transi, it is relatively poor in terms of its depictions of the
body’s anatomy; it is significant that some of the best carved examples of Tran-
si figures are three-​dimensional effigy sculptures, which strongly suggests that
their sculptors had a good level of knowledge in human surface anatomy.25

23 Cohen, Metamorphosis, 189–​91; Jacques le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur
Goldhammer (Chicago: 1984), 10–​11; Council of Trent: Decree: De invocation veneration et
reliquis sanctorium, et de sacris imaginibus. 3 December 1563, session 25.
24 Michael Camille, Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Remiet (New Haven: 1996), 168–​71.
25 Welch, “Late-​Medieval English Memento Mori,” 349–​54.

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280 Welch

European depictions of the human body’s internal anatomy date to at least

the late 1200s, and relate to early autopsy, although the division and dissection
(evisceration) of the corpse for transportation from place of death to site of
burial predates this form of anatomization.26 Until the Renaissance however,
illustrations of the human body were typically anatomically inaccurate and
highly stylised. It was the publication of De humani corporis fabrica libri sep-
tem by Andreas Vesalius (1514–​1564) that changed the way the dead human
body was depicted.27 First published in 1543, it described in words and imag-
ery the various systems of the human body (muscular, arterial, skeletal) in a
hitherto unknown manner, as Vesalius scientifically dissected human corpses
to gain detailed information about how the human body worked. Two of the
most well-​known of the Fabrica plates are Plates 163 and 164, two of a series
of three posed skeletons.28 These particular woodcuts, by an anonymous art-
ist employed by Vesalius, show a human skeleton in very life-​like postures.29
Plate 163 depicts the front view of an articulated skeleton resting almost non-
chalantly on a spade in a barren mountainous wilderness beside what appears
to be the corner of a hole, probably a freshly dug grave. The head is shown
titled slightly to the left and backwards, with the bony left hand pointing to
the earth and the eye sockets gazing upwards. The pose of this figure sug-
gests it is pointing to the resting place of the body (the grave) and looking
at the destination of the soul (heaven), making the illustration both secular
(scientific-​anatomical) and spiritual. However, as the jawbone and cranium
are shown as slightly apart, it is unclear whether the figure finds the prospect
of death entertaining or terrifying; both expressions could be read into the
imagery. A hair, or possibly a wriggly worm, shown hanging from the skeleton’s
left ear, adds to the incongruity of this particular depiction of the dry bones
of a human body.
Plate 164 of Fabrica shows a side-​on view of a skeleton leaning against a
plinth.30

26 Katherine Park, “The Life of the Corpse: Division and Dissection in Late Medieval Europe,”
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 50 (1995), 111–​32.
27 Andreas Vesalius is the Latinised form of the Dutch name Andries van Wesel. Vesalius was
born in Brussels, which was at the time part of the Habsburg Netherlands.
28 Plate 163 from Vesalius’s Fabrica (1543) can be viewed at Historical Anatomies on the Web:
https://​www.nlm.nih.gov/​exhibition/​historicalanatomies/​Images/​1200_​pixels/​Vesalius
_​Pg_​163.jpg (last accessed 28/​6/​2020).
29 The discussion in this paragraph comes from Glenn Harcourt, “Andreas Vesalius and the
Anatomy of Antique Sculpture,” Representations 17 (1987), 28–​61.
30 Fabrica, Plate 164: https://​www.nlm.nih.gov/​exhibition/​historicalanatomies/​Images/​1200
_​pixels/​Vesalius_​Pg_​164.jpg (last accessed 28/​6/​2020).

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Images of Death in Art and Literature281

­f igure 10.2 
Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica, plate 164
source: © public domain

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282 Welch

The figure’s left arm is bent with the elbow resting on the plinth, and the
hand is bent back to support the skull. The figure’s right hand holds anoth-
er skull, so positioned that there is a direct gaze between the two bony eye
sockets. With its legs casually crossed, this skeletal figure is not a lifeless skel-
eton representing death, but the bare bones of an individual contemplating
mortality. Following on is the third posed skeleton of the triptych (the less
well-​known Plate 165).31 This view of the human skeleton is largely of the back.
The figure is slightly hunched over and looking downwards at the earth in a
thoughtful manner. Whether the illustrator intended this triptych of the hu-
man skeleton to resonate with theological concerns about one’s post-​mortem
fate is unknown, but the philosophical postures of the three skeletons suggest
strongly that they did. Knowledge of the Bible in Europe during this time was
a given, and it can be assumed that any Renaissance viewer/​reader of Fabrica
would find it hard not to think of Ezekiel’s prophecy that God breathes life into
dry bones so humans may know the Lord at the end of time.32
The importance of theology in visual representations of death and the dead
cannot be underestimated. Protestant, and proto-​Protestant theology empha-
sised adherence to the Bible, and individual responsibility for one’s own sins.
Further, the Roman Catholic tenet that praying for the dead in purgatory could
help lessen their pains and their time spent there, a tenet only adopted as doc-
trine at the Council of Trent (1545–​63), was considered questionable and even-
tually became entirely defunct.33 Thus, images of the dead moved away from
their pray-​for-​me didacticism (such as with Transis) and acted purely as a re-
minder that death was inevitable and could come at any time, and without the
ability to purge one’s sins away, heaven or hell were the only afterlife options.
Reformation theology, and the pre-​existing theological debates dating from
the before the 14th century that culminated in it, impacted on the visual de-
pictions of death beyond the notion that purgatory did not exist. With biblical
adherence central to reformed thought, and with Romans 5:12 asserting that
“through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin,” it was clear to
the reformers that Adam, through his sinful disobedience to God in the Garden
of Eden, was responsible for human mortality. However, as both Adam and Eve

31 Fabrica, Plate 165: https://​www.nlm.nih.gov/​exhibition/​historicalanatomies/​Images/​

1200_​pixels/​Vesalius_​Pg_​165.jpg (last accessed 28/​6/​2020).
32 Graham D. Caie, “Lay Literacy and the Medieval Bible,” Nordic Journal of English Studies 3
(2004), 125–​44, on 126; Ezekiel 37:1–​5, 12.
33 Cohen, Metamorphosis, 189–​91; Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, 10–​11; Council of Trent:
Decree: De invocation veneration et reliquis sanctorium, et de sacris imaginibus. 3 December
1563, session 25.

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Images of Death in Art and Literature 283

were responsible for the Fall, whilst Adam brought sin and death, Eve brought
sin and life, symbolised by vanitas (the transience of human life) and volup-
tas (earthly pleasures). As such, from the late 15th century, particularly in the
Germanic-​speaking countries, the image of death as an anonymous skeletal
figure shifted to Death personified, or Death as the Grim Reaper.
The first images of Death as a gendered individual can be attributed to the
German painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer (1471–​1528) who twinned a
male Death (Adam) with a female figure of earthly temptation (Eve) in the
engraving Young Woman Attacked by Death or The Ravisher (ca. 1494). Here a
young woman sits on the lap of an elderly bearded naked man (Death). She
appears to be pulling away from him, but Death holds her skirt tightly to stop
her escaping. However, her left hand is placed lightly on his left arm, which
might suggests that she cannot quite resist his advances. There are a number
of other German-​speaking artists, often known as the Little Masters from the
proto-​Reformation era, who also depict Death as male.34 Linguistically, with
death as masculine in German, gendering Death as male (Herr Todd) is artisti-
cally sensible. In the painting The Three Ages of Woman and Death (1509–​10) by
the German Little Master Hans Baldung Grien (1484–​1545), Death is imaged as
a decomposing man with a ragged, fleshy penis, and the whole image is replete
with symbols of mortality.35 Death holds up an hourglass for the elderly wom-
an who, in an act of futility, tries to push his arm away –​she is unable to stop
the onward march of time. Death also holds a gauze cloth that covers the geni-
tals of the maiden who is vainly preoccupied with her hair and her reflection in
a mirror, and at the same time envelops a baby shown with a hobbyhorse and
an apple at her feet; the mirror and toy are symbols of transient amusement
and the wages of sin, while the apple reminds the viewer of the Original Sin.
The Baldung Grien oil painting is a classic Reformed theology ‘Death and
the Maiden’ image, but even when Death is shown as skeletal and thus un-
gendered, given the heteronormativity of the era, the depiction of a skeleton
in the presence of a woman strongly suggests that Death is male. Two works
by the German Little Master Hans Sebald Beham (1500–​1550) best exemplify
this gendering of a skeleton. Death and Three Nude Women (ca. 1535–​37) shows
a skeletal Death as part of a circle of four individuals. The women include an
elderly female with sagging breasts shown side-​on, and a plump woman de-
picted from behind whose right foot rests on the cranium of a skull, and whose

34 Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-​Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago:
1993), xvi.
35 The image can be seen at: https://​commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:Hans_​Baldung_​-​_​
Three_​Ages_​of_​the_​Woman_​and_​the_​Death_​-​_​WGA01189.jpg (last accessed 28/​6/​2020).

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284 Welch

right hand touches the vulva of the third woman. This third woman is shown
full-​frontal. She is holding a cloth, possibly a burial shroud, and is being leered
at by the skeleton, who maintains an eye to eye (socket) contact; the skeleton’s
lecherous expression casts little doubt that Death here is male.36
Sebald Beham’s 1548 engraving Death and the Sleeping Woman (1548) ce-
ments the notion that Death, even if skeletal, when paired with naked women,
is male. Death and the Sleeping Woman shows a naked woman asleep on a bed.
She is reclining with her right arm under her head, and her left arm resting
on her left thigh. Her legs are apart; the left leg on the bed, and the right posi-
tioned over the side of the bed so her right foot is on the floor; a bedpan is close
by to emphasise earthiness. Kneeling on the bed behind the sleeping woman is
a skeletal figure with wings holding an hourglass. Beham placed the woman’s
vulva at the very centre of the engraving; there is no pubic hair to cover her
genitals and as such the image is highly voyeuristic.37
All the Little Masters specifically highlighted the connection between
sex and death. In Sebald Beham’s Death and the Indecent Pair (1529), Death
is shown as a fully fleshed man with a skull head; his erect (uncircumcised
so distinctly Christian) penis rests on the left hand of a naked male, who in
turn has his left hand on the head of a child.38 Death is holding the man’s left
hip and shoulder as if to keep him in place. On the man’s right side is a na-
ked woman. Her left hand tousles the man’s hair while her right hand grasps
his non-​erect penis and testicles; the man’s right hand is placed between her
thighs and they stare at each other intently. Along the side of the engraving a
plaque states: Mors Vltima Linea Rervm (Death, the final boundary of things).
The human figures represent Adam and Eve as the first couple (with the child
as fruit of their earthly coupling), but Death has the last word, for it was desire
that brought about the Fall and with it sin, sex, and death.
Another sexually explicit image is Deutsch’s 1517 Death and the Maiden.39
Here a decomposing figure is shown kissing a young woman who clearly sig-
nifies voluptas, his hand has pulled up her skirt and is between her thighs; her
hand holds his in place. The couple are in an opulent baroque landscape, and
she has ribbons at her knees; the scene symbolises vanity, lust, and materiality

36 Hans Sebald Beham, Death and Three Nude Women (1535–​37): private collection.
37 It should be noted that Sebald Beham engraved several images of women showing their
vulva; Die Nacht (1548) is one of them. Hans Sebald Beham, Death and the Sleeping Woman
(1548), Israel Museum, Jerusalem.
38 A circumcised penis would indicate a Jewish or Muslim male and as such Death in
Beham’s Death and the Indecent Pair is firmly shown as Christian.
39 Niklaus Manuel Deutch, Death and the Maiden (1517), Kuntsmuseum, Basel.

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Images of Death in Art and Literature 285

and connotes that all will come to nothing in the end, for death triumphs. But
not every depiction of Death by a German-​speaking Renaissance artist imaged
a predatory male. As previously noted, in one ‘Dance of Death’ mural, Deutsch
depicts Death as a woman but this depiction of Death as female is unusual.
However, Death being designated as female was normative in literary work
from countries where the linguistic designation of Death was grammatically
female, such as France, Spain, and Poland.

2 Literary Representations of Death and the Dead

A classic example of designating Death as female comes from the Italian poet
Francesco Petrarca, known as Petrarch (1304–​1374). After his death, his work
“found a ready readership [as] his vernacular lyrics were accessible.”40 In his
poem, Trionfo della morte (the third of his Trionfo series dating from1340–​74)
he described Death as “a woman shrouded in a dress of black,” furious, ruthless,
and pitiless. Death, presented in a variety of visual forms based on Petrarch’s
work, was also imaged as long-​haired and “wielding a scythe,” or stood on a
chariot draped with cloth and “hung with skulls and bones,” whilst beneath
its wheel were “the bodies of living and the dead.”41 Here, Death is not the
sexually predatory male imaged by Dürer and the Little Masters, but a fierce,
wild woman.
In the Spanish ‘Dance of Death’ text, dating from the 15th or early 16th cen-
tury and known as Dança, Death is described as an ugly woman. Unlike its
Northern European counterparts, Dança was textual only,42 but it was just
as didactic. The Dança poetry uses a preacher’s voice in the prologue to in-
form the readers to take heed of the poem’s advice. The prologue emphasis-
es the vanity of earthly materiality (voluptas) which causes moral decay, and
the poem features a number of characters, from across society, being taken to
their death. In these elements it differed little from the non-​Spanish ‘Dance of
Death’ representations that focused visually and textually on the inevitabil-
ity of death. However, linguistically the Dança adds some depth to the over-
all genre. In the Dança when death addresses the Knight, the term Athaona
(meaning an occupation) is used. Here occupation means not just one’s job,

40 Sara Sturm-​Maddox, “The French Petrarch,” Annali d’Italanistica 22 (2004), 171–​87, on 173.
41 Karl S. Guthke, The Gender of Death: A Cultural History in Art and Literature (Cambridge:
1999), 69–​70.
42 Léonard P. Kurtz, The Dance of Death and the Macabre in European Literature (Geneva:
1975), 147.

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286 Welch

but the work of grieving. The use of the term Athaona accentuates the sorrow
and monotony of humanity’s eternal dance of death. Comprised only of male
characters (as in the Parisian mural at the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents), in
the Dança each man laments the pleasures he must leave behind, expresses
fear of the unknown, and despairs that he did not accept the reality of death
before the moment of his demise. The female figure of Death confirms and
affirms this before moving onto her next character/​victim, and so the poetic
dance continues.43
Another example of female Death in literature is the Polish Rozmowa Mistr-
za Polikarpa ze Śmiercią (Master Polikarp’s Dialog with Death). Written in the
early 15th century, what remains of the original (an incomplete copy from ca.
1463–​1465) presents a variety of scenes in which a conversation takes place be-
tween Master Polikarp, an educated man, and Death. Wielding a scythe, Death
is described as a pale, skinny, bald, and hideously ugly, rotting yellowish corpse
who is missing the tip of her nose and has blood oozing from her eyes.44 Death
informs Polikarp that he should not be afraid of Her until She comes for him.
She states that She will come for everyone eventually, and that She was inside
the forbidden fruit that Eve gave to Adam; once Adam ate of that fruit, he was
destined to die and bring death into the world. Death states how much She
loves human sin, and names a variety of occupations and types of people, as-
serting that She will have them all and will avenge every one of their crimes
(sins). In many ways this poem resembles the ‘Dance of Death’ in its theolog-
ical overtones, and the variety of individuals noted, and as such it should be
understood as part of this European trope.
The biblical connection of sin with death is evident in many other works of
literature, such as John Milton’s (1608–​1674) epic poem Paradise Lost (1667).
Book Nine of Paradise Lost informs the reader that death was ingested with
the forbidden fruit, and here there are echoes of Death in the Polish Polikarp
tale noted above. However, Milton’s Death is male, and Satan is noted as his
father. Described in Book Two, Death is shapeless and black, a fierce and ter-
rible thing “with what seemed his head, the likeness of a kingly crown had
on.”45 Milton’s highly biblical worldview appears based on there being several
types of death, with the Latin document De Doctrina Christiana (On Christian

43 Nicolás Asensio Jiménez, “La danza en la Dança General de la Muerte,” Bulletin of Spanish
Studies 92 (2017), 377–​98.
44 Staropolska online, Conversations of a Master with Death: A Selection (translated by
Michael J. Mikoś), at: http://​staropolska.pl/​ang/​middleages/​sec_​poetry/​conversation.
php3 (last accessed on 28/​6/​2020).
45 Tzachi Zamir, “Death, Life, and Agency in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 56 (2015), 201–​30.

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Images of Death in Art and Literature 287

Doctrine), which was discovered in a bundle of his papers in 1823, informing

this understanding.46 In De Doctrina there are four distinct types of death: the
physical cessation of the body; a sort of living death due to the guilt of the Fall;
spiritual death where one is enslaved to sin due to losing the sense of right rea-
son; and the eternal death of those condemned to eternal torment for rejecting
the gospel. For Milton, obedience to God and, therefore, morality are central to
his thinking about mortality.
Morality and mortality are also linked in an earlier work about death, the
Middle-​English poem, A Disputacioun betwyx þe Body and Wormes (1435–​40).47
The Disputation is a conversation held in the grave between a female body and
the worms that are eating her. The woman is described as recently interred in
an elaborate tomb, and the poem is initially narrated by a passing pilgrim who
took his rest in the churchyard and dreamt of the verbal exchange. After a brief
scene setting, the poem moves on to relate the words of the woman and the
worms, who speak plainly. She laments that she cannot buy her way out of the
situation, and the worms tell her of the stench of her rotting, horrible flesh as it
decomposes. They state that this process is one which they are not able to see,
smell, or taste, and as such it does not repulse them. The full goriness of the
description would doubtlessly have been familiar to people of the time, given
the commonality of charnel houses/​ossuaries, and the intercutting of graves
in urban areas.48
The lady in the Disputacioun notes her sinfulness, and how proud, how
beautiful, self-​indulgent, and also promiscuous she had been. These sins set
her as ‘everyman’, and indeed she notes towards the end of the poem that
everyone should avoid fleshly temptation. The link between women and the
sinfulness of earthly materiality has been noted previously, although in the
Disputacioun her gender does not add to her innate sinful nature, but draws
attention to the temptations of the flesh that both genders embody and that
scripture discourages. For added horror, the worms in the poem note they
were born of the lady’s rotting flesh (and thus of her sins), and that other
beasts will follow them in eating her body. Some of the additional creatures
the worms name are fantastical, like the dragon and basilisk, but most are

46 Filippo Falcone, “More Challenges to Milton’s Authorship of De Doctrina Christinana,”

ACME: International Journal of Critical Geographies 63 (2010), 231–​50.
47 Jenny Rebecca Rytting, “A Disputacioun betwyx þe Body and Wormes: A Translation,”
Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 31 (2000), 217–​32.
48 Jennifer N. Crangle, “A Study of Post-​Depositional Funerary Practices in Medieval
England” (University of Sheffield, PhD diss.: 2015), at: http://​etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/​
13315/​1/​JNC%20Thesis.pdf (last accessed 28/​6/​2020).

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288 Welch

more commonplace and include lizards, moles, toads, snakes, ants, crabs, spi-
ders, and newts, all creatures reminiscent of those represented in many of the
continental and Irish Transi sculpture.49 Interestingly, the poem is helpfully
illustrated, giving additional poignancy to the words.50 The stark contrast be-
tween the fair lady and her rotting corpse is visualised in the form of a tiered
Transi tomb, with the lady lying recumbent in her finery above a corpse in its
worm-​filled shroud. In both word and image, it is clear there is no escape from
being consumed post-​mortem, for death is the wages of sin and the price hu-
manity paid for the Fall.
That the woman in Disputacioun is in dialogue with the worms despite
being dead speaks to an understanding of post-​mortem sentience that, al-
though theologically incorrect, was widespread in vernacular culture and, as
discussed in the chapter by Polina Ignatova, appears to have been potently
pedagogical. The most widespread types of beings that in wider European lit-
erature were depicted as remaining sentient post-​mortem, were ghosts and
apparitions, but revenants (corporeal ghosts) also featured, especially in Ger-
man, English, and Icelandic writings.51 Typically, these revenants returned to
the living to warn of the pains of purgatory and to encourage the living to lead
better lives, to avoid the Seven Deadly Sins, and to embrace the Seven Corpo-
real and Seven Spiritual Acts of Mercy. The liminal time when the dead were
decomposing (the wet stage of death) was commonly understood as the most
dangerous,52 and medical historian Catherine Park has argued that “belief in
the continued animation of the corpse could be found at all levels of society
and culture [and] was analysed, debated, and defended, with copious erudite
references, by learned northern writers on theology, medicine, and law.”53 One
particularly notable work that resonates with this notion of post-​mortem sen-
tience and the pedagogical return of the dead is the anonymous English 15th-​
century Revelation of Purgatory. The Revelation imparts a holy woman’s vision
of a nun describing the pains she endures in purgatory. The nun comes to the
holy woman as a spirit asking for masses to be said to ease her sufferings and is

49 Katherine Dixon, “Devotion and Decay: Death in the Late Medieval Imagination,”
Vanderbilt Historical Review (2016), 58–​61 and Rytting, “Disputacioun.”
50 A Disputacioun betwyx þe Body and Wormes, BL. MS Add. 37049.
51 Winston Black, “Animated Corpse and Bodies with Power in the Scholastic Age,” in Death
in Medieval Europe: Death Scripted and Death Choreographed, ed. Joëlle Rollo-​Koster
(London: 2017), 71–​92, on 72.
52 Nancy Caciola, “Wraiths, Revenants and Ritual in Medieval Culture,” Past and Present 152
(1996), 3–​45, on 33, and dangerous, and Medical.
53 Park, “The Life of the Corpse,” 117.

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described as having skin that is shredded and burning, with fire leaping from
her mouth.54
Of course, the most famous and influential of all texts dealing with post-​
mortem sentience in purgatory, and the torments inflicted there, is Dante
Alighieri’s (1265–​1321) Divine Comedy (ca. 1308–​20).55 Dante learns that the
time spent and the pains endured in purgatory can be reduced by prayers from
the faithful in the living world, and that committing any of the Seven Deadly
Sins (pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust) brings about related
purgatorial punishments. For instance, the arrogant carry heavy rocks on their
backs to keep their once proud faces to the ground, while the greedy are forced
to stare at the ground, their hands and feet tied as their soul was once tied by
their greed and graspingness. A poem in a similar vein is Prik of Conscience.
Written in Middle-English in the first half of the 14th century, the poem teach-
es, or reinforces, the message that each of the Seven Deadly Sins has a specif-
ic pain in purgatory. The poem makes clear that the soul suffers in purgatory
far more than the body ever did on earth; although the distinction between
the suffering of the soul and the body post-​mortem is decidedly blurred. The
purgatorial suffering described in Prik includes gout and “whitrows” (ulcers)
in the dead, caused by sloth during life; pride produces a fever; gluttony gives
the dead sores; envy brings about abscesses and palsy; and lechery leaves the
dead in general misery.56 What is clear here is that, as with the Divine Comedy,
the souls of the sinful dead suffer physically, and contemporary illustrations in
editions of the book visualised the viscerality of these punishments.
Books of Hours were another form of literary work where illustrations
supported the written word. A sophisticated set of illuminations in a Book of
Hours by the Flemish miniaturist Gerard Horenbout (ca. 1465–​ca. 1541) depict-
ed Souls in Purgatory (ca. 1500). One illumination depicts at least 15 individuals
with flames burning among them. One individual, bent over in prayer, has a
tonsure and thus represents a cleric, while two figures appear to symbolise the
laity: a bearded male, and a woman. A further person holds their hands at their
chest in prayer, but most of the depicted individuals are illustrated either as
just faces, or as undifferentiated figures with their hands raised to the skies.

54 Marta Powell Harley, A Revelation of Purgatory by an Unknown Fifteenth-​Century Woman

Visionary: Introduction, Critical Text and Translation (Lewiston, NY: 1985), 60–​4.
55 Werner P. Friederich. Dante’s Fame Abroad, 1350–​1850: The Influence of Dante Alighieri on
the Poets and Scholars of Spain, France, England, Germany, Switzerland, and the United
States (Chapel Hill: 1950).
56 James H. Morey (ed.), Prik of Conscience (Kalamazoo: 2012): part 3: Of Death and of
the Pain that With Him Goes, at: https://​d.lib.rochester.edu/​teams/​text/​morey-​prik-​of-​
conscience-​part3 (last accessed 28/​6/​2020).

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The overall scene is potently suggestive of the universality of purgatory and its
punishments.
Horenbout (1465–​1541) had an international clientele and produced works
for the wealthy and well-​connected in Austria, Portugal, and Venice. He also
produced the miniatures in a Book of Hours for King James iv of Scotland
and was one of the artists who illuminated the Book of Hours known as the
Rothschild Prayer-​book (ca. 1505). One illumination in this Prayer-​book depicts
an elaborate burial: clerics abound, veiled women weep, and the laity are in
attendance, as is the gravedigger. In the image, as two monks lower a wooden
coffin into the ground, a skull emerges, and further skulls are visible on the left-​
hand side of the church door, close to the weeping women shrouded in black,
possibly nuns.57 Beneath the scene in an inhabited border are three skulls and
some bones. On the facing page in a type of picture cycle, again in an inhabited
border, are four long bones and eight skulls; notably, only one of all the skulls
has a mandible.
What is interesting in these two images in the Rothschild Prayer-​book is
that they combine what the social historian Philippe Ariès termed the “Tame
Death,” and the “Death of the Self” in his study, The Hour of Our Death (1981). In
Ariès’s model of changing perceptions to death over time, the notion of a tame
death typified the early medieval period and was characterised by frequent
deaths, and a resignation to death as a result of Original Sin or misfortune.58
It was marked by burials in city churchyards, where the church was the ul-
timate authority and took total charge of the formalised death rituals. Ariès
characterised the “Death of the Self” as the typical death of the later-​medieval
period and he argued that although the rituals surrounding death remained
the familiar ‘tame death’ rituals, the growing awareness of the self as an indi-
vidual, and an increase in materialistic desires, meant that death had more of
a social effect. It was during this period that, he noted, coffins began to hide
the corpse and thus the realities of the process of death, at least for the so-
cial elite.59 The two illuminations in the Rothschild Prayer-​book highlight how
death and post-​mortem decay was, by the 1500s, hidden away from the world

57 The role of women as mourners and even keeners at funerals is explored by Kristen Mills
in her PhD thesis “Grief, Gender and Mourning in Medieval North Atlantic Literature”
(University of Toronto, PhD diss.: 2013). She argues for the centrality of women as mourn-
ers in the medieval Irish tradition, some of them even dying of grief over the deaths of
the men they loved. See https://​tspace.library.utoronto.ca/​bitstream/​1807/​68979/​1/​Mills
_​Kristen_​M_​201306_​PhD_​thesis.pdf (last accessed 28/​6/​2020).
58 Phillipe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death (Oxford: 2004), 11.
59 Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, 606–​7.

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of the living (death of the self), but that death (symbolised by the skulls) was
still commonplace (tame death) and ritualised under the jurisdiction of the
church. Because of the date of this Book of Hours, the scene can be placed
within the remit of Roman Catholicism and thus purgatory as the afterlife des-
tination of the individual being buried. Clearly illustrating the concerns over
death, the text cited in the illumination on the page facing the burial scene is
Psalm 114, the first of the five psalms used in the Office of the Dead at vespers.60
This office was one of the devotions that any individual could recite (barring
a Sunday or a Solemnity –​a feast day of the higher rank), and was, and indeed
remains, central to Roman Catholic prayers for the dead, including those read
for the feast of All Souls, where bells were rung for the comfort of the deceased
in purgatory.61
Whilst learning about death through illuminated Books of Hours was the pre-
serve of the wealthy literate elite, vernacular culture informed the masses, and
in regard to Renaissance perceptions of death nowhere was this more the case
than through the works of William Shakespeare (1564–​1616). Almost every con-
ceivable type of death, from suicide to murder, occurs in his plays, and people
of all social classes are killed off through hanging, stabbing, and poisoning. In a
number of plays many of the main characters die, with Titus Andronicus (1594)
and Macbeth (1606) having particularly high head counts: 14 in Titus Andronicus,
and at least that number in Macbeth, as it is unclear how many of the MacDuff
household are murdered. But it is in Hamlet (1609) that death could be said to
be the central theme. The play features a ghost at the start and a bloodbath at its
close, the main protagonist has an obsession with death, and it contains the fa-
mous “to be or not to be” soliloquy on existence. Although written when England
was firmly Protestant, much of the play resonates with the notion of purgatory
and revolves around what can happen when someone does not die well.
Purgatory was, as noted, the normative afterlife destination in Roman Ca-
tholicism, and in its communal certainty there was some comfort, but comfort
was also to be found in dying well and the Ars moriendi (ca. 1415 long version,
ca. 1450 short version), a Latin text popular across Europe, explained how to do
this. The notion of the socially ‘good’ death is explored in ­chapters 2 and 3, and
the Ars was, as Stephen Bates and Madeleine Gray discuss in their chapters, a
hugely popular illustrated printed tradition which portrayed the “deathbed as
the centre of an epic struggle for the soul of the Christian man.”62 It included

60 Translation by Tomas Olding.

61 Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–​1700 (Oxford: 1996),
146–​51.
62 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (London: 1992), 317.

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advice on how to live well, which meant avoiding temptation, making regu-
lar confession of sins, being remorseful, and desiring not to sin again. The Ars
also asserted that no one was beyond forgiveness and that even at death, good
could triumph over evil, allowing the dying person who expressed true con-
trition the opportunity to reduce their time in purgatory and thus eventually
attain their place in heaven.63
With the Protestant Reformation however, the security of purgatory dis-
appeared. The insecurity of one’s post-​mortem fate was highlighted in Shake-
speare’s Measure for Measure (1603); “Ay, but to die, and go we know not
where: To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; … the weariest and most loathed
worldly life … is a paradise to what we fear of death” (3.1.129-​142). Hamlet also
plays with the notion that the afterlife might not be straightforward, for the
ghost, a corporeal revenant rather than a spiritual apparition, appears to be
in a liminal place; neither in heaven nor hell. However, as well as highlighting
the insecurity of one’s afterlife destination, Hamlet powerfully draws on the
sleep as death analogy. This trope appears in a number of his plays and poems,
The Rape of Lucrece (1594), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595/​6), and Romeo
and Juliet (1597), as well as informing the aforementioned Ars moriendi and
Edmund Spenser’s epic poem, The Faerie Queene (1590). With both classical
and theological resonances, “the similitude of death for sleep and sleep for
death [was in] vogue in medieval and Renaissance literature and iconogra-
phy.”64 With the Bible stating that the dead were in a form of sleep (Matt 9:24,
Luke 8:52–​53), and Jesus resurrecting individuals who appeared dead (such as
Lazarus in John 11:11–​13), the parallels between sleep and death would have
been familiar to late medieval and early modern audiences.
Although sleep was God-​given (Psalm 127), it was also a time connected with
the realm of the supernatural. This connection took a sinister form in John
Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) where Satan, the fallen angel, plants the idea of
eating from the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil” in Eve’s mind while
she sleeps (Book 5, l.55–​61). Although in the poem, Adam and Eve are protect-
ed by angels in Eden (from the appearance of malevolent spirits as night falls),
it is by eating the forbidden fruit that the couple are expelled from the Garden,
and cast, with death, into the world. This ambiguity of sleep/​death is, unsur-
prisingly, expressed in Hamlet: “for in that sleep of death what dreams may
come” (Act iii, s.1, l. 60). But as Shakespeare showed, death did not necessarily

63 Austra Reinis, Reforming the Art of Dying: The ars moriendi in the German Reformation
(1519–​1528) (Aldershot: 2007), 20.
64 S. Viswanathan, “Sleep and Death: The Twins in Shakespeare,” Comparative Drama 13
(1979), 49–​64, on 49.

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mean resting in peace, for many of his plays featured the return of the dead to
the land of the living. In Hamlet, as noted, the returning ghost was not a spiri-
tual entity but appears in corporeal form having the features of a mortal body.
Indeed, the likeness of the ghost to the king is mentioned several times and at
one point it is even seen wearing armour.65
Whilst for some theologians and scholars of the era, ghostly apparitions
and revenants were pure fancy, vernacular belief in the supernatural was
widespread.66 The biblical tale of the raising of Lazarus was popular in the
medieval era and featured in both the English and French drama cycles (of-
ten termed Passion Plays). Occasionally, individuals did appear to come back
from the dead.67 Historian Nancy Caciola, in her book on the return of the
dead in the medieval era, recounts the story of a nun from Freiberg, Germa-
ny, who died three times before finally shuffling off her mortal coil in 1458.68
In England, a Mrs Blunden of Basingstoke, described as a “fat gross woman
[accustomed] many times to drink brandy” was buried alive twice in 1674.69
Until a corpse “began to putrefy and break down, mortality could be difficult
to certify.”70 The potential liminality of the dead therefore was a particular
fascination, and in the late 1600s, a French magazine published Eastern Eu-
ropean tales of walking corpses (revenants) and methods to ensure their
destruction.71
Tales of revenants peppered vernacular European literature, and the stories
of the dead having some form of sentience was also evidenced in the bier-​rite
where a deceased murder victim was believed to bleed afresh in the presence of
their murderer.72 A number of Elizabethan plays employed this motif, includ-
ing Shakespeare’s Richard III where Lady Anne Neville accuses Richard Duke of

65 Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: 2001), 206–​16, 232–​5, 252.

66 Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford: 2002), 237.
67 Kathleen M. Ashley, “The Resurrection of Lazarus in the Late Medieval English and
French Cycle Drama,” Papers on Language and Literature 22 (1986), 227–​44.
68 Nancy M. Caciola, Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages (New York:
2016), 68–​70.
69 Feanois J. Baigent and James E. Millard, A History of the Ancient Town and Manor of
Basingstoke in the County of Southampton (Basingstoke: 1889), 162–​66.
70 Caciola, Afterlives, 88.
71 Stephen Gordon, “Sleep Paralysis and the Nightmare in Medieval Europe,” Social History
of Medicine 28 (2015), 425–​444, on 443.
72 Caciola, “Wraiths”; Caciola, Afterlives; Jacqueline Simpson, “Repentant Soul or Walking
Corpse? Debatable Apparitions in Medieval England,” Folklore 114 (2003), 389–​402; Thea
Tomani, “The Corpse as Testimony: Judgement, Verdict and the Elizabethan Stage,” in
Dealing with the Dead: Mortality and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,
ed. Thea Tomani (Leiden: 2018), 274–​301.

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Gloucester of murder stating, “O Gentlemen, see, see dead Henry’s wounds open
their congealed mouths and bleed afresh, blush, blush, thou lump of foul defor-
mity for tis thy presence that exhales this blood” (1.2.55-​58). The notion of post-​
mortem sentience in England survived the Protestant Reformation, despite the
official abolition of purgatory, and Shakespeare provides evidence for this. In
Hamlet, the ghost of the king reports suffering in the fires of purgatory, although
states that he is “forbidden to tell the secrets of my prison-​house” (1.512–​22). He
does note however, that the suffering relates to retaining the emotions and vexa-
tions of life in his head, having been taken from the earthly realm before he was
able to make his peace and die a socio-​religiously good death, i.e. in old age and
fully confessed. Shakespeare, in his plays, not only casts a light on the numerous
ways to die a socio-​religiously bad death (unconfessed and before one’s natural
time), but he also makes allusions to a further fate that could await the dead
body, that of becoming mummy/​mumia or corpse medicine. In Merry Wives of
Windsor (1602), the rather rotund character Falstaff notes how he would make
a “mountain of a mummy” (3.5.1764), while in Henry IV Part I (1600) Falstaff
gives a companion leave to “powder me, and eat me too” (5.4.3077). Mummy
is an ingredient in the witches’ cauldron in Macbeth (1606) (4.1.1570), and also
appears in Othello (1604) (3.4.72), although here, not as something to ingest, but
in relation to the magical properties of Desdemona’s handkerchief.73
The purported properties of mummy/​mumia as a medicine to cure and/​or
stave off diseases has a history dating back to Galen and perceptions of the four
humours, but in Christianity the notion was further reinforced through the nat-
ural biblical lifespan of threescore years and ten (Psalms 90:10).74 To summarize
this briefly, our bodies contained life essence enough for our natural life-​span
of seventy years, and should people die before this time then the life-​essence
not utilised could be taken on by others. The potency of human body parts was
a commonplace belief across medieval Europe as an acceptance of the power
of religious relics was an essential part of Christian life in the Middle Ages.75

73 Park, “The Life of the Corpse,” 116. For studies on the potency of medicinal cannibalism
see: Kenneth Himmelman, “The Medicinal Body: An Analysis of Medicinal Cannibalism
in Europe, 1300–​ 1700,” Dialectical Anthropology 22 (1997), 183–​ 203; Louise Noble,
Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (New York: 2011); Richard Sugg,
Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance
to the Victorians (New York: 2011); Ian Smith, “Othello’s Black Handkerchief,” Shakespeare
Quarterly 64 (2013), 1–​25.
74 The four humours according to Galen had associations with the seasons of the year, per-
sonality traits, the elements, and one of four periods of life; they were Blood (spring, pas-
sion, air, and childhood); Yellow bile (summer, anger, fire, and youth); Black bile (autumn,
sluggishness, earth, and adulthood); Phlegm (winter, melancholy, water, and old age).
75 Patrick J. Greary, Living with the Dead in the Middles Ages (Ithaca, NY: 1994), 200–​1.

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The earliest extant evidence for the use of human mummy (powered hu-
man body parts) as a medicine dates from the 13th century, when the Ital-
ian surgeon Lanfranc of Milan cited it as a cure for broken bones, and the
Spanish physician Arnold of Villanova prescribed oil from human bones, as
a general cure-​all.76 The 16th-​century Swiss physician Paracelsus (1491–​1541)
believed that mummy was the “noblest medicine,” and a number of medical
works extolled its almost miraculous properties. One of the more interesting
of these works is William Salmon’s Pharmacopoeia Londinensis (first pub-
lished in 1678) which provided a detailed description of the various types of
mummy, and also instructions on how to make one’s own should purchase
be problematic.77 However, while popular medical literature largely praised
the use of human mummy, non-​medical texts were often less favourable;
Shakespeare uses it as part of the unnatural witches’ brew in Macbeth, and
relates it to the disreputable character Falstaff in Henry IV Part I. The poet
John Donne (1572–​1631) “problematizes the healing potential” of mummy in
his poem, Love’s Alchemy (ca. 1590), and does likewise in his work Devotions
Upon Emergent Occasions (1624) (xxii: Meditations).78 Indeed, in a letter to
Sir H.G. Donne notes that “Mymmy have in it no excelling quality.”79 But while
for Shakespeare the ingesting of human flesh was distasteful, and for Donne it
was ineffective, for Spenser in The Faerie Queene ingesting mummy suggested
cannibalism and he utilised the trope as an anti-​Catholic rhetoric against the
eucharistic ritual of the sacrament. Here the bread and wine were believed
to turn into the body and blood of Christ via transubstantiation during the
mass.80
Death in literature was not always politically charged though, and indeed
death was not always portrayed as inherently depressing. The Spanish text Co-
media de Calisto y Melibea, first published in 1499, was a black comedy about il-
licit love with tragic ends. Although in part it was a morality tale about reckless
lovers, the numerous deaths of the supporting cast, plus the accidental demise

76 Sugg, Mummies, 18–​19.

77 Louise Noble, “ ‘And Make Two Pasties of Your Shameful Heads’: Medicinal Cannibalism
and Healing in the Body Politic in ‘Titus Andronicus’,” English Literary History 30 (2003),
677–​708, on 681; William Salmon, Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, or the New London
Dispensatory (London: 3rd edition, 1685). The 1824 edition was the first not to contain
remedies using human mumia.
78 Noble, “Two Pasties,” 687; John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624): http://​
triggs.djvu.org/​djvu-​editions.com/​D ONNE/​D EVOTIONS/​Download.pdf (last accessed
28/​6/​2020).
79 Janel Mueller (ed.), John Donne: Selected Writings (Oxford: 2015), 598.
80 Noble, Medicinal Cannibalism, 89.

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of the protagonist Calisto and the suicide of his grief-​stricken lover Melibea,
inject the tale with a deliberate sense of the ridiculous through the use of “un-
necessary and inappropriate flourishes of language,” and deaths that are never
dignified.81
There is also a sense of the light-​hearted in the face of death in The Decam-
eron (1353), a collection of novellas written by the Florentine author Giovanni
Boccaccio (1313–​1375). The work provides a contemporary record of the emer-
gence of the plague, its physical progression, and the utter devastation that
it left in its wake, but it centres around how society distracted itself from the
deadly effects of the contagion through music and joviality, rather than pi-
ous prayer (1 Introduction, 93).82 The disease arrived on Florentine shores in
1348 where it destroyed “an innumerable multitude of living beings … [and]
propagated itself without respite from place to place.”83 The dreadful symp-
toms were described by Boccaccio, who claimed the only remedy was to flee
for “there was no medicine for the disease superior or equal in efficacy to
flight.”84 Many contemporary chroniclers from across Europe noted that the
plague tended to upturn the natural order of death, with the young especially
prone to succumbing to the contagion. In 1361, Geoffrey le Baker, an English
chronicler, wrote that “the pestilence seized especially the young and strong,
commonly sparing the elderly and feeble.”85 This perception is also found in
an anonymous Middle English lyric which stated, “Be mindful of death: now
there is a gate for all men born; /​Often it takes to itself young men before
old.”86 The seeming unfairness of indiscriminate deaths from the plague
can be seen in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale, one of the 24 stories
that comprised his Canterbury Tales (1387–​1400). In the story a Roister is in-
formed that one of his comrades has been taken by “an unseen thief, called
Death … who hereabouts makes all the people die … /​He’s slain a thousand
with this pestilence /​Both man and woman, child and hind and page.” The
Roister attempts to find death but on his way encounters “an old man, and a
poor” whom he asks: “What? Churl of evil grace … /​Why do you live so long

81 Connie L. Scarborough, “Gallows Humor in the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea,” in

Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: The Material and Spiritual Conditions of
the Culture of Death, ed. Albrecht Classen (Boston: 2016), 357–​372, on 368, 371.
82 Martin Marafioti, Storytelling as Plague Prevention in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: The
Decameron Tradition (Oxford: 2018), 11.
83 Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. James M. Rigg (Lawrence, Kansas: 2010), 19.
84 Boccaccio, The Decameron, 19–​21.
85 Peter. G. Beidler, “The Plague and Chaucer’s Pardoner,” The Chaucer Review 16 (1982), 257–​
69, on 261.
86 Robert. D. Stevick (ed.), One Hundred Middle English Lyrics (Chicago: 1994), 80.

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Images of Death in Art and Literature 297

in so great age?.”87 As the conversation ensues, there is an ill feeling from the
Roister towards the old man, solely due to his age. The elderly man, for his
part, feels a sense of guilt that he is alive, spared from the dreadful disease.88
The tale clearly presents evidence that death was perceived as unfair when
the young were taken over the old, and life cut-​short. In The Merchant’s Tale,
Chaucer informs the reader that old age acts as a harbinger of social death: the
social death of the elderly precedes their physical demise, for as age removes
socially valued qualities (in men, strength, and in women, fertility), the social
usefulness of elderly individuals within their community becomes lowered,
even non-​existent. This narrative shows that an individual could die socially
by being removed from his social setting before shuffling off his/​her mortal
coil and dying biologically.

3 Conclusions

This chapter has examined late medieval and early modern representations of
death in art and literature using a wide range of sources from across Europe,
and spanning the entire period from 1300 to 1700. Yet, it is of course not com-
prehensive. Death, dying, the dead, and the afterlife were preoccupations in
late medieval and early modern Europe, and as such featured heavily in textual
and pictorial form; the present chapter offers only a representative sample.
With death common and seemingly random in its selection of victims,
some order needed to be placed on the experience of death to stop it from
overwhelming the experience of living. Within the Christian context of the
period 1300 to 1700 in Europe, this ordering meant the use of rhetoric and rit-
uals connecting death with sin.89 Death was understood to have come into the
world as the consequence of the Fall, and the Fall was a result of human sinful
disobedience to God: consequently, one’s afterlife destination took account of
the sinfulness of one’s earthly existence. As such, the intimate connection be-
tween morality and mortality expressed in poetry and prose is unsurprising.
From vernacular literature through to the devotional books of the elite, and
from sonnets to plays, all types of literary works informed readers that the wag-
es of sin were death, and that death might come at any time. Intimately related
to this was fear of the afterlife.

87 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, trans. J.U Nicolson (New York: 2004), 260–​1.
88 Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, 261–​2.
89 Phillipe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death (Oxford: 2004), 11.

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298 Welch

Before the Reformation, when Catholicism predominated, that afterlife was

purgatory with its suffering. For those following the new Reformed Christian
faith, however, heaven or hell were the only post-​mortem options. Regardless
of faith, though, dying appropriately was believed to be important. This theme
was addressed in detail by the ars moriendi, for there were potentially dire con-
sequences of a socially bad death, such as returning to the land of the living,
as happened with King Hamlet’s ghost. However, ghosts and revenants, such
as the nun in Revelation, typically returned to inform the living on how to live
a more devout life and thus gain a better afterlife, which meant less suffering
or time in purgatory, or avoiding the liminal earthly haunting that Protestants
believed an unnatural death might bring.
Another constant across the period is that death was understood as a so-
cial leveller, and this was more easily expressed in artworks than in literature.
From the “Three Living/​Three Dead,” through to the “Dance of Death” and the
Transi memorials, artworks informed viewers that everyone was mortal, and
therefore everyone had a designated fate awaiting them once they had died.
Even with the theological shift in parts of northern Europe from Catholicism
to Protestantism, the pedagogical aspect of death imagery remained. However,
there was a shift in how death was visualised: anonymous, ungendered images
of the dead as signifiers of generic death were replaced by images of personi-
fied Death, gendered according to regional linguistic traditions.
For some of the best-​known writers of this period though, death remained
ungendered. This is particularly the case in English, where typically words for
death are neutral. Without doubt Shakespeare is the most famous English writ-
er to have written about death and the dead. As well as providing numerous ex-
amples of socio-​religiously ‘bad’ ways to die, he also advised his audiences that
after a premature death, their bodies could be made into mummy. Shakespeare
additionally warned that the dead might not rest in eternal sleep. Despite the
potent connections between sleep and death, the notion that the dead might
come back to life or that the dead were in some way sentient is one that in-
formed both literature and art. Post-​mortem sentience aided the communal
relationship between the living on earth and the dead in purgatory through the
economy of prayer, and depictions of that fearful place painted the suffering in
visceral terms. Dante’s Comedy, the Prik of Consciousness, and prayer-​book illu-
minations, all showed that the purging of earthy sins was an agonising process.
Noticeably, until the publication of Fabrica by Vesalius, the visual depictions
of the dead human form were by and large fairly crude, and the “Three Living/​
Three Dead” and “Dance of Death” depictions are examples here, although a
number of the Transi sculpture did show the human body in a more accurate
way. But regardless of where the images of the human corpse were, even the

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Images of Death in Art and Literature 299

more scientific of them could not be removed from the more spiritual ones.
Vesalius’ skeletons may have shown the dead body in novel ways, but as the
triptych of Plates showed, they were ways intimately connected with the theo-
logical contemplation of death.
Overall therefore, in late medieval and early modern European art and liter-
ature, death appears to have been a constant preoccupation. Concerns about
death, dying, the dead, and the afterlife informed everything from vernacular
wall paintings in country churches to exquisite illuminations in books for the
wealthy, and inspired great works of painting. Such concerns featured as cen-
tral topics in all forms of literature from folklore, through vernacular poems
and prose, to verse by authors still celebrated today. Death has always been the
biggest of life’s big questions. We are born to die, but it is rare that we know
where or how our death will take place; death is both a reality, but it is also un-
knowable, and it was always thus. In late medieval and early modern Europe,
the big questions that death poses were explored in art and in literature, and
the plethera of material available today provides a window through which we
can glimpse some of their meanings.

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 ­c hapter 11

Funeral Sermons and the Reformation: The British

Isles and Germany
Part i. Funeral Sermons over Time: From Catholic to Protestant in the
British Isles

Jacqueline Eales

The editors1 of the Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon have de-
scribed the sermon as a potent instrument of “religious politics and a liter-
ary form of central importance to British culture.”2 This was all the more so in
the case of funeral sermons, which marked moments of extreme disruption to
family and social networks as well as occasions for communities to reinforce
their political and religious bonds.3 Before the Reformation, sermons were
preached at the funerals of notable or wealthy individuals as well as commem-
oratively at the “month’s mind” some 30 days after death, at the “year’s mind,”
and sometimes for several years thereafter. Thus, the term “funeral sermon”
can very loosely be used for most of these occasions when ministers preached
for the dead even when the corpse was not present.
Susan Wabuda has observed that sermons only held “a supplementary
place in the devotional framework of the later Middle Ages.”4 The rejection of
belief in purgatory by the Edwardian reformers together with the Protestant
emphasis on the preaching of God’s word meant that the sermon gradually
came to have a much greater prominence in burial rites for the dead. After
the Reformation the funeral sermon became more properly associated in En-
gland with preaching before burial and usually in the presence of the corpse,

1 I would like to thank Ralph Houlbrooke, Peter Lake, and Penny Pritchard for their help with
the research for this chapter.
2 Peter McCullough, Hugh Adlington, and Emma Rhatigan (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the
Early Modern Sermon (Oxford: 2011), xiv.
3 Key surveys of funeral sermons from the late Middle Ages to the early 18th century are to be
found in Susan Powell and Alan J. Fletcher, “ ‘In die sepulture seu Trigintali’: The Late Medi-
eval Funeral and Memorial Sermon,” Leeds Studies in English, new series 12 (1981), 195–​228;
Frederic B. Tromly, “ ‘According to Sounde Religion’: The Elizabethan Controversy over the
Funeral Sermon,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 13/​2 (1983), 293–​312, and Ralph
Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England 1480–​1750 (Oxford: 1998), 295–​330.
4 Susan Wabuda, Preaching During the English Reformation (Cambridge: 2002), 8.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004443433_013

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Funeral Sermons and the Reformation 301

but in contrast, the Scottish Calvinist Kirk rejected funeral sermons and ini-
tially some of the stricter English reformers followed their lead. In Ireland, as
Clodagh Tait notes, there were very few references to sermons before burial
even after the Reformation, and hardly any manuscript or printed funeral texts
have survived from Ireland in the century from 1550 to 1650.5
Similarly, manuscript texts of few pre-​Reformation Catholic funeral ser-
mons have survived and even after the advent of print, funeral sermons were
rarely published in England in the 16th century. Frederic B. Tromly has traced
only 20 printed funeral sermons from the whole of Elizabeth’s reign.6 Funeral
sermons were provided for all the Tudor kings and queens, but it was only in
the Stuart period that royal funeral sermons were routinely published. By the
end of the early modern period funeral sermons were also preached in many
parishes at the death of the monarch and no less than 16 sermons for the death
of William iii were published in 1702.7 During the 17th century the aristocracy,
the gentry, wealthy merchants, and the professional classes such as prominent
lawyers and clerics were also increasingly accorded a printed funeral sermon
as were their wives.
Wills and diaries indicate that funeral sermons were also preached for the
middling sort in greater numbers from the late 16th century onwards in En-
gland, but these were unlikely to be published. Ralph Houlbrooke has identi-
fied 214 printed sermons for England in the first half of the century, rising to
534 in the second half. These figures can be contrasted with the 240,000 funeral
sermons traced for Germany between 1570 and 1770 where both the Lutheran
and Catholic traditions vigorously encouraged the practice. Houlbrooke also
emphasises that our knowledge of the changes made to the English funeral
sermon from the 1530s onwards depends on investigating the 1300 or so exam-
ples printed up to 1750.8
The late medieval and early modern sermon was however, first and fore-
most, a performative act, often lasting an hour or more, and although the sur-
viving texts of funeral sermons reflect the drama inherent in preaching at a
death, yet the gestures, tone of voice, and skill of the preacher in delivery are

5 Clodagh Tait, Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550–​1650 (Basingstoke: 2002), 42.
6 Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family, 306–​10; Powell and Fletcher, “ ‘In die sepulture
sue Trigintali’,” 207, n. 1; Tromly, “ ‘According to Sounde Religion’,” 306.
7 Penny Pritchard, “The Protestant Funeral Sermon in England, 1688–​1800,” in The Oxford
Handbook of the British Sermon 1689–​1901, eds Keith Francis and William Gibson (Oxford:
2012), 322–​37, on 322–​3.
8 Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family, 386–​7; 326.

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302 Eales

largely lost to us.9 While the influence of the printed funeral sermon on readers
has been widely discussed, the impact of the preached word on funeral con-
gregations is more difficult to retrieve. When Bishop William Bedell of Kilmore
in Ireland preached in 1638 at his own wife’s funeral “with that moderation of
affection, and yet just commendation of her worth” there were “few drie eyes
in the church all the while,” but such accounts are relatively rare.10
There are also difficulties inherent in matching printed texts of funeral ser-
mons to their oral delivery. Some preachers added to or rewrote their spoken
texts for publication and such editing is to be expected, but most chose not to
allude to any revisions in their work. Peter Watkinson was unusual in explain-
ing exactly how he had expanded his sermon for Lady Mary Wharton for publi-
cation in 1674 by incorporating “what was prepared, but could not be delivered
in the short time allotted for such discourses” and by adding “many particu-
lars, whereof I had no knowledge, before this was intended to be published.”11
Even with this acknowledgement, it is impossible to discern what Watkinson
had originally preached. The funeral sermon was also a sub-​category of several
wider literary genres including the growing interest in life writing and the tra-
dition of the ars moriendi, or instruction on the art of dying, which emerged in
the late Middle Ages and continued to be popular throughout the period un-
der consideration here. Our understanding of the development of the funeral
sermon after 1500 thus lies at the intersections of changing preaching conven-
tions on the one hand and the history of print culture, literacy, and reading
habits on the other.
The use of the funeral sermon as a tool of Protestant teaching was, however,
slow to take shape and one of the best known complaints of the reformers was
the lack of preaching in the English parishes, even in Elizabeth’s reign, while
in Wales and Ireland the campaign to promote Protestant preaching was even
slower to take root. As Wabuda has demonstrated, there is clear evidence of
preaching before the 1530s by bishops and other church dignitaries, by friars,
and by university-​trained secular clergy.12 Many parishes would not have ben-
efited from their ministry, however, and the survival of various late medieval

9 See for example J. B., Chirologia, or, the natural language of the hand composed of the
speaking motions, and discoursing gestures thereof: whereunto is added Chironomia, or, The
art of manuall rhetorike consisting of the natural expressions, digested by art in the hand
(London: 1644).
10 Evelyn Shirley Shuckburgh (ed.), Two Biographies of William Bedell, Bishop of Kilmore: with
a selection of His Letters and an Unpublished Treatise (Cambridge: 1902), 151.
11 Peter Watkinson, Marys Choice Declared in a Sermon preached at the Funeral of the Right
Honourable Lady Mary Wharton (London: 1674), leaf A3v.
12 Wabuda, Preaching During the English Reformation, 20–​63.

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Funeral Sermons and the Reformation 303

manuscripts of generic sermons, or homilies, indicates that the parish clergy,

who often lacked a university education, were regarded as in need of guidance
in their preaching. The most popular of these works, which were designed as
patterns for the clergy to adapt or to read to their congregations, was written
in the 1380s by the Abbot of Lilleshall in Shropshire, John Mirk. His sermon
cycle for the church year survives in nearly 40 manuscript copies and includes
a sermon for the Feast of All Souls, a burial sermon, and notes for the clergy
on burial.13
Mirk’s Festial was first printed by William Caxton in 1483 and the last edi-
tion was published in 1532; thereafter the theological shifts of the Henrician
Reformation made such Catholic sermon cycles obsolete.14 They were re-
placed at the start of Edward vi’s reign by twelve Certain Sermons or Homilies
of 1547 that were to be read regularly on Sundays in churches and were de-
signed not only to ensure that parishes without a preacher could hear God’s
word expounded, but also that Catholic preachers instilled the new Protestant
faith in their congregations. The ninth homily was an exhortation against the
fear of death, and it marked a complete break from the doctrines of Rome.
Unlike pre-​Reformation funeral sermons, it did not dwell on the terrors of
hell, but described at length how the comforts of heaven could be attained
through true faith and by the merits of Christ. Parishioners were no longer
called upon to perform rituals of prayer and commemoration for the dead,
but to act in charity to their neighbours. The homily furnished preachers with
a host of appropriate biblical texts for reflecting on death including the two
most popular texts chosen by funeral preachers over the next two hundred
years.15 These were St Paul’s First Epistle to the Philippians:21–​4 which was
used in over thirty printed sermons, and Revelation 14:13, which Houlbrooke
identifies as “by far the most popular text used in over 60 printed sermons”
between 1500 and 1750.16 The latter was the text used for Prince Arthur in 1502
when it confirmed his role as a leading Christian within the Catholic commu-
nity and it was also chosen by the bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner,

13 Certayne sermons, or homelies appoynted by the kynges Maiestie, to be declared and redde,
by all persones, vicars, or curates, euery Sondaye in their churches, where they haue cure
(London: 1547), sig. Oiiiiv-​Qiiiiv.
14 Judy Ann Ford, John Mirk’s Festial: Orthodoxy, Lollardy and the Common People in
Fourteenth-​Century England (Cambridge: 2006), 8–​10.
15 Certayne sermons, or homelies appoynted by the kynges Maiestie, sig. Oiiiiv-​Qiiiiv.
16 Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family, 306–​7. Houlbrooke states that preachers
chose either verse 21 from the Epistle “for to live is Christ, and to die is gain” or verses 23–​
4 “for I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ; which
is far better: nevertheless to abide in the flesh is more needful for you.”

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304 Eales

for Henry viii’s funeral at Windsor in 1547, when the text could be seen as
affirming the righteousness of the king’s religious policies.17 The Edwardian
homily had a profound influence on the English funeral sermon as it provided
nearly 60 biblical quotations, many of which would be used as proof texts for
subsequent funeral preaching.
The newly Protestant Edwardian church initially looked to the Lutherans
for advice about how to formulate funeral sermons. The Simple and Religious
Consultation by the Archbishop of Cologne and Lutheran convert, Hermann
von Wied, published in London in 1547, instructed that funeral sermons should
consist of an exposition of a biblical text and an exhortation about the great-
ness of sin and the wrath of God.18 The following year Walter Lynne, a London-​
based Flemish translator, published two sermons by Martin Luther that were
suitable to be read at burials.19 Although the theological underpinning of ear-
ly Protestant funeral sermons was influenced by Lutheran doctrine, the later
dominance of Calvinist theology and the so-​called “Calvinist consensus” of the
English clergy is strongly present in the funeral sermons of the 17th century,
which commonly made reference to the doctrine of election whilst also care-
fully avoiding wading too deeply into the topic of predestination.
Yet sermons for the dead were not without controversy. They were intended
as occasions for the instruction or exhortation of the laity about religion and
the afterlife, but they also provided the opportunity to praise an individual
for their exemplary life, especially if a preacher was surveying the life of his
own patron or of a great personage. Such was the funeral sermon preached
for Edward the Black Prince in 1376 by Bishop Brinton of Rochester, who eulo-
gised the prince as a great warrior, both pious and wise.20 From an early date,
excessive commendation of the deceased was criticised as detracting from the
religious message of the sermon and for its resemblance to Ciceronian and
other orations for the dead in the classical world. Thus, the Office of the Dead
in the 15th-​century sermon cycle Speculum Sacerdotale warned that no praise
or thanks should be made for the dead.21 The concern to counter objections to

17 Gordon Kipling (ed.), The Recyt of the Ladie Kateryne, eets 296 (Oxford: 1990), 81–​93;
John Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials Relating Chiefly to Religion, vol. 2. Part ii (London:
1721), 3–​18.
18 Hermann von Wied, A simple, and religious consultation of us Herman by the grace of God
Archebishop of Colone, and prince Electour (London: 1547).
19 Walter Lynne, A briefe collection of all such textes of the scripture as do declare ye most
blessed and happie estate of the[m]‌that be byseted wyth sycknes (London: 1549).
20 Mary Aquinas Devlin (ed.), The Sermons of Thomas Brinton, Bishop of Rochester (1373–​
1389), Camden Third Series 85 and 86 (London: 1954), 354–​7.
21 Edward H. Weatherley (ed.), Speculum Sacerdotale, eets 200 (London: 1936), 233.

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Funeral Sermons and the Reformation 305

preaching for the dead is also evident well before the Reformation. The 15th-​
century funeral homily Memorare novissima tua argued that men may lawfully
gather at funeral services, burials, and commemorations so that they can pray
for the dead, that the mourners could be comforted and be offered examples
of godly behaviour.22
Bishop John Fisher of Rochester addressed this issue when he declared at
the burial of Henry vii, “let no man thynke that myn entent is for to prayse
hym for ony vayne transytory thynges of this lyfe, whiche by the example of
hym all kynges and prynces may lerne how slydynge, how slippery, how fay-
lyng they be.”23 Similarly, when Matthew Parker, the future Archbishop of Can-
terbury, preached one of the earliest surviving Protestant funeral sermons at
Cambridge in 1551 for the continental reformer Martin Bucer, he emphasised
that he did not speak for Bucer’s “commendations … They be not Bucers com-
mendations but Gods commendations in hys chosen servant.”24
As the Protestant funeral sermon took shape, English preachers respond-
ed to the objections against commendation by dividing their address to the
mourners into two distinct sections. The longer part was devoted to the ex-
position of a biblical text while a second concluding section consisted of
a biographical survey of the deceased’s religious bearing, which according
to the inclination of the preacher might be generalised and very brief, thus
avoiding accusations of excessive praise of an individual. Preachers were
keen to distance this part of the sermon from other ways in which an in-
dividual could be more fully commemorated including poetical elegies,
secular funeral orations, and epitaphs, although sermons were sometimes
published along with poems in honour of the deceased. Yet, the attractions
of the funeral sermon as a means of presenting a pattern of godly piety for
others was so strong that by the end of the 17th century the dissenting min-
ister Samuel Clarke made a virtue of reprinting only the biographical sec-
tions of funeral sermons. These appeared in a series of omnibus editions
designed, as Clarke explained, to be examples of godly behaviour worthy of
emulation.25

22 Gloria Cigman (ed.), Lollard Sermons, eets 294 (Oxford: 1989), 207–​8.
23 John Fisher, This sermon folowynge was compyled [et] sayd in the cathedrall chyrche of saynt
Poule within ye cyte of London by the ryght reuerende fader in god Iohn bysshop of Rochester,
the body beyinge present of the moost famouse prynce kynge Henry the Vij (London: 1509),
leaf Aii.
24 Cited in Tromly, “ ‘According to Sounde Religion’,” 308.
25 See for example Samuel Clarke, The Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons in this Later Age
(London: 1683).

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306 Eales

Clarke included other “godly lives” in these volumes, which had been spe-
cifically written for publication, and the success of his endeavours, which were
“printed four times in a few years space, and yet never less than a thousand
at a time,” demonstrates the continued appetite in contemporary readers for
literature about and in preparation for death.26 As Peter Lake has noted, Clarke
situated his work within the traditions of martyrology and of ecclesiastical his-
tory, but was also responding to the specific political circumstances of 1651 to
1683, when the moderate Puritanism he espoused was under particular threat.
Clarke’s editorial decision to reprint only the spiritual biographies of funeral
sermons also emphasises the relationship of the genre to both life writing and
biographical writing.27
As this brief introduction indicates, funeral sermons are an important his-
torical and literary source. They demonstrate not only the mid-​16th century
displacement of Catholic belief systems by Protestant observances and the
exhortation to a godly life, but also the ways in which individuals and social
groups were fashioned as good Christians at their death. It is here that we
can witness the post-​Reformation funeral sermon as a site of striking inno-
vation, as the English clergy used their funeral sermons to celebrate the role
of clergy wives in response to Catholic accusations that clerical marriage was
illegitimate, and that ministers’ wives were whores. While many historians
have mined funeral sermons for evidence of female piety in the period, the
presentation of the entirely new social group of clergy wives and daughters
in funeral sermons has not yet been given the prominence that it deserves.
The presentation of male piety in funeral sermons has also been largely over-
looked, partly because the behaviour of men has been perceived as norma-
tive by past societies and also because modern commentators have analysed
it primarily to highlight the ways in which female religiosity can be read
“against the grain” of a text. The emphasis on the female relatives of the cler-
gy and the nuances of male piety in the funeral sermons of the early modern
period were important aspects of the genre and both will be examined here
in greater detail.

26 Clarke, The Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons, 1–​11.

27 Peter Lake, “Reading Clarke’s Lives in Political and Polemical Context,” in Writing
Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England, eds
Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Oxford: 2008), 293–​318. I am grateful to Peter Lake
for giving me a draft of his forthcoming book on Clarke, Making Memory: Samuel Clarke
and the Construction of a Puritan Tradition.

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Funeral Sermons and the Reformation 307

1 The Contents of Funerary Sermons

Before the Reformation a sermon was not usually part of the observances at buri-
als, when those who could afford to do so paid instead for intercessory masses,
requiems, and prayers designed to ease the passage of the soul through the pains
of purgatory on its way to heaven.28 The theology of purgatory was so central to the
moment of death in the late Middle Ages that wealthier individuals left bequests
for masses and prayers to be performed for a specified time or even in perpetuity.
The very wealthiest in society funded chantry chapels where regular services for
the founders and their families could be maintained. The less wealthy left mon-
ey to guilds or confraternities of laymen and women, who professed devotion to
a specific saint or to Christ, the Trinity, or the Virgin Mary, and guild members
paid for the burial and the commemoration of their fellows through masses and
prayers. Model sermons, or homilies, for the feast of All Souls on 2 November when
all the dead, including the poor, were remembered show similar beliefs in the effi-
cacy of prayer rather than preaching to aid souls in their delivery from purgatory.
In England bequests for Catholic funeral rites tailed off from the mid-​1530s,
and fell away sharply after the abolition of chantries by the Edwardian Chan-
tries Act of 1547 and the clear repudiation of purgatory in the 42 articles of re-
ligion of 1553, which described purgatory as “vainly invented” with no grounds
in scripture and “repugnant to the Word of God.”29 Yet it was not until the 1580s
that the custom of requesting a funeral sermon in wills became more evident.
In a survey of probate accounts from Berkshire, Kent and Lincolnshire, Clare
Gittings has noted that the numbers of funeral sermons mentioned in the
accounts increased steadily between 1591 and 1650.30 A case study of this is
provided by the village of Cranbrook in Kent, where in an isolated example
from 1582 a local shoemaker left 6s 8d for a sermon at his burial, but from 1596
onwards such bequests appear more frequently and in the next quarter of a
century clothiers and their widows, yeomen, a tapster, a shoemaker, a tanner,
and a saddler, amongst others, commonly left 10 shillings or £1 for the minister
of Cranbrook to preach a funeral sermon for them.31 This was undoubtedly a

28 Peter Marshall, “Fear, Purgatory and Polemic in Reformation England,” in Fear in Early
Modern Society, eds William G. Naphy and Penny Roberts (Manchester: 1997), 150–​66. See
also Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford: 2002).
29 Gerald Bray (ed.), Documents of the English Reformation (Cambridge: 2004), 297.
30 Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early modern England (London:
1984), 240.
31 Jules de Launay, Abstracts of Cranbrook Wills 1396–​1640 (Canterbury: 1984), 198, 220, 237,
242, 256, 257, 262, 274, 284, 357.

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308 Eales

reflection of the increase in the number of printed funeral sermons in the late
16th and early 17th centuries, which created a fashion for the genre.
Such bequests also demonstrate that funeral sermons were not a routine
part of the burial service. Ministers might make an address to the congregation
at a burial, but an individualised sermon making reference to the deceased was
reserved for notable individuals, for those who could afford to pay a preacher,
or for those with household chaplains performing a last office for their patron.
The issue of payment for this service in England is further underlined by the
hostile comments of the Scottish Calvinist minister Robert Baillie in 1644 that
the English clergy would not abandon the practice of preaching at funerals,
because it was “a good part of the minsters livelyhood; therefore they will not
quitt it.”32
Late medieval English funeral sermons were designed to instruct the hear-
ers about the four last things of death, judgement, hell, and heaven. Surviving
texts considered the efficacy of good works to salvation and how the soul could
be released from purgatory, which according to the tastes of the preacher might
variously include the prayers of friends and of the faithful, generous oblations
and charity, the observation of fasts, and above all, the salvation offered by the
sacrament of communion. Various combinations of these aids were offered in
the 15th-​century revisions and extensions of Mirk’s Festial such as the model
sermon In die sepulture seu trigintali, which took as its organising theme acts of
charity and the “precius prayers” of friends that would help to release the souls
of all Christians from the prison of purgatory.33 Similarly, the burial sermon In
die sepulture alicuius mortui, acknowledged the power of prayer and the sac-
raments, but emphasised that the mass was the chief and principal succour to
all souls.34 The Memorare novissima tua was also traditional in taking the four
last things as its organising theme. Here the ten pains of hell were graphically
described as including fire, great cold, darkness, foul stink, dread and despair,
but they were contrasted with the comforting spectacle of the joys of heaven
encompassing immortality, love, and comfortable company as well as sight of
the Trinity.35
Changing emotional responses to death and dying in the medieval and
early modern periods have become a topic of interest for historians and
others, but we can also see some of the continuities between the medieval

32 David Laing (ed.), The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: 1841), 245.
33 Devlin, Sermons of Thomas Brinton, 206–​9, 260–​72, 280-​4,340-​3; Powell and Fletcher, “ ‘In
die sepulture sue Trigintali’,” 215–​28.
34 Susan Powell, (ed.), John Mirk’s Festial, eets 335:2 (Oxford: 2011), 256–​9.
35 Cigman, Lollard Sermons, 231–​9.

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conventions about preaching for the dead and early modern funeral ser-
mons. The late 17th century writer, Oliver Heywood, believed that the sub-
ject matter of a funeral sermon should speak “terrour and caution” to the
mourners, and like their Catholic forebears Protestant preachers certainly
used vivid imagery to provoke sympathy for the deceased and a dread of a
life spent in sin.36 Nicolas Estwick questioned whether his auditors had seen
“a heap of dead men’s bones? Hast thou not seene their skuls without flesh,
a grim spectacle to behold, the very eyes being wasted and turned into dust?
Hast thou not seene their mouthes (as it were) grinning and shewing their
corrupted teeth.”37 Such graphic descriptions were intended to evoke fear
in the auditors and to persuade them to turn from sin.38 Funeral preachers
also held out the prospect of salvation to the righteous reassuring them in
the words of Alexander Gosse, minister of Plympton St Mary, Devon, that “in
the evening of our age, when death commeth, we shall sup with the Lambe
of God, Christ Jesus, and there will be great joy indeed.”39 The extended em-
phasis on the salvation of the godly was one of the defining hallmarks of the
English Protestant funeral sermon in the transition from its late medieval
form and was a corollary of the rejection of Catholic theology of death at
the Reformation.
The impact of the Reformation on the funeral sermon in England has been
described by Tromly as “cataclysmic” since the severance of its Catholic roots
meant that it had to be reinvented, while it was also the subject of prolonged
controversy about its legitimacy in a reformed church.40 While Tromly is cor-
rect in his assessment of the impact of doctrinal change on the funeral sermon
in 16th century England, the attack on preaching for the dead was not as se-
rious as he suggests, as it came from a very small minority of advanced pres-
byterian and independent groups in the 1580s and 1590s, and their objections
did not have a significant impact on burial practices in England. Their leaders

36 Horsfall Turner (ed.), The Rev. Oliver Heywood B.A.,1630–​1702; His Autobiography, Diaries,
Anecdote and Event Book, vol. 4 (Bingley: 1885), 48. See Rebecca F. McNamara and Una
Mcllvenna “Medieval and Early Modern Emotional Responses to Death and Dying,”
Parergon 31/​2 (2014), 1–​10.
37 Nicolas Estwick, A learned and godly sermon preached on the XIX. day of December anno
Dom. MDCXXXI. At the funeral of Mr. Robert Bolton (London: 1639), 11.
38 Andrew Spicer, “ ‘Rest of their bones’: Fear of Death and Reformed Burial Practices,” in
Fear in Early Modern Society, eds William G. Naphy and Penny Roberts (Manchester: 1997),
167–​83.
39 Alexander Gosse, Death’s Deliverance and Eliahs Fiery Charet, or the holy mans Tryumph
after Death. Delivered in two Sermons preached at Plymouth (London: 1632), 10.
40 Tromly, “ ‘According to Sounde Religion’,” 293.

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310 Eales

were enthusiastically answered, amongst others, by the future Archbishop of

Canterbury, John Whitgift, and this very public endorsement of the practice by
church luminaries certainly made the funeral sermon a desirable commodity
for those able to afford the costs.
The greatest disruptor to medieval funeral sermons lay, as Tromly has ar-
gued, in the new doctrines that were introduced into England by the Refor-
mation and the Protestant rejection of Catholic theology. The Edwardian re-
pudiation of belief in purgatory was specifically driven forwards in funeral
sermons, which provided the perfect opportunity to make this doctrinal point.
A printed funeral “oration” of 1550 delivered by John Hooper, the future bishop
of Gloucester and Marian martyr, illustrates the energetic dismantling of the
theology of purgatory by the reformers:

the lernynge of man wythout iudgement, knoweledge, and grace wyll

compell and force them what lyue to beleue there frendes soules depart-
ed to be broyled in Purgatory. Desyre them to giue you a reason why?
Aunswere haue they none, but that ye muste so beleue, or els be ac-
compted for an Heretike.41

Hooper insisted that salvation was obtained through faith and not by the good
works and prayers of others. His text was unadorned by any praise for the de-
ceased, in which respect he was in harmony with the practice of the later En-
glish exiles in Geneva in Mary’s reign, who stipulated in their forme of prayers
and ministration of the sacraments, approved by John Calvin, that the congrega-
tion should accompany the corpse to the grave without ceremonies. After the
interment the minister might exhort the people about death and resurrection,
but no mention was made of any commendation in the minister’s address.42
The Scottish Calvinist reformer, John Knox, had a hand in writing the forme of
prayers and on his return to Scotland, Knox was one of a group of presbyterian
ministers who devised the Protestant Kirk’s First Book of Discipline in 1560. The
authors of the Book expressed their disapproval of funeral preaching, because
they claimed that if ministers preached at all burials they would be overly oc-
cupied with funeral sermons, but they could not with any conscience preach

41 John Hooper, A funerall oratyon made the xiiij. day of Ianuary by Iohn Hoper, the yere of our
saluation, 1549 (London: 1549), sig. Aiiiv-​Aiiiir.
42 The forme of prayers and ministration of the sacraments, andc vsed in the Englishe
Congregation at Geneua and approued, by the famous and godly learned man, Iohn Caluyn
(Geneva: 1556), 88.

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Funeral Sermons and the Reformation 311

only for the “rich and honorable.”43 Perhaps with the Genevan allowance for
the minister to exhort the people in mind, Knox did preach at the burial of the
Earl of Moray after his assassination in 1570 and funeral sermons were allowed
by authority in Montrose in the 1580s.44
Simultaneously, the leading English presbyterian clerics, John Field, Thom-
as Wilcox, and Thomas Cartwright, engaged in a protracted debate with the
authorities about further church reforms, which included the legitimacy of the
funeral sermon. In 1572 Field and Wilcox attacked burial sermons, which they
insisted in their Admonition to the Parliament had been removed by the best
reformed churches, because the practice gave rise to abuses.45 The Admoni-
tion was answered meticulously point by point by the then dean of Lincoln,
John Whitgift, who cited the Genevan forme of prayers as evidence that Calvin
had approved of funeral sermons. Whitgift asked whether there was any better
time than at a funeral to preach the mortality of mankind and the judgement
to come, or to beat down “trentalls, sacrificing for the dead, prayers for the
dead, purgatorie, and such like, than that wherin they were accustomed to be
most used?.”46 This view was widely shared in the English Church and as late
as the 1690s English funeral preachers continued to describe the doctrine of
purgatory as a delusion, imaginary, and a fable.47
In response to Whitgift, Thomas Cartwright asserted that members of the
English congregation in Geneva had told him that they did not use funeral
sermons nor were they used in Calvin’s church there. In line with the Scottish
Book of Discipline he argued that funeral sermons were for the rich and those
in authority, and they were seldom preached at the burial of the poor, there-
fore “it is most convenient to leave both.”48 The assault on funeral sermons was

43 The First and Second booke of discipline, as it was formerly set forth in Scotland by pub-
licke authoritie, anno 1560 And is at present commanded there to be practised, anno 1641
(London: 1641), 71.
44 Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (London: 2002), 341.
45 John Field, An Admonition to the Parliament (Hemel Hempstead: 1572), leaf Biiiir.
46 John Whitgift, An ansvvere to a certen libel intituled, An admonition to the Parliament
(London: 1572), 200.
47 John Shower, The mourners companion, or, Funeral discourses on several texts (London:
1692), 34; John Howe, A discourse relating to the much-​lamented death and solemn funeral of
our incomparable and most gracious Queen Mary, of most blessed memory (London: 1695),
40; George Stanhope, The happiness of good men after death a sermon at the funeral of Mr.
Robert Castell, late of Deptford in Kent (London: 1699), 19.
48 Thomas Cartwright, A replye to an ansvvere made of M. Doctor VVhitgifte Against the admo-
nition to the Parliament (Hemel Hempstead: 1573), 201. For Whitgift’s further response
see John Whitgift, The defense of the aunswere to the Admonition against the replie of T.C.
(London: 1574), 733.

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312 Eales

subsequently taken up by the Independent leaders Henry Barrow and John

Penry, who argued that funeral sermons were not commanded by the Bible.
As a Welshman, Penry was particularly concerned to see the best reformed
practices extended into Wales, which the radical reformers regarded as a dark
corner of the land where Catholic practices persisted and preaching was still
lacking.49 Their insistence on separation from the established Church led to
both men’s execution on charges of sedition in 1593.50
Despite this controversy, there was little wider support for the Presbyterian
and separatist positions in England. By 1600 funeral sermons had been printed
for various aristocratic patrons including Walter, Earl of Essex in 1577, Francis,
Earl of Bedford in 1585, Sir Henry Sidney in 1586, Anne, Countess of Warwick in
1591, and Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton in 1593. Other ranks were also commem-
orated in print, including in 1581 the lawyer Robert Kelway, who was also the
surveyor general of the court of wards and in 1597 John Piers, the Archbishop
of York.51
The publication in 1602 of two funeral sermons by William Leigh and Wil-
liam Harrison for the Puritan Lancashire gentlewoman Katherine Brettergh
marked a watershed in the print history of the genre. Deaths Advantage Little
Regarded was as Tromly points out “the first extant [funeral] sermon preached
for a woman who was not titled.” It was printed seven times between 1602 and
1642 and its popularity owed much to the “brief discourse” of Katherine’s life
and death appended to the sermons as well as to its hostility to Catholicism.52
Katherine died at the age of 22 after a spectacular deathbed crisis during which
she repeatedly flung her Bible to the ground and which Harrison interpreted
as a diabolical assault. The publication of Deaths Advantage Little Regarded
was intended to rebut the accusation by local Catholics that Katherine had
suffered because of a crisis of faith. The depiction of her life, death, and funeral
in print also gives an insight into the isolation felt by Katherine’s Puritan circle

49 John Penry, An exhortation vnto the gouernours, and people of Hir Maiesties countrie of
Wales, to labour earnestly, to haue the preaching of the Gospell planted among them
(London: 1588), 98–​9; Henry Barrow, A brief discoverie of the false church (London: 1590),
126.
50 Claire Cross, 2004, “Penry, John (1562/​3–​1593), religious controversialist,” Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography. 14 Jul. 2019. https://​www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​10.1093/​ref:odnb/​
9780198614128.001.0001/​odnb-​9780198614128-​e-​21894 (last accessed 28/​6/​2020). Patrick
Collinson, 2004, “Barrow, Henry (c. 1550–​1593), religious separatist,” Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography. 14 Jul. 2019. https://​www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​10.1093/​ref:odnb/​
9780198614128.001.0001/​odnb-​9780198614128-​e-​1540 (last accessed 28/​6/​2020).
51 Tromly, “ ‘According to Sounde Religion’,” 299–​304.
52 Tromly, “ ‘According to Sounde Religion’,” 310.

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Funeral Sermons and the Reformation 313

in Lancashire where traditional Catholicism was still strongly evident even at

the start of the 17th century.
Funeral sermons for women have had a particular attraction for historians
of female piety in the early modern period. Eric Josef Carlson has identified
43 funeral sermons for non-​royal women preached between 1600 and 1640, 29
of which contain biographical material. They encompassed the range of re-
ligious leanings that had developed in the established Protestant Church by
the time of the civil wars. The preachers from the conservative wing included
John Cosin and John Donne, although they were outnumbered by the Puri-
tan tendency, which was represented by Stephen Dennison, Thomas Gataker,
and Thomas Taylor amongst many others. Despite the preachers’ different re-
ligious traditions their sermons all focused on the domestic nature of women’s
religious practices.53 Patrick Collinson has argued that the constraints of the
genre meant that such texts were highly formulaic and generalised whereas Pe-
ter Lake and Carlson rightly contend that women’s funeral sermons and their
associated godly “lives” do reveal individual behaviours that went “against the
grain” of conventional social codes.54 Thus, Katherine Brettergh was praised
for correcting her husband for being angry on the Sabbath and for pursuing a
tenant in rent arrears for then, as she said, you “oppress” the poor.55 In this ex-
ample Katherine’s godly behaviour trumped the obedience expected of a wife
to her husband in an ostensibly patriarchal society.
Significantly, the printed funeral sermons of the 1620s and 1630s also com-
memorated an entirely new social class of women for the first time. Funer-
al sermons for the wives, daughters, and other female relatives of the clergy
should be interpreted not only as contributing to the development of the

53 Eric Josef Carlson, “English Funeral Sermons as Sources: The Example of Female Piety
in Pre-​1640 Sermons,” Albion 32/​4 (2000), 567–​97. See also Jacqueline Eales, “Samuel
Clarke and the ‘Lives’ of Godly Women in Seventeenth-​Century England,” in Women in
the Church, eds W.J. Sheils and Diana Wood, Studies in Church History 27 (Oxford: 1990),
365–​76; Elizabeth Hodgson, “The Domestic ‘Fruit of Eves Transgression’ in Stuart Funeral
Sermons,” Prose Studies 28/​1 (2006), 1–​18; Femke Molekamp, “Seventeenth-​Century
Funeral Sermons and Exemplary female Devotion: Gendered Spaces and Histories,”
Renaissance and Reformation 35/​1 (2012), 43–​63; Raymond A. Anselment, “Anthony
Walker, Mary Rich, and Seventeenth-​Century Funeral Sermons of Women,” Prose Studies
37/​3 (2015), 200–​24.
54 Patrick Collinson, “ ‘A Magazine of Religious Patterns’: An Erasmian Topic Transposed in
English Protestantism,” in Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism,
ed. Patrick Collinson (London: 1983), 499–​527; Peter Lake, “Feminine Piety and Personal
Potency: The Emancipation of Mrs Jane Ratcliffe,” Seventeenth Century 2 (1987), 143–​65.
55 William Harrison and William Leygh, Death’s Advantage Little Regarded and the Soul’s
Solace against Sorrow. Preached in Two Funeral Sermons (London: 1606), 9–​10.

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314 Eales

genre, but also as part of a wider debate about the legitimacy of clergy mar-
riage, which had been initiated by the Reformation. This debate remained a
live issue for the English clergy throughout the 17th century and funeral ser-
mons for the women of clergy families can fruitfully be read within the context
of this ongoing debate between the English Protestant clergy and their Cath-
olic opponents.
The first printed funeral sermon for a clerical wife was Nicholas Guy’s Pieties
Pillar (1626), in which he described Elizabeth Gouge as a “pious, prudent, prov-
ident, painfull, carefull, faithfull, helpfull, grave, modest, sober, tender, loving
Wife, Mother, Mistris, Neighbour.”56 Elizabeth was married to William Gouge,
the famed godly preacher of St Anne’s Blackfriars, and at her death she had just
given birth to a son, her 13th child. Pieties Pillar was published at the “importu-
nity” of her husband and it marked a significant turning point in the creation
of a new social identity for clergy wives in post-​Reformation England. We can
trace, for example, an extremely close relationship between the description of
Elizabeth Gouge in this sermon and the idealised conduct of wives as set out in
William Gouge’s domestic advice book for the laity Of Domesticall Duties first
published four years earlier in 1622. In this book Gouge also made a clear de-
fence of clerical marriage, arguing that it was lawful for “all sorts of persons” to
marry and that the Church of Rome’s restraint on marriage for those entering
holy orders was “impure and tyrannical.”57
Pieties Pillar was the complete answer to Catholic accusations that clerical
marriage was nothing more than concubinage and it set the tone for funeral
sermons for other women from clerical households and in particular their do-
mestic support for their husbands’ vocations. It was also seen as a model for
all godly women to follow. In 1659 Edward Reynolds published a godly “life” for
Mrs Mary Bewley, in which he noted that “in this nation reverend divines have
judged it expedient and useful to propose some women as patterns to other.”
Amongst the works he cited was that of “Mr Nicholas Guy, his Narration of the
life and death of Dr Gouge’s wife.”58

56 Nicholas Guy, Pieties pillar: or, A sermon preached at the funerall of mistresse Elizabeth
Gouge, late wife of Mr. William Gouge, of Black-​friers, London With a true narration of her
life and death (London: 1626), 41.
57 William Gouge, Of domesticall duties eight treatises (London: 1622) 183–​4. For further
discussion of the relationship between conduct literature and the debate about clerical
marriage see Jacqueline Eales, “Gender Construction in Early Modern England and the
Conduct Books of William Whateley (1583–​1639),” in Gender and Christian Religion, ed.
R. N. Swanson, Studies in Church History 34 (Woodbridge: 1998), 163–​74.
58 Edward Reynolds, Imitation and caution for Christian woman: or, The life and death of that
excellent gentlewoman, Mrs. Mary Bewley (London: 1659), 2.

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Funeral Sermons and the Reformation 315

While the construction of femininity and female piety presented in funer-

al sermons has been closely analysed, the same cannot be said about funeral
sermons for men. Sermons about individuals have always been a staple of bi-
ographical research about both men and women, but the genre has not been
the central focus for wider studies of masculinity. Yet a wide range of male
ranks and professions are represented in the printed sources including court-
iers, gentlemen, soldiers, merchants, lawyers, judges and of course, clerics.
Each grouping represented particular facets of male behaviour and reinforced
the contemporary patriarchal expectations that men should act as leaders in
their public vocations and in their homes, whilst also displaying Christian val-
ues of piety, charity, and compassion.
The clergy thus used their funeral sermons to strengthen the bonds with-
in masculine spheres of operation. Francis Rogers’s funeral sermon for Lieu-
tenant Colonel William Proud, who died at the siege of Maastricht in 1632,
was delivered in Canterbury Cathedral to a congregation which included the
deputy-​lieutenants of East Kent “to whom the chiefest charge of military dis-
cipline … is committed.” Rogers skilfully used the obedience required of the
soldier to emphasise the need to obey God’s laws and commands, and invoked
the bravery of men in battle to exhort his listeners to fear neither death nor the
Devil, who he assured his listeners could be overcome like a coward.59 Simi-
larly, when Edward Dunsterville preached in Dublin in 1642 at the funeral of
Sir Simon Harcourt, a colonel in the English forces in Ireland and a member of
the Irish Privy Council, he addressed a congregation of judges, privy council-
lors, military commanders, and soldiers involved in the colonisation of Ireland.
Dunsterville lamented Harcourt’s death at the hands of their Irish enemies and
warned that “this should worke every Colonell, Officer and Souldier of an Army
to a holy care to prepare themselves for every event before-​hand, and to make
their peace with God on their knees in their Chambers before they go into the
field.”60
The funerals of the clergy themselves were occasions for solemn gatherings
of networks of ministers. When the minister of Little Waldingfield in Sussex
died in 1605 his coffin was carried by a group of preachers, which included John
Knewstub, who preached the funeral sermon. Few clerical funerals could have
been as well attended by fellow ministers, though, as that of the Reverend Fish,
a London minister buried on 23 August 1662. In a show of religious and political

59 Francis Rogers, A sermon preached on September the 20. 1632. in the cathedrall church of
Christ at Canterbury, at the funerall of William Proud (London: 1633), leaf A2r-​v.
60 Edward Dunsterville, A sermon at the funerall of the truely vertuous, honourable, valiant, in
fame never-​dying, Sir Simon Harcourt (London: 1642), 11.

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316 Eales

force, his funeral attracted the presence of 100 “dead” ministers, who expected
to be removed from their parishes on the following day for refusing to subscribe
to the Act of Uniformity recently passed by Parliament.61 Funeral sermons for
the clergy also provided an overt opportunity for the preacher to reflect on the
impact of the clerical profession on their flocks. Nicolas Estwick asserted in his
1631 funeral sermon for his fellow Northamptonshire minister Robert Bolton that
“the consciences of millions converted, can witnesse that Ministers have beene
their spirituall fathers, their preaching hath beene the key to open the Kingdome
of Heaven, and they are appointed by GOD for the gathering of the Saints.”62
While some sermons, like those for Proud and Bolton, are entirely lauda-
tory others revealed tensions between praiseworthy male behaviour and the
inability to live up to this ideal. Omitting to adumbrate the moral failings of
the deceased when addressing a congregation that knew them well could ren-
der a preacher’s sermon an empty exercise. In 1682 Oliver Heywood noted that
a notable local drunkard, who was a “filthy” talker had been sent “straight to
heaven” by the preacher at his funeral “I suppose upon ignorance of him.” Hey-
wood hoped that this disparity would not encourage the wicked to continue in
their sinful courses.63
The gendered assumptions of early modern society were clearly exposed
at funerals as the preachers considered that men were prone to a wider range
of moral lapses than women. Funeral sermons for women might flag up a cer-
tain transitory dullness in religious observation, a questioning of faith that had
been overcome, and even the deathbed temptations of Satan, but the sins of
men were more varied and included drunkenness, gambling, swearing, forni-
cation, and a failure to engage with religious worship in varying degrees. When
faced with the task of preaching at the funeral of the notorious rakehell John,
Earl of Rochester, in 1680 his wife’s chaplain, Robert Parsons, admitted that
“so great a sinner as now lies before us” was a subject that “might deserve and
exhaust all the treasures of religious eloquence.” Parsons took refuge in the
biblical text Luke 15:7 “joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth,
more than over ninetie and nine just persons.”64
Some forty years earlier, Robert Abbot, the minister at Cranbrook used
the occasion of a funeral sermon for the young apothecary William Rogers to

61 Winthrop Papers 1498–​1629, vol. 1 (Boston: 1929), 89; Ernest Axon (ed.), Oliver Heywood’s
Life of John Angier of Denton, Chetham Society, 97 New Series (Manchester: 1937), 127.
62 Estwick, A learned and godly sermon, 54.
63 Horsfall Turner (ed.), The Rev. Oliver Heywood B.A., 48.
64 Robert Parsons, A Sermon Preached at the Funeral of the Right Honourable John, Earl of
Rochester (Dublin: 1680), 5.

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Funeral Sermons and the Reformation 317

address the deceased’s coterie of drinking companions and warn them against
irreligion and its consequences. Rogers had been a young man of “sweet” dis-
position, but he persistently rejected church-​going in favour of the alehouse.
As the sermon made clear, Rogers suffered a failure of faith on his deathbed
and died in terror believing he was damned.65
Penny Pritchard has noted that preachers were faced with particular chal-
lenges when preaching about the religious conduct of merchants, whose lives
had been dedicated to earthly profits.66 When preaching at the burial of his
good friend John Juxon, a London merchant tailor, Stephen Dennison was con-
scious that some people “wil not speake well [of him]” because of his trade,
but remembered how Juxon had once told him that “his conscience did not ac-
cuse him of any one groate then in his possession, which was gotten by vniust
meanes.”67 If Juxon was aware of any gossip against him, he was determined
to demonstrate that he had the confidence of the communities in which he
moved and as a wealthy man, he was prepared to pay for their attendance at
his funeral. His will stipulated that nine “godlie ministers,” including Dennison,
should be paid £4 each to wear mourning gowns and attend his corpse to the
church; 80 boys from Christ’s Hospital were to accompany them along with
liveried members of the Merchant Tailors Guild, as well as Juxon’s friends and
kindred. A further 50 poor men were paid 11 shillings each to attend the body to
burial dressed in “comely” black mourning gowns. As Dennison preached the
funeral sermon at St Laurence Pountney church he thus faced a congregation
which represented Juxon’s livelihood as a merchant, his charity to the poor,
and his networks of religious and family contacts.68
The allegation that funeral sermons were open to abuse was underlined by
the 1640s debate about the production of a Directory for Public Worship by the
Westminster Assembly of Divines tasked with reforming the English Church
during the first phase of the English civil wars. The Scottish representatives to

65 Robert Abbott, The young-​mans warning-​peece, or, A sermon preached at the buri-
all of William Rogers, apothecary with an history of his sinfull life and woefull death
(London: 1639); see also Lorraine Flisher, “The Sinful Life and Woeful Death of William
Rogers: Textual Legacy and Puritan Culture in 1630s West Kent,” in Kentish Book Culture
1400–​1660, ed. Claire Bartram (Oxford: forthcoming).
66 Penny Pritchard, “The Eye of a Needle: Commemorating the ‘Godly Merchant’ in the
Early Modern Funeral Sermon,” Journal of Religious History, Literature and Culture 3/​2
(2017), 70–​90.
67 Stephen Dennison, Another tombestone; or, A sermon preached at Laurance Pountneys-​
Church London, vpon the last day of August, in the yeere, 1626 At the celebration of the funer-
als of Master Iohn Iuxon (London: 1626), 60–​1.
68 tna PROB11/​150/​25.

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318 Eales

the Assembly made their disapproval very clear in 1643 when they refused to lis-
ten to the funeral sermon preached by Stephen Marshall for the parliamentarian
leader John Pym. Robert Baillie, one of the Scot’s contingent, remarked that “for
funeral sermons we must have away with the rest.” A year later Baillie reported
that the differences between the English and the Scots over the issue of funeral
sermons appeared to be irreconcilable. He described the practice as a reward for
the rich and said that there had been three days of debate in the Assembly over
the wording of directions for burying the dead in the Directory for Public Worship,
which was to be used in England, Scotland and Wales.69 The final version of the
Directory decreed that there should be no praying, singing, or reading at the buri-
al “as no way beneficiall to the dead” and that the mourners should instead apply
themselves to appropriate meditations and discussion. If a minister were pres-
ent then he “may put them in remembrance of their duty.”70 While Presbyterian
and independent clerics were expected to adhere to the rubrics of the Directory,
the Royalist clergy had no such scruples and, as Houlbrooke has observed, the
period 1660 to1714 would be “the heyday of the ‘Anglican’ funeral sermon.”71

2 Conclusions

During the 16th century the delivery, contents, and reception of funeral ser-
mons altered considerably in the British Isles as a result both of religious poli-
tics and the increasing popularity of the genre as a printed literary form. From
the early 1550s leading figures in the established English Church regarded
preaching at burials as the key opportunity for spreading the reformed faith
and combatting the doctrines of Catholicism, and by the early 17th century
this even extended to the championing of clerical marriage. Funeral sermons
were also important locations for the expression of gendered modes of person-
al piety as well as the construction of the ideal religious behaviour expected
of certain social groups such as clerics, soldiers, and merchants. In England
and Wales opposition to funeral preaching was voiced by a small group of ex-
treme reformers, but their reservations about the practice did nothing to halt
the growing fashion amongst the majority. Even in Scotland, where funeral
sermons were actively discouraged, there is evidence that the practice took a
sporadic hold.

69 Laing (ed.), Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, ii, 118, 245.
70 Chad Van Dixhoorn (ed.), The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, 1643–​1652,
vol. 5 (Oxford: 2012), 145–​6.
71 Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family, 299.

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Some of these developments, including the presentation of male piety in fu-

neral sermons are yet to be fully explored, but perhaps the largest gap in the liter-
ature thus far concerns the expository aspects of the genre. The debate about the
formulaic nature of funeral sermons initiated by Collinson has centred closely
on the biographical sections of these sermons and his critics, including Lake and
Carlson, have responded by analysing them for evidence of individualism. Yet by
far the greater part of a funeral sermon was constructed from the exposition of
a biblical text, and this element in the sermons has remained almost completely
unexamined by historians and literary critics. Yet, the shift from Catholic to Prot-
estant usage released funeral preachers from the constraints of teaching Catho-
lic belief in purgatory and in an imminent hell. As a result, the exposition of the
text became a much freer form ranging from the sophistication of John Donne’s
sermon for the heraldic funeral of Sir William Cockayne in St Paul’s Cathedral to
the simple, short sermon by Francis Tallents at the burial of the dissenting min-
ister Philip Henry minister at Broad Oak in 1696, which was attended by “most of
the neighbouring gentry, with a vast multitude of others.”72
Although, as Houlbrooke has argued, the Anglican clergy would retreat
from publishing their funeral sermons in the 18th century as a reaction against
religious enthusiasm, the dissenting clergy continued to publish, although the
overall numbers of printed sermons would fall after the mid-​point of the cen-
tury. Despite the rise and fall of the appetite for printed funeral sermons in the
early modern period, the practice would remain firmly embedded in English
funeral practices throughout the ensuing centuries.

Part ii. Protestant Funeral Sermons in Early-​Modern Germany

Ruth Atherton

“You should not grieve because of those who are asleep … like the others
who have no hope.”73 ,74 In delivering the funeral sermon for Martin Luther in
1546, Johannes Bugenhagen sought to give the grieving parishioners hope and

72 Peter McCullough, “Preaching and Context: John Donne’s Sermon at the Funeral of
Sir William Cockayne,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, eds Peter
McCullough, Hugh Adlington, and Emma Rhatigan (Oxford: 2011), 213–​67; J.B. Williams
(ed.), Eighteen Sermons by the Rev. Philip Henry, A. M. (London: 1816), 3–​30, 373.
73 I am grateful to Dr Benedikt Brunner for his helpful comments on a draft of this chapter.
74 Johannes Bugenhagen, Eine Christliche Predigt /​uber der Leich und begrebnis /​des
Ehrwirdigen D. Martini Luthers /​durch Ern Johan Buugenhagen Pomern /​Doctor /​und
Pfarrher der Kirchen zu Wittemberg /​gethan (Wittemberg: 1546), unpaginated.

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320 Atherton

comfort regarding the delivery of the Wittenberg reformer from this world.
Acknowledging the “rightful mourning” of those gathered, Bugenhagen gen-
tly reminded his audience that “in this sorrow we should also rightly recognize
God’s grace and mercy to us and thank God that he has awakened for us through
his spirit this dear Dr. Martin Luther against the antichristian doctrines of the
abominable satanic pope.”75 The theme of the sermon was one of thanksgiving
and hope: Luther long desired “to be rid of this miserable life and to be with
Christ.”76 Echoing Justas Jonas’s immediate report regarding Luther’s death,
Bugenhagen confirmed that the reformer died well, secure in his faith, and al-
though those he leaves behind are sorrowful, they should remember that “God
himself now holds [Luther] precious and beloved.”77 In August 1532, Luther had
delivered a sermon on the occasion of Elector John of Saxony’s funeral. In this,
Luther drew on the same words of consolation from 1 Thessalonians 4:13 that
Bugenhagen was to employ for Luther’s own funeral fourteen years later.78 The
words were intended to comfort Elector John’s grieving family, friends, and sub-
jects. Acknowledging the instinctive human reaction to death, Luther taught
that grief is not to be ignored but “it must be Christian in moderation.”79
Taking the theme of comfort as its primary focus, this chapter explores the
development of Protestant funeral sermons over the course of the 16th and 17th
centuries in Germany.80 It considers how Protestant preachers used funeral

75 Bugenhagen, Eine Christliche Predigt.

76 Bugenhagen, Eine Christliche Predigt.
77 For a discussion of the reports regarding Luther’s death, see Jochen Birkenmeier,
“ ‘Den Würmern einen guten feisten Doktor zu verzehren geben’: Die Entstehung und
Entwicklung der Berichte über Luthers Tod,” in Luthers Tod: Ereignis und Wirkung, ed.
Armin Kohnle (Leipzig: 2019), 141–​57; Bugenhagen, Eine Christliche Predigt.
78 “Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death,
so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope.”: 1 Thessalonians
4:13, New International Version. For more on the use of Scripture in funeral sermons, see
Robert Kolb, “[…] da jr nicht trawrig seid wie die anderen, die keine hoffnung haben: Der
Gebrauch der Heiligen Schrift in Leichenpredigten der Wittenberger Reformation (1560–​
1600),” in Leichenpredigten als Medien der Erinnerungskultur im europäischen Kontext, ed.
Eva-​Maria Dickhaut (Stuttgart: 2014), 1–​25.
79 Martin Luther, “Zwo Predigt uber der Leiche des Churfürsten Herzog Johans zu Sachsen,
1532,” in D. Martin Luthers Werke, kritische Gesammtausgabe [hereafter, WA], 128 vols
(Weimar: 1883–​1929), vol. 36, 237–​70. See also Volker Leppin, “Schmerz und Trost:
Beobachtungen zu Luthers Umgang mit dem Tod,” in Luthers Tod: Ereignis und Wirkung,
ed. Armin Kohnle (Leipzig: 2019), 49–​68.
80 For more on the broader topic of consolation, see Ronald K. Rittgers, “The Age of Reform
as an Age of Consolation,” Church History 86/​3 (2017), 607–​42. For more on the genre
of funeral sermons see Forschungsstelle für Personalschriften (http://​www.person-
alschriften.de/​leichenpredigten.html last accessed 28/​6/​2020).

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Funeral Sermons and the Reformation 321

sermons to instruct the living on how to live and die well, drawing attention
to the dangers of sin and ungodly lifestyles, whilst simultaneously serving to
comfort listeners in their time of grief. The findings presented here support
both Ulrike Ludwig’s and Alexander Kästner’s suggestion that funeral sermons
contributed to the abundance of literature focusing on the ars moriendi, or the
art of dying, while focusing attention also on how the individual can live well.81
Further, this chapter will argue that the genre of funeral sermons reflects shifts
in the broader cultural landscape while recognising also that they were shaped
by local religious climates. In so doing, the findings resonate with those of La-
rissa Taylor, who argues that funeral sermons delivered in 16th-​century France
were “an unsurpassed vehicle for religious propaganda,” noting that they could
be “adaptable to the needs of a preacher.”82

1 Dying, Death, and Grief

Research into popular religion has demonstrated the sustained engagement

between the realms of the living and the dead in late medieval and early mod-
ern Europe: the saints in heaven interceded for the living, while the living in-
terceded for those souls languishing in purgatory, accruing merit to assist their
own journey towards heaven.83 The Protestant Reformation first challenged
and subsequently transformed the concept and understanding of death.84 As
well as reforming the rituals surrounding death, the possible destinations of
one’s spiritual journey were reduced to two: heaven and hell, with the con-
cept of purgatory being denied by Protestant theologians. This change was
not immediate –​in his Ninety-​five Theses, Luther had retained the notion of

81 Ulrike Ludwig, “Erinnerungsstrategien in Zeiten des Wandels: Zur Bedeutung der

Reformation als Generationserfahrung im Spiegel sächsischer Leichenpredigten für adlige
Beamte,” AfR 104/​1 (2013), 158–​84, on 161–​2; Alexander Kästner, “Die Ungewissheit über-
schreiten: Erzählmuster und Auslegungen unverhoffter Todesfälle in Leichenpredigten,”
in Leichenpredigten als Medien der Erinnerungskultur im europäischen Kontext. ed. Eva-​
Maria Dickhaut (Stuttgart: 2014), 147–​72, on 153–​4.
82 Larissa Juliet Taylor, “Funeral Sermons and Orations as Religious Propaganda in Sixteenth-​
Century France,” in The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and
Early Modern Europe, eds Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshal (Cambridge: 2000), 224–​39,
on 225.
83 Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall, “Introduction,” in The Place of the Dead: Death and
Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds Bruce Gordon and Peter
Marshall (Cambridge: 2000), 1–​16, on 4.
84 See Craig M. Koslofsky, The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early Modern
Germany, 1450–​1700 (Houndmills: 2000).

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322 Atherton

purgatory but in 1530 he denied its existence altogether arguing it lacked scrip-
tural justification and it was incompatible with the doctrine of justification by
faith alone. By extension, the effectiveness of indulgences in aiding the souls
languishing in purgatory was challenged, nullifying the practice of masses
for the dead.85 Scholars such as Anna Linton have explored how the transfor-
mations wrought by the Protestant Reformation impacted early modern ex-
pressions of emotion and displays of feeling, noting that although reformers
recognised the sorrow that accompanied the death of a loved one, they ad-
monished the faithful to grieve in moderation and instead sought to encourage
the individual to prepare for their own death.86 Indeed, Albrecht Classen has
commented that a chief purpose of Lutheran funeral sermons was to docu-
ment that the individual had died a good Christian death which indicated that
they had led a good Christian life and Kästner notes that Künzelsau pastor
Michael Baumann’s volume of funeral sermons published in 1659 focused on
the uncertainty of death as an occasion to advocate leading a pious life and
warning of the dangers of sin.87
Protestant church orders published across the Holy Roman Empire echoed
these objectives.88 For instance, the Lutheran Elector Ludwig vi’s church order,
published in the Palatinate in 1577, included four exemplar funeral sermons –​
two designed for elderly parishioners, one for a child, and a final shorter text to
be used “where you do not have much time.”89 Each sermon imparted the same

85 Martin Luther, Ein widderauff vom Fegefeuer (Wittenberg: 1530), WA, vol. 30 II, 360–​90.
86 Anna Linton, Poetry and Parental Bereavement in Early Modern Lutheran Literature
(Oxford: 2008), 8.
87 Albrecht Classen, “Die Darstellung von Frauen in Leichenpredigten der Frühen
Neuzeit: Lebensverhältnisse, Bildungsstand, Religiosität, Arbeitsbereiche,” Mitteilungen
des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 108 (2000), 291–​318, on 292; Kästner,
“Die Ungewissheit überschreiten,” 155–​6.
88 Church orders were drawn up by theologians who aimed to encourage the reform of
worship, doctrine and education. Often commissioned by the local secular ruler or city
council, church orders included varying degrees of instruction on the many duties and
occasions that pastors would be required to undertake and participate in on a regular basis,
including baptisms, weddings, holy day services, and funerals. See also Die evangelischen
Kirchenordnungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts, eds Emil Sehling, Eike Wolgast, and Gottfriend
Seebaß (Tübingen, 1904–​17); Robert Kolb, “Orders for Burial in the Sixteenth-​Century
Wittenberg Circle,” in Gute Ordnung: Ordnungsmodelle und Ordnungsvorstellungen in der
Reformationszeit, eds Irene Dingel and Armin Kohnle (Leipzig: 2014), 257–​79.
89 Ludwig vi, Kirchenordnung, Wie es mit der Christlichen Lehre /​Administrierung der hei-
ligen Sacramenten und Ceremonien /​in des Durchleuchtigste /​Hochgebornen Fürsten
unnd Herren /​Herrn Ludwigen Pfalzgrauen bey Rhein /​des heiligen Römischen Reichs
Ertztruchsässen vnd Churfürsten Hertzogen in Bayern /​ic. Chur: und Fürstenthumb
gehalten werden soll (Heidelberg: 1577), 98a.

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Funeral Sermons and the Reformation 323

lesson: parishioners were advised to “stay in constant readiness” for death, a

status achieved if they “withdraw from sin, grow in the faith of Jesus Christ,
and lead an unspotted life.”90 They were encouraged “not to despair” but to
take comfort in the life and death of Christ.91 A woodcut appearing on the title
page of the printed funeral sermon of the ex-​soldier and minor noble Christoph
Pfinzing of Hefenfeld in 1629 visualised the impending nature of death: an hour-
glass adorned with wings is placed beside a human skull and wilting flowers.92
Reminiscent of the works of the artist Albrecht Dürer produced over a century
earlier, this image serves to remind readers that life on earth is fleeting and that
the summons of death is but a matter of time. In conjunction with the Protes-
tant rejection of intercessory abilities on behalf of the dead, the focus of funeral
sermons was centred on encouraging the living to lead holy lives and to be ever
ready to meet death. A funeral sermon delivered in Heidelberg in 1661 warned
against being unconcerned about illness and dying, accusing such people of
having made “a covenant with God” rather than looking to improve themselves,
and warning that they should take note of the signs of God’s anger.93
Despite the theological challenges to the concept of death and the after-
life, Protestants certainly recognised that during times of grief and sadness,
parishioners sought comfort and needed guidance. While Susan Karant-​Nunn
has argued that Protestants perceived grieving as exposing “a human will that
struggled against the divine plan,” research into funeral sermons has demon-
strated that it was accepted that the living would grieve for their departed loved
ones: Claudia Jarzebowski’s analysis of funeral sermons delivered for children
has revealed the depth of parental love, thereby challenging suggestions that
emotions were internalised during the early modern period, and Sarah Leh-
mann’s work on 17th-​century Catholic and Lutheran funeral sermons demon-
strates that both faiths recognised the need to provide consolation to gathered
mourners.94 Indeed, Luther did not admonish those who wept at funerals and

90 Ludwig vi, Kirchenordnung, 98a; 95a.

91 Ludwig vi, Kirchenordnung, 93.
92 Sigismund Faber, Christliche und Einfältige Leichpredigt bei Adelicher Leichbegängnuß /​
Deß Edlen unnd Ehrnvesten Herrn Christoff Pfinßings von Henfenfeld seliger Gedachtnuß
(Nuremberg: 1629), title page.
93 Johann Jakob Elser, Christliche Leich-​ Predigt Von aller Menschen Hinfelligkeit und
Sterblichkeit. Gehalten den 25. Februar. Ann 1661. zu Heidelberg /​in der Kirchen zu S. Peter /​
Bei Christlicher und ansehenlicher Bestattung Des Wohl Edel-​Gebornen und Besten Jungrern
Ludwig Friderich Effingers von Wildegt /​Herren zu Wildenstein (Heidelberg: 1661), Aii.
94 Susan C. Karant-​Nunn, “ ‘Christians’ Mourning and Lament Should not Be Like the
Heathens’: The Suppression of Religious Emotion in the Reformation,” in Confessionaliza­
tion in Europe, 1555–​1700: Essays in Honor and Memory of Bodo Nischan, eds John M. Headley,

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in the 17th century preachers sought to comfort the bereaved, with Hartmann
Creidius commenting in his funeral sermon for the Augsburg merchant Marx
Hueber in 1652 that “nobody will blame us [if] we cry and are sad.”95 Similarly,
Calvinist funeral sermons acknowledged the grief felt by loved ones: Daniel
Tossanus’s funeral sermon for the Calvinist Elector Frederick iii of the Palati-
nate, delivered in 1576, commented on the “sorrow and sadness” of the living.96
Church orders encouraged pastors to sympathise with their grieving parishio-
ners upon the death of loved ones, with some ordinances having entire sec-
tions devoted to “Comfort against Disgrace (Schande) and Death.”97
While recognising the natural sadness that accompanies death, there were,
of course, differences between Catholic and Protestant processes of dying and
the subsequent funeral.98 Lutheran church orders sought to remove “papist” su-
perstitions from the funeral service, and the church order published in Leipzig
in 1581 demanded that “obdurate papist folk who fall and die without penitence
shall be separated from the Christian funeral.”99 Moreover, at the moment of
death, Lutheran parishioners could be supported by friends and family gath-
ered at their bedsides, but two particularly significant departures from the

Hans J. Hilderbrand, and Anthony J. Papalas (Aldershot: 2004), 107–​30, on 125; Claudia
Jarzebowski, Kindheit und Emotion: Kinder und ihre Lebenswelten in der europäischen
Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: 2018), especially ­chapter 3; Sarah Lehmann, Jrdische Pilgrimschafft
und Himmlische Burgerschafft: Leid und Trost in frühneuzeitlichen Leichenpredigten
(Göttingen: 2019).
95 Hartmann Creidius, Christliche Leichpredigt Auß dem 11. 12. 13. 14. Verß. Deß Gebetts
Manassis. Bei ansehenlicher unnd Volckreicher Bestattung deß weiland Ehrnvesten und
Wolfürnemmen herren Marx Huebern /​Gewesenen Kauff: und Handelsmanns in Augspurg
seel angedenckens (Augsburg: 1652), 4.
96 Daniel Tossanus, Leichpredig /​So zu Begrebnuss des Durchleuchtigsten /​Hochgebornen
Fürsten und Herrn /​Herrn Friderichen /​diß Namens des dritten /​Pfalzgrauen bei Rhein
/​Herzogs in Baiern /​des Hei. Rom. Reichs Erztruchsaß und Churfürstens /​ic. ist gehalten
worden /​Durch ihrer Churf. G. Hochseligster gedechtnuß Hoffpredigern /​M. Danielem
Tossanum /​den 12. Tag des Monats Novembris. Anno 1576 (Heidelberg: 1576), ii.
97 Kirchen Ordnung: Wie sich die Pfarherrn und Seelsorger in irem beruff mit leren und predigen
/​allerley Ceremonien und guter Christlicher Disciplin unnd Kirchenzucht halten sollen: Für
die Kirchen inn dem Fürstenthumb Hessen: Aus der Aposteln /​irer Nachfolger und anderen
alten Christlicher reiner Lehrer schrifften gestellet (Marburg: 1566), CLXXXXa- ​C LXXXXIIa.
98 For a comparison of Catholic and Protestant funeral sermons, see Sarah Lehmann,
“Wir haben hier keine bleibende Stadt: Leid und Trost in Leichenpredigten über den
Hebräerbrief,” Daphnis 45 (2017), 156–​200.
99 Kirchen Ordnung /​Wie es in Religions sachen /​mit der seligmachenden Lehr des heiligen
Göttlichen worts /​Christlicher administration der hochwirdigen Sacramenten /​und aller-
lei denselben anhengenden /​auch sonst zu dem heiligen Predigampt gehörigen löblichen
und heilsamen Ceremonien /​In den Graffschafften Hoya und Bruichausen /​einmutiglich
gehalten werden sol (Leipzig: 1581), 144.

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Funeral Sermons and the Reformation 325

Catholic tradition would be apparent. Firstly, the sacrament of extreme unc-

tion was (usually) prohibited and, secondly, the final journey to be made by the
individual was to be undertaken alone –​the soul would either enter heaven
immediately upon death or be cast down to hell.100 It was not possible for the
living to intercede on behalf of the deceased and, as Luther had written in 1522:

we are all summoned to death, and no one will die for another. But every-
one alone must fight his own battle with death by himself. We can scream
into ears, but everyone must himself be prepared for the time of death: I
will not be with you then, nor you with me.101

Evidently, the fate of the deceased was out of the hands of the living but the be-
reaved still had the opportunity to improve their lives and prepare themselves
for the inevitable death that was to come. The final moments of the dying per-
son would not be without succour though: the opening prayer at the funeral
of Christoph Pfinzing acknowledged that God “will comfort us poor sinners in
our final sobbing.”102
Research has recognised the multifunctional purposes of funeral sermons.
They served to construct official memories of the deceased; they supported
dynastic objectives of ruling families; and they provided an opportunity to ed-
ucate the gathered mourners on scriptural messages.103 As Ulrike Ludwig has
noted, Protestant funeral sermons were not intended only to remember the
deceased but they served as forms of edification for their listeners and, when

100 The moment of death has been recognised as a threshold moment for individuals as
opposed to the end of one’s life. This view remained largely unchanged until the 18th
century: Hillard von Thiessen, “Das Sterbebett als normative Schwelle: Der Mensch in
der Frühen Neuzeit zwischen irdischer Normenkonkurrenz und göttlichem Gericht,”
Historische Zeitschrift 295/​3 (2012), 625–​59, on 627–​8.
101 “Wir seint allsampt zu dem tod gefodert und wirt keyner den andern storben. Sonder ein
yglicher in eygner person für sich mit dem todt kempffen. In die oren künden wir voll
schreyen. Aber ein yglicher muß für sich selber geschickt sein in der zeyt des todts: ich
würd den nit bey dir sein noch du bey mir”: Martin Luther, ‘Invocavit Sermon’, 1522, in WA,
vol. 10:3, 1–​2.
102 Faber, Christliche und Einfältige Leichpredigt bei Adelicher Leichbegängnuß, Aii.
103 See Sivert Angel, The Confessionalist Homilitics of Lucas Osiander (1534–​1604): A Study of
a South-​German Lutheran Preacher in the Age of Confessionalization (Tübingen: 2014),
esp. 31–​9 and ­chapter 3; Ludwig, “Erinnerungsstrategien in Zeiten des Wandels”;
Andrew L. Thomas, “Wittelsbachs, Habsburgs, and Hohenzollerns: Gender, Kinship,
and Confession in the Funeral Literature for Susanna of Bavaria,” Austrian History
Yearbook 48 (2017), 131–​ 44; Magdalena Schlosser, Leichenpredigten des Barock als
Forschungsgegenstand (Mainz: 2016); Frank Alexander Kurzmann, Die Rede vom Jüngsten
Gericht in den Konfessionen der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: 2019), esp. 135–​45.

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326 Atherton

published, their readers, although, of course, a printed sermon may have been
changed from the version that was delivered orally.104 Much focus has been
placed on the biographical details included in funeral sermons, as Jacqueline
Eales has shown for England, above.105 Cornelia Niekus Moore’s study of Lu-
theran funeral sermons, for instance, focuses on their biographical content,
suggesting that sermons could reflect changes in the political landscape, such
as the unrest in Brunswick in 1602–​1604, and Sven Tode has demonstrated that
the details provided in funeral sermons can tell us much about the nature of
early modern education, including schooling and intellectual networks.106 Fur-
ther, Kalina Mróz-​Jabłecka notes that funeral sermons can reveal information
on the upbringing, education and status of women in early modern Europe,
and Moore notes that the bibliographies provided in some sermons can tell us
about the devotional reading patterns of women, as well as men.107
With regards to the broader genre of sermons, scholars have recognised
the role they played in the creation of confessional identities and the shaping
of collective memory. Ludwig notes that though funeral sermons served as a
way for the family to remember the deceased, their subsequent publication
demonstrates that they were intended for a much wider audience.108 Irene
Dingel has suggested that broader political considerations meant that funer-
al sermons preached and published in Silesia tended not to reveal the beliefs
of noble families who had adopted the Reformed faith.109 On the other hand,
Nicholas Must argues that Huguenot sermons preached in 17th-​century France

104 Ludwig, “Erinnerungsstrategien in Zeiten des Wandels,” 3.

105 Rudolf Lenz, Leichenpredigten als Quelle historischer Wissenschaften vols 1–​3 (Cologne:
1975–​84).
106 Cornelia Niekus Moore, Patterned Lives: The Funeral Biography in Early Modern Germany
(Wiesbaden: 2006), esp. ­chapter 4; Sven Tode, “Verkannte Quellen: Leichenpredigten
als Analysegrundlage der Bildungs-​ und-​Sozialgeschichte,” in Konfession, Migration
und Elitenbildung: Studien zur Theologenausbildung des 16. Jahrhunderst, eds Herman
J. Selderhuis and Markus Wriedt (Leiden: 2007), 209–​30.
107 Kalina Mróz-​Jabłecka, “Sibylla Schwarz in der Leichenpredigt von Christoph Hagen: Die
Lebenswelt der gelehrten Jungfrau aus der Greifswalder Stadtelite –​ein Vergleich mit
Breslau,” Daphnis 44 (2016), 223–​40; Cornelia Niekus Moore, “The Quest for Consolation
and Amusement: Reading Habits of German Women in the Seventeenth Century,” in The
Graph of Sex and the German Text: Gendered Culture in Early Modern Germany 1500–​1700,
ed. Lynne Tatlock (Amsterdam: 1994), 247–​68; see also Classen, “Die Darstellung von
Frauen in Leichenpredigten der Frühen Neuzeit.”
108 Ludwig, “Erinnerungsstrategien in Zeiten des Wandels,” 3.
109 Irene Dingel, “Spuren reformierter Konfessionalität in Leichenpredigten auf Angehörige
des schlesischen Adels,” in Die Reformierten in Schlesien: Vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur
Altpreußischen Union von 1817, eds Joachim Bahlcke and Irene Dingel (Göttingen: 2016),
15–​30, on 19.

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Funeral Sermons and the Reformation 327

were pivotal in the creation of a Reformed identity, and Sabine Holtz suggests
that funeral sermons delivered in 18th-​century Augsburg “served to strengthen
confessional identity.”110 However, part of a Lutheran or Reformed identity rest-
ed on a sound understanding of salvation through faith alone and the correct
preparation for death. Thus, while recognising the sorrow of those who grieved
for their deceased loved one, a further purpose of funeral sermons sought to
instruct on the dangers of sin and the transient nature of life. By way of rein-
forcement, a stark warning issued by Duke Julius of Brunswick-​Lüneburg in
his 1569 church order announced that those who died unrepentant after a life
filled with “impudent sin” should not be buried in the same way as good Chris-
tians, that is, without “processions, singing and other Christian ceremonies.”111
Funeral sermons formed part of the corpus of pastoral and educational
measures adopted by Protestants over the course of the 16th century. Many of
these sermons drew on themes of obedience and discipline, although Robert
Kolb and Mary Haemig have cautioned against viewing sermons only in this
light, noting instead that “Luther counted as the measure of his success his cul-
tivation of the hearers’ believing, praying, their ability to suffer and prepared-
ness to die in faith.”112 Funeral sermons could be published as stand-​alone texts
or in collections. Johann Spangenberg, for instance, published a collection of
15 funeral sermons in 1545 intended to aid fellow Lutheran pastors who lacked
experience or training in preaching of pastoral care.113 In comparison to Lu-
theran funeral sermons, those produced by Reformed Protestants are far fewer
in number. Amy Nelson Burnett’s study of Johann Brandmüller’s collection of
funeral sermons notes that Reformed preachers tended to publish their funeral
sermons as Latin homilies that “functioned as commentaries on the text of
scripture and were intended primarily for professional use by the clergy.”114

110 Nicholas Must, Preaching a Dual Identity: Huguenot Sermons and the Shaping of
Confessional Identity, 1629–​1685 (Leiden: 2017); Sabine Holtz, “On Sermons and Daily Life,”
in Preaching, Sermon and Cultural Change in the Long 18th Century, ed. Joris van Eijnatten
(Leiden: 2008), 263–​312, on 305.
111 Kirchenordnung Unnser von Gottes Genaden /​Julij /​Hertzogen zu Braunschweig und
Lüneburg /​ic. Wie es mit Lehr und Ceremonien unsers Fürstenthumbs Braunschweig /​
Wolffenbütlischen Theils /​Auch derselben Kirchen anhangenden sachen und verrichtungen
/​hinfurt (vermittelst Göttlicher Gnaden) gehalten werden sol (Wolffenbüttel: 1569), 129.
112 Mary Jane Haemig and Robert Kolb, “Preaching in Lutheran Pulpits in the Age of
Confessionalization,” in Lutheran Ecclesiastical Culture, 1550–​ 1675, ed. Robert Kolb
(Leiden: 2008), 117–​57, on 122.
113 Johann Spangenberg, Funffzehen Leichprediget /​So man bey dem Begrebnis der verstorb-
nen /​jnn Christlicher Gemein thun mag (Wittenberg: 1545).
114 Amy Nelson Burnet, “ ‘To Oblige my Brethren’: The Reformed Funeral Sermons of Johann
Brandmüller,” SCJ 36/​1 (2005), 37–​54, on 41.

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328 Atherton

Nonetheless, there are examples of Reformed funeral sermons printed in the

vernacular, including the sermon delivered by Daniel Tossanus on the death
of the Reformed Elector Frederick iii of the Palatine in 1576 and the sermon
delivered by Melchior Anger at the funeral of Johan Casimir, administrator of
the Palatinate, in 1592.115
As a genre, Protestant funeral sermons evolved over time, both in terms of
content and length. By the end of the 17th century, Lutheran funeral sermons
had come to contain significant biographical comments and had grown in
length from 15 or so minutes to 2 or 3 hours.116 Despite this evolution, key fea-
tures remained constant: the importance of preparing for death whilst alive;
the significance of sin and forgiveness in our daily lives; and the hope of eter-
nal salvation achieved through faith in Jesus Christ. The following case stud-
ies seek to chart the development of Lutheran and Calvinist funeral sermons
across the Holy Roman Empire in the 16th and 17th century, illustrating the
continuities and changes in content and tone.

2 Lutheran Sermons

At the turn of the 16th century, Wittenberg was the capital of Electoral Saxony.
Despite its status, the city was small, with a mere ca. 2000 inhabitants: the Cath-
olic priest and early opponent of Martin Luther, Johannes Cochlaeus, described
it as “a miserable, poor, dirty village … it is not worthy to be called a town of Ger-
many,” and upon his arrival at the university in 1508 as professor of theology, Lu-
ther had considered it to be “on the edge of civilization.”117 Yet, after the onset of
the Reformation, Wittenberg became an important centre of printing and learn-
ing, with the university soon becoming one of the most popular in Germany.118
Wittenberg proved fertile for reform and Luther combined his literary prowess

115 Tossanus, Leichpredig; Melchior Anger, Exeqviae Casimirianae. Beschreibung des todt­
lichen Abgangs und Begrebnus /​des Durchleuchtigsten /​Hochgebornen Fürsten und Herren
/​Herren Johanns Casimiri /​Pfalzgraffen bei Rhein /​Vormunden und Administratorn der
Churfürstlichen Pfalz /​Herzogen in Baiern /​etc. Christlichster gedechtnuß (Heidelberg: 1592).
116 Haemig and Kolb, “Preaching in Lutheran Pulpits,” 132.
117 Helmar Junghans, “Luther’s Wittenberg,” trans. Katharina Gustavs in The Cambridge
Companion to Martin Luther, ed. Donald M. McKin (Cambridge: 2003), 20–​38, on 21–​23;
Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into
a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe –​and Started the
Protestant Reformation (New York: 2015), 7–​8.
118 Junghans, “Luther’s Wittenberg,” 27; Pettegree, Brand Luther, especially 11. For the
spread of the early Reformation in Saxony, see Thomas Kaufmann, Der Anfang der

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Funeral Sermons and the Reformation 329

with regular preaching and lecturing in order to aid religious change.119 Though
Luther’s teachings were to spread far beyond Wittenberg, the city remained his
base until his death in 1546. Thereafter, the Reformation continued in Witten-
berg, with the university largely remaining a “stronghold of Luther’s theology.”120
Luther delivered four funeral sermons over his career, two for the funeral of
Elector Frederick the Wise (1525) and two for that of the Elector’s brother and
successor, John the Steadfast (1532).121 In his survey of 16th-​and 17th-​century
funeral sermons, Eberhard Winkler commented that those delivered by Luther
rejected the concept of intercession for the dead and focused on encouraging
the living to improve their lives.122 Luther’s funeral sermons sought to praise
God, and to provide instruction and consolation to his listeners.123 In his funer-
al sermon for Elector John of Saxony, delivered in 1532, Luther sought to com-
fort the gathered audience, teaching that death is but a sleep and, significantly,
that at the moment of death, one’s thoughts should not be on “how pious we
are.”124 Rather, the individual should remember that Christ died for them and
that they will be saved by God in turn.125 In concluding his sermon, Luther en-
couraged his listeners to “humble yourself and improve your life, so that you,
like him [the Elector], may be among those who suffer and die with Christ.”126
Similar messages can be seen in later Lutheran funeral sermons delivered
across Germany. For instance, in 1554, Georg Major delivered the funeral ser-
mon for Prince George of Anhalt. This sermon praised the Prince far more
than Luther had commended the Saxon Dukes, but key themes from Luther’s
sermons remained. The audience was reminded of the saving power of God
for those who believed in his Word.127 Major taught that “though, because of

Reformation: Studien zue Kontextualität der Theologie, Publizistik und Inszenierung Luthers
und der reformatorischen Bewegung (Tübingen: 2012).
119 In a letter of 1518, Luther wrote “each evening I expound to children and ordinary folk the
Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer”: cited in Pettegree, Brand Luther, 118.
120 Junghans, “Luther’s Wittenberg,” 33.
121 For more on the sermons Luther preached for the funeral of Elector John see Neil
R. LeRoux, Martin Luther as Comforter: Writings on Death (Leiden: 2007), esp. ­chapter 4.
122 Eberhard Winkler, Die Leichenpredigt im deutschen Luthertum bis Spener (Munich:
1967), 30–​1.
123 Winkler, Die Leichenpredigt, 31.
124 WA, vol. 37, 252.
125 WA, vol. 37, 252.
126 WA, vol. 37, 254.
127 Georg Maior, Eine Predig über der Leich des Hochwirdigen /​Durchlauchten und
Hochgebornen Fürsten und Herrn /​Herrn Georgen /​Fürsten zu Anhalt /​Grauen zu Ascanien
/​Herrn zu zerbst und Berneburg /​Thumprobsts zu Magdeburg und Meissen /​hochloblicher
und seliger gedechtnis /​den 19. Octob. Anno 1553. zu Dessaw (Wittenberg: 1554), A4.

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330 Atherton

sin the body must die, decay and rot, the best part of the body however lives,
namely the Soul, which is carried and preserved in the hands, arms and bosom
of the Lord Christ.”128 With regards to sin, Major explained that it is “the cause
of all human suffering” but teaches that those who

pray and confess to God the Lord, do penance, improve themselves, and
believe that God will forgive their misdeeds, their sins, through the Lord
Christ, and that he takes them again to grace, [as] his children and heirs
… [are] not without comfort.129

For both Luther and Major, sin is unavoidable but trust in God’s Word and the
sacrifice of Christ serve to redeem the faithful. Similarly, Georg Miller’s funeral
sermon for the Wittenberg painter Lucas Cranach the Younger (1586) asked
what the difference was “between Christians and all the other people on earth,”
answering that “Christians, who [have] true faith … do not see death,” while
the non-​believers “lie in hell.”130 By way of encouragement to lead a good life,
in 1592 Jodocus Preisenstein began his funeral sermon for Ludwig Rabus, a Lu-
theran minister, by drawing on 2 Timothy: 7–​8:

I have fought a good fight. I have completed the race. I have kept faith.
From now on the crown of righteousness is laid up for me, which the
Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day. Not only to me,
but to all who crave His appearance.131

Justification by faith alone underpins the theology of these sermons and each
preacher eulogised the dead by connecting their piety and certainty of eternal
life with their sustained belief in God’s Word.
However, not all Lutheran funeral sermons followed this pattern. As the
nature of the Reformation varied from city to city and town to town, preachers
could respond directly to local religious tensions and concerns, or express dif-
fering interpretations of the evangelical teachings. Andreas Osiander (1498–​
1552), the leading evangelical reformer in the imperial city of Nuremberg, for

128 Maior, Eine Predig, A4.

129 Maior, Eine Predig, Ciii–​Ciiia.
130 Georg Miller, Christliche Predigt /​Bey der trawrigen/​Leich vnd Begrebnus /​des weiland /​
Ehrnuesten vnd Fürnemen Herren Lucas Cranachs, gewesenen Bürgermeisters /​in der wei-
therhümbten Stad Wittemberg (Wittenberg: 1586), Aiia.
131 Jodocus Preisenstein, Ein Christliche Leichpredig /​Bei der Leiche und Begrebnuß /​des
Ehrwürdigen und Hochgelehrten /​Herrn Ludovici Rabt /​der Heiligen Schrifft Doctori /​
Pastorn, und Superintendenten, &c (Tübingen: 1593), Aii.

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Funeral Sermons and the Reformation 331

instance, sought to promote the role of the clergy in the individual’s journey
towards salvation. Osiander spent most of his career in Nuremberg and he
devoted his time there to protecting clerical authority from magisterial inter-
ference.132 In his catechism, sermons, and broader activities, Osiander empha-
sised the need for sinners to seek forgiveness from pastors. Osiander delivered
one funeral sermon over the course of his career, although he preached on
the topic of death more broadly. The sermon was delivered at the funeral of
Susanna of Bavaria in 1543 after Osiander had received a specific request from
her husband, the Count Palatine Ottheinrich of Neuburg, to write her funeral
sermon. Andrew L. Thomas has analysed this sermon in some depth, noting
that Osiander focused on the denouncement of purgatory and provided only
a “rather generic” account of Susanna’s personal life.133 Osiander’s lengthy and
emphatic rejection of purgatory was influenced by Susanna’s Catholic faith
and reflects the confessional division between the Catholic and Lutheran
branches of the Wittelsbach dynasty. In the sermon, Osiander stressed that
those who have faith in God’s Word will be saved and between the moment
of death and the future resurrection, faithful individuals sleep in “peace and
quiet.”134 He emphasised that Christ’s death served to forgive us our sins, and
that believing in the existence of purgatory undermined Christ’s redeeming
sacrifice.
However, another aspect of Osiander’s funeral sermon for Susanna de-
serves greater attention: his interpretation of justification. Thomas argues
persuasively that “gendered expectations of female piety could transcend
confessional boundaries” and suggests that Susanna’s acts of charity and
self-​sacrifice enabled Osiander to “envision [her] soul in a state of grace.”135
Thomas does not consider in depth Osiander’s understanding of justifica-
tion as presented in Susanna’s funeral sermon, but doing so reveals traces of
a theological splintering that culminated in a bitter battle between Osiander
and fellow Lutherans in the 1550s with both sides arguing that they adhered

132 For the Reformation in Nuremberg see Guy Fitch Lytle, “The Renaissance, the Reformation
and the City of Nuremberg,” in Nuremberg: A Renaissance City 1500–​1618, ed. Jeffrey Chipps
Smith (Austin: 1983), 17–​22; Ronald K. Rittgers, The Reformation of the Keys: Confession,
Conscience, and Authority in Sixteenth-​Century Germany (Cambridge, MA: 2004); P.J.
Broadhead, “Public Worship, Liturgy and the Introduction of the Lutheran Reformation
in the Territorial Lands of Nuremberg,” EHR 120 (2005), 277–​302.
133 Thomas, “Wittelsbachs, Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns,” 137.
134 Andreas Osiander, “Leichenpredigt für Pfalzgräfin Susanna” (1543), in Andreas Osiander
d.A., Gesamtausgabe [hereafter, AOGA], eds Gerhard Müller and Gottfried Seebaß, 10 vols.
(Gütersloh: 1975–​1997), 8: Schriften und Briefe April 1543 bis Ende 1548, 60–​82.
135 Thomas, “Wittelsbachs, Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns,” 140.

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332 Atherton

to Luther’s theology.136 Essentially, Osiander believed that justification com-

prised two parts: forgiveness, and reconciliation, which are achieved through
the indwelling of Christ’s divine nature. Forgiveness alone did not represent
justification, rather, we are justified by Christ’s essential righteousness which
dwells within us through the union with Christ.137 This was in opposition to
Philip Melanchthon who argued that righteousness was forensically attribut-
ed.138 In his 1550 defence of justification, Osiander presented justification as
bringing the dead back to life. This was “a movement of the spirit, which God
awakens in our hearts through the words of the preachers and His Holy Spir-
it.”139 Osiander’s views on justification were rejected by fellow Lutherans to
whom he protested that he had taught the same thing for thirty years with-
out causing a controversy.140 Indeed, the funeral sermon for Susanna supports
Osiander’s claim. In this, Osiander taught that becoming justified does not
mean one “has only forgiveness of sin, but [one] is cleansed of sin.”141 Through
baptism, Osiander explained, a Christian is “new born, created after God, be-
comes a temple of God, a member of Christ, and a child of God … he is incor-
porated into Christ and Christ is in him.”142 In rejecting purgatory, Osiander
questions how a “Christian soul, in which Christ as true God, in his temple tru-
ly and really is present and lives, shall go into purgatory.”143 Osiander connect-
ed the indwelling of Christ in the individual with the process of justification,
the point around which the later controversy surrounding Osiander’s teach-
ings centred. This example demonstrates that Lutheran funeral sermons did
not follow a uniform doctrinal approach, illustrating divergence from Luther’s
teachings even during his lifetime, and shows that funeral sermons served to
advocate aspects the individual pastor’s interpretation of their faith.
Though Osiander expressed his views regarding justification in this fu-
neral sermon preached in Neuburg in 1543, as well as in other sermons and

136 For a detailed consideration of the Osianderian Controversy, see Timothy Wengert,
Defending Faith: Lutheran Responses to Andreas Osiander’s Doctrine of Justification, 1551–​
1559 (Tübingen: 2012).
137 Andreas Osiander, Disputatio de justificatione (Königsberg: 1550), esp. theses 76 and
77, Ciiia.
138 Wengert, Defending Faith, 13–​14.
139 ‘Sed motum spiritualem, quem Deus per uerbum praedicatum, et spiritum suum sanctum,
in cordibus nostris excitat’: Andreas Osiander, Disputatio de justificatione (Kaliningrad:
1550), Bii.
140 AOGA, 10: September 1551 bis Oktober 1552 sowie Posthumes und Nachträge, 426.
141 Osiander, “Leichenpredigt für Pfalzgräfin Susanna,” cii.
142 Osiander, “Leichenpredigt für Pfalzgräfin Susanna,” ciiib.
143 Osiander, “Leichenpredigt für Pfalzgräfin Susanna,” ciiib.

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Funeral Sermons and the Reformation 333

catechetical material delivered to his Nuremberg parishioners, his influence in

the city did not prove long-​lasting.144 This can be seen in Christoph Pfinzing’s
funeral sermon, delivered in the city in 1629. In this sermon, the pastor began
by describing three mountains that must be overcome in an individual’s life.
The first of these was the “Mountain of Sin” which is overcome “with true pen-
ance and conversion of the heart … and with faith in Christ.”145 The majority of
the sermon focuses on sin and desire, whilst also denouncing Catholic beliefs
in purgatory and limbo and exhorting –​as Luther and Osiander had done al-
most a century earlier –​that “death is the best doctor.”146 The pastor declared
that God “lives in us by the grace of the Holy Spirit and Christ’s will” but does
not suggest that the indwelling nature of Christ contributes to salvation.147 The
final part of the sermon focused on Pfinzing, providing an overview of his life
and achievements. The tone of the sermon is not without comfort, but it is far
more admonitory than Luther’s sermons had been and, in this, was more akin
to Osiander’s approach. In particular, the lengthy denouncement of Catholic
doctrines and rejection of ‘papist’ beliefs takes much of the attention away
from Pfinzing just as Osiander’s dismissal of purgatory had taken attention
away from Susanna.
Lutheran funeral sermons taught common messages regarding sin, but the
process of justification was not presented consistently. This is significant: one
of the key tenets of Lutheran doctrine –​justification –​was not delivered in
a uniform manner across Lutheran Germany and its teaching was subject to
the interpretation and beliefs of individual preachers. Studies have demon-
strated that religious identities could be fluid across early modern Germany,
but research in education and pedagogical texts tends to suggest that confes-
sional documents were designed to encourage the formation of confessional
or clerical identities that transcended geographic and chronological boundar-
ies.148 However, Osiander’s parishioners, for instance, would have a different

144 For instance, see Andreas Osiander, Catechismus oder Kinderpredig /​Wie die in meiner
gnedigen herrn /​Margraven zu Brandēburg /​un̄ eins Erbarn Raths der stat Nürmberg ober-
kait un̄ gepieten /​allent halbē gepredigt werdē/​Den Kindern un̄ jungen leutē zu sonderm
nuz also in Schrifft verfaβt (Nuremberg: 1533), 290.
145 Faber, Christliche und Einfältige Leichpredigt bei Adelicher Leichbegängnuß, 6.
146 Faber, Christliche und Einfältige Leichpredigt bei Adelicher Leichbegängnuß, 14. In the 1543
funeral sermon, Osiander declared that “The death of Christ is a satisfaction and medi-
cine for sins”: Osiander, Leichenpredigt für Pfalzgräfin Susanna, ci.
147 Faber, Christliche und Einfältige Leichpredigt bei Adelicher Leichbegängnuß, 8.
148 Bernd Moeller, “Was wurde in der Frühzeit des Reformation in den deutschen
Städten gepredigt?” AfR 75 (1984), 176–​93; Susan C. Karant-​Nunn, The Reformation of
Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (New York: 2010); John

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334 Atherton

understanding of justification than those of Melanchthon, although both men

saw themselves as adhering to Luther’s teachings. The theological diversity
presented in Lutheran funeral sermons calls into sharp focus the methodol-
ogies employed to gauge the development of confessional identities in ear-
ly-​modern Germany and suggests that differences in educational texts could
have significant ramifications regarding the development of uniform religious
identities across the Empire.

3 The Palatinate

The Palatinate was a tempestuous region in the 16th century. Charles Gunnoe
Jr. has provided a comprehensive overview of the territory in the decades be-
fore the publication of the Reformed Heidelberg Catechism in 1563 and high-
lights the political expediency of the Palatine Electors remaining on good
terms with the Habsburgs. Gunnoe comments that Lutheranism made deep
inroads into the Palatinate in the 1520s, facilitating its formal acceptance in the
mid-​16th century.149 The succession of Elector Frederick iii in 1559 marked a
political and religious turning point for the Palatinate. Sympathetic to Calvin-
ism, Frederick encouraged the adoption of the Reformed faith, overseeing the
publication of the Heidelberg Catechism and the introduction of a Reformed
liturgy through his church order of 1563. However, upon his death in 1576, his
Lutheran son, Ludwig, succeeded. He quarrelled with his Calvinist brother,
Johan Casimir, over who would deliver their father’s funeral sermon. Casimir
was in favour of the Calvinist court preacher, Daniel Tossanus, while Ludwig
wanted the Lutheran court preacher Johann Schechsius to deliver the sermon.
In the end, the brothers agreed that both preachers could publish their funer-
al sermons –​a compromise that reflected the negotiated Reformation in the
Palatinate more broadly.150 The delivery of a funeral sermon for the Calvinist

Frymire, The Primacy of the Postils: Catholics, Protestants, and the Dissemination of Ideas in
Early Modern Germany (Leiden: 2010); Lee Palmer Wandel, Reading Catechisms, Teaching
Religion (Leiden: 2016).
149 Charles D. Gunnoe Jr., “The Reformation of the Palatinate and the Origins of the Heidelberg
Catechism, 1500–​1562,” in An Introduction to the Heidelberg Catechism: Sources, History,
and Theology, ed. Lyle D. Bierma (Grand Rapids: 2005), 15–​47, on 20. The infiltration of
Lutheranism began in the 1520s and by 1558 there was a majority of Lutheran followers in
the council at Amberg: Trevor Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles: The Counter
Reformation in the Upper Palatinate (Farnham: 2009), 28–​9.
150 Volker Press, Calvinismus und Territorialstaat: Regierung und Zentralbehörden der
Kurpfalz, 1559–​1619 (Stuttgart: 1970), 272. For more on the negotiated Reformation in the

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Funeral Sermons and the Reformation 335

Elector is noteworthy: Amy Nelson Burnett has commented that the Palatine
was the only Reformed territory outside Basel where parishioners expected
funeral sermons to be preached.151 Successive Palatine church orders, both Lu-
theran and Calvinist, permitted funeral sermons to be preached but decreed
that they should not seek to intercede for the dead because they have “already
without our wishes, desires, prayers, help and intervention, the peace of eter-
nal blessed life.”152
The preachers of Elector Frederick iii’s funeral sermons took the oppor-
tunity to deliver messages that reflected their confessional and political per-
suasions. Tossanus declared that “everyone must acknowledge that there
now exists in Heidelberg, and in the entire Palatinate, order, quietness, and a
Christian-​like state of affairs, very different from what it has been in past years”
and he warned that God would punish the Palatinate should the religious poli-
cies of Frederick iii be reversed.153 The funeral sermon was fraught with warn-
ings of divine wrath with comfort being offered to the righteous. Drawing on
Isaiah 57:1, Tossanus explained that the death of the righteous is a “particular
warning from God” and chastised those who did not recognise the Elector’s
death as a sign of God’s anger, refusing to convert and to lead upright lives.154
For the righteous who die, they “come to peace and quiet” and death is but a
“gentle sleep.”155
Perhaps by way of response to Tossanus’s warnings of divine punishment
should Ludwig seek to return the Palatinate to the Lutheran confession,
Schechsius opened his sermon with Kings 2:2, referring to David’s final instruc-
tions to his son, Solomon:

I am to go the way of all of the earth. So be comforted and be a man, and

keep the charge of the Lord your God, that you walk in His ways and keep
His customs, commandments, ordinances, and decrees, as is written in

Palatinate see: Ruth Atherton, “The Pursuit of Power: Death, Dying and the Quest for
Social Control in the Palatinate, 1547–​1610,” in Dying, Death, Burial and Commemoration in
Reformation Europe, eds Elizabeth C. Tingle and Jonathan Willis (Farnham: 2015), 25–​48.
151 Nelson Burnett, “Reformed Funeral Sermons,” 42–​3.
152 Kirchen Ordnung. Wie es mit der Christenlichen Leere /​heiligen Sacramenten /​unnd
Ceremonien /​in des Durchleuchtigsten Hochgebornen Fürsten unnd Herren /​Herrn
Ottheinrichs /​Pfalzgrauen bey Rhein /​des Heiligen Römmischen Reichs Erzdruchsessen
unnd Churfürsten /​Herzogen in Nidern un̄ Obern Bairn ic. Chur und Fürstenthumben
gehalten wirdt (Neuburg/​Donau: 1556), 67a.
153 Tossanus, Leichpredig, xiii.
154 Tossanus, Leichpredig, iiii–​vii.
155 Tossanus, Leichpredig, ii; xiii.

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336 Atherton

the Law of Moses, so that you may prosper in all you do and wherever
you turn.156

This can be interpreted as encouragement for Ludwig to stand firm in his con-
victions. The first part of Schechsius’s sermon consoled the mourners in their
grief, reminding them of Frederick’s piety and generosity, and confirming that
the deceased Elector has “come to peace.”157 The pastor acknowledged that
“death itself is caused by sin” but exhorted the parishioners to remember that
Christ’s death has “fully paid for our sin.”158 The sermon is comforting through-
out, juxtaposing the fear of sin and death with the redeeming sacrifice of Jesus
and God’s boundless mercy. Both pastors sought to comfort the bereaved: Tos-
sanus and Schechsius acknowledged the feelings of grief endured by the elec-
tor’s friends, family and subjects and sought to offer comfort through teaching
that he has “not died, but certainly lives before God’s countenance.”159 How-
ever, there is a stark difference in the structure of their respective sermons
and both preachers can be seen to have used the occasion to promote their
religious objectives, essentially politicising their funeral sermons.
Despite Tossanus’s warnings, Elector Ludwig indeed sought to return the
Palatinate to Lutheranism, issuing a new church order and banning the Heidel-
berg Catechism. His brother, Casimir, followed in the faith of his father and wel-
comed exiled Calvinists to his territory. Upon Ludwig’s death in 1583, Casimir
acted as regent for his nephew, the future Elector Frederick iv. Under Casimir’s
administration, the Palatinate returned to the Reformed faith. After Casimir’s
death in 1592, Melchior Anger delivered a funeral sermon in which he taught
that sin had caused God to be angry and that death is a deliverance from this
anger: “the godless are present and live in the world afflicted with great pun-
ishment.”160 This echoed a similar theme to that of Tossanus’s sermon for Fred-
erick iii and reflects Calvin’s theology regarding death. In his Institutes, Calvin
taught that

we shall never be clearly persuaded, as we ought to be, that our salvation

flows free from the wellspring of God’s free mercy until we come to know
his eternal election, which illuminates God’s grace by this contrast: that

156 Johann Schechsius, Eine Christliche und einfältige Predigt, gehalten bei dem Begräbnis des
… Herrn Friedrichs, dieses Namens des III. Pfalzgrafen bei Rhein (Heidelberg: 1576), vi.
157 Schechsius, Eine Christliche, x.
158 Schechsius, Eine Christliche, xiii.
159 Schechsius, Eine Christliche, x.
160 Anger, Exeqviae Casimirianae, unpaginated.

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Funeral Sermons and the Reformation 337

he does not indiscriminately adopt all into the hope of salvation but gives
to some what he denies to others.161

In contrast, Schechsius’s funeral sermon for Frederick iii had consoled the pa-
rishioners through teaching that because the elector had lived in “proper true
knowledge and confession of the only life of Prince Jesus Christ, our redeemer
and saviour, and in undisputed faith in his hallowed blood and death … he is
asleep with the Lord Jesus Christ.”162 The difference between the funeral ser-
mons delivered by Lutherans and Calvinists in the Palatinate is that the former
sought to comfort through the doctrine of justification by faith alone, while
those of Tossanus and Anger juxtaposed the release brought about by death
with the sins and future punishment that is to be inflicted on the living. Essen-
tially, for Anger and Tossanus, death was a form of election for the righteous.
In the 17th century, funeral sermons changed somewhat in the Palatinate. At
the funeral of Lucretia Spanheim, wife of the theologian Friedrich Spanheim the
Younger, in 1668, Johannes Salmuth delivered a sermon that was divided into the
themes of sin and hope. The first half of the sermon emphasised the evil nature
of humankind and our fall from God’s grace. The second half focused on hope,
declaring that “a hopeless life is a miserable and lifeless life … hope is the believ-
er’s certainty and firm anchor in this life.”163 This sermon exhorted the faithful
to place their hope in God and reminded them of his promise to save those that
trust in his word. The theme of the sermon is Lutheran in content, reflecting
the religious landscape in the Palatinate in the latter part of the 17th century,
but its structure was reminiscent of the 16th century Reformed funeral sermons
delivered in Heidelberg in that it began by focusing on the wretched condition
of humanity before emphasising the hope of redemption through God’s mercy.

4 Conclusion

Protestant funeral sermons remined popular until the mid-​ 18th centu-
ry after which their use declined.164 Holtz suggests this was a result of the

161 John Calvin, Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeil (Westminster:
1960), Book iii, xxi.i.
162 Schechsius, Eine Christliche. ix.
163 Johannes Laurentius Salmuth, Christliche Leich-​Predigt /​ Von der Kinder Gottes in der
Nichtigkeit dieses Lebens steiffer Hoffnung (Heidelberg: 1668), 18.
164 Rudolf Mohr, “Das Ende der Leichenpredigten,” in Leichenpredigten als Quelle historische
Wissenschaften: Personalschriftensympsion, Forschungsgegenstand Leichenpredigten, ed.
Rudolf Lenz (Marburg: 1984) iii, 293–​30.

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338 Atherton

Enlightenment and the accompanying rejection of devotional literature.165

But for over two centuries, Protestant funeral sermons formed part of a corpus
of literature that provides insight into the processes of dying and death, both
of which were transformed after the Reformation. The sermons reflect the na-
ture of the religious and political landscapes in which they were delivered and
allow us to trace the contours of confessional developments across Germany.
The focus of many of these sermons was not to eulogise the deceased but to en-
courage the living to improve their lives and look to their own journey towards
salvation. While differences can be detected between Lutheran and Reformed
funeral sermons, there are key similarities that transcend confessional division
and, as with Lucretia Spanheim’s funeral sermon, there could be a merging of
structure and content between the faiths.166 Further, grieving mourners were
comforted but to differing extents. While Luther and, later, Schechsius framed
their funeral sermons within the context of hope, the Calvinist Tossanus pref-
aced the theme of comfort with stark warnings of God’s anger for those who
refuse to improve their lives or seek to discontinue with Elector Frederick iii’s
religious policies. In this, there are similarities with 18th-​century funeral ser-
mons delivered in bi-​confessional Augsburg. Holtz notes that funeral sermons
delivered here were polemical tools, designed as a “means of shoring up and
defending one’s confessional identity.”167 Far more research into the connec-
tions between funeral sermons and the development of confessional identities
is needed for 16th-​and 17th-​century Germany, but this chapter has shown that
theological interpretations and emphases articulated in the sermons reflects
the fluid and evolving nature of religious change across the Empire. Preach-
ers developed individual approaches to funeral sermons that reflected their
specific experiences of the Reformation and distinct interpretations of a given
confession.
165 Holtz, “On Sermons and Daily Life,” 274.
166 Lehmann argues that there was a degree of interconfessionality between Lutheran and
Catholic funeral sermons, particularly in their use of biblical examples relating to sor-
row and efforts to console mourners: Lehmann, Jrdische Pilgrimschafft und himmlische
Burgerschafft, 299.
167 Holtz, “On Sermons and Daily Life,” 305.

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 ­c hapter 12

Dramatizing and Celebrating Death in the

Early-​Modern Visual Arts: The Fortunes of the
Post-​Tridentine Iconography of Martyrdom
Ralph Dekoninck

In representing martyrdom and ecstasy, suffering and love, the art

of the 17th century reached the depths of feeling; it remained only
for it to show the anguish of death to have expressed all the extreme
emotions of the soul.1

∵
This quotation from L’art religieux après le Concile de Trente, published by
Émile Mâle in 1932, a true milestone in the study of baroque art in its re-
lation to religion, clearly links death to suffering and to love, a connection
that constitutes a distinctive feature of the baroque period. Thanatos and
Eros are joined together in a kind of theatricalization of the most extreme
emotions. One work in particular epitomises this encounter between suf-
fering and ecstasy: Bernini’s famous Lodovica Albertoni, located in Rome in
the Franciscan church of San Francesco a Ripa, the very site of this blessed
woman’s tomb.2
The dramatization of an agony we might call ecstatic results in an aesthetic
of “sacred horror” (sacer horror), to employ an expression that was in use at the
time, to denote a mixture of fascination and fear.3 This mixture characterises a
certain experience of the sacred and of the manner in which death is imagined
in the baroque period, as we will attempt to show in this chapter.

1 Emile Mâle, L’art religieux après le Concile de Trente (Paris: 1932), 203.
2 See among other analyses of this famous sculpture: Giovanni Careri, Bernini: Flights of Love,
the Art of Devotion, trans. Linda Lappin (Chicago: 1995), 51–​86.
3 Ralph Dekoninck and Annick Delfosse, “Sacer horror: The Construction and Experience of
the Sublime in the Jesuit Festivities of the Early Seventeenth-​Century Southern Netherlands,”
Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 8/​2 (2016), doi: 10.5092/​jhna.2016.8.2.9.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004443433_014

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340 Dekoninck

­f igure 12.1 
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Lodovica Albertoni, 1674, Church of San Francesco a
Ripa, Rome
source: © san francesco a ripa, rome

In the early modern period, when wars and major epidemics decimated the
population, and religious conflicts, real civil wars, tore apart northern Europe
in particular, death became an almost daily tragic spectacle.4 The bloody the-
atre of the wars of religion fuelled the imagination of artists, an imagination
which found a parallel with both artistic and religious ideals that had become
prominent since the beginning of the 16th century. It is this encounter between
death experienced and death represented, or rather the way in which the latter
transfigured the former, that I will examine here.
One area of exploration might have been that of the funerary arts and fu-
neral ceremonies, whose splendour was taken to extremes in the 17th centu-
ry. At that time, artists competed in inventiveness and ingenuity in staging
death, and at the same time as celebrated those whose memory was deemed
worthy of preservation. As has been clearly shown in relation to funeral

4 For a major contribution to the study of this topic see Denis Crouzet, Les guerriers de Dieu: La
violence au temps des troubles de religion, vers 1525–​vers 1610 (Paris: 2005).

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Dramatizing and Celebrating Death in Early-Modern Visual Arts 341

ceremonies, ephemeral art and the sumptuary display it deployed were an

arte guida for all forms of artistic expression: they were a site of experimen-
tation for many artists whose surviving works, like the numerous funerary
monuments, appear to be only the tip of this immense iceberg of the culture
of baroque spectacle.5 Whether lasting or ephemeral, funerary art celebrated
both the triumph of death and the triumph of those who survive thanks to
the arts. In a famous passage in his treatise on painting, at the beginning of
the 15th century Leon Battista Alberti had praised this “divine force” of repre-
sentation, which “not only makes absent men present, as friendship is said to
do, but moreover makes the dead seem almost alive.”6 Within the perpetua-
tion of this intrinsic link between the image and death, funerary art exploited
its resurrectional power converted into commemorative strength that truly
makes of the work of art a monument, that is a place of memory but also a
place of political and religious investment that sought to inscribe the past in
the present.

1 The Martyr: A Figure of Paradox

The subject of funerary art has already been widely explored in the historiogra-
phy, to the extent of becoming, along with the theme of Vanity and its memen-
to mori, one of the main entry points to the study of a type of macabre aesthet-
ic peculiar to the baroque. As a result, I have chosen to examine another form
of visual meditation on death, which is just as characteristic of the period as
the changes in mortuary imaginary that we see in the visual arts and in other
forms of artistic expression, such as literature, theatre, and music, discussed by
Christina Welch in ­chapter 11 above.7 The form discussed here is the iconogra-
phy of martyrdom, which at that time enjoyed remarkable success and which
appears as a powerful indicator of contemporary religious ideals, while also

5 See two recent contributions to this field of inquiry: Minou Schraven, Festive Funerals in Early
Modern Italy: The Art and Culture of Conspicuous Commemoration (Farnham: 2014); Franck
Lafage, Le théâtre de la mort: Lecture politique de l’apparat funèbre dans l’Europe du XVIe au
XVIIIe siècle (Paris: 2012).
6 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting (De Pictura), trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven, CI: 1966),
2:63.
7 For the theatre in France see Christian Biet (ed.), Théâtre de la cruauté et récits sanglants ( fin
XVIe-​début XVIIe siècles) (Paris: 2006); Christian Biet and Marie-​Madeleine Fragonard (eds),
Tragédies et récits de martyres en France (fin XVIe-​début XVIIe siècle) (Paris: 2009).

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342 Dekoninck

revealing the other face, both violent and morbid, of a hedonist Renaissance
and a vitalist baroque.8
The defining feature of the iconography of martyrdom is the close link be-
tween death and the violence and suffering which precede and lead to it. More
so than death itself, it is the death throes which are highlighted, seeming to be
a struggle not against death but for holy death and the salvation which is its
outcome. In short, it is a matter of exalting a victory over death rather than a
victory of death. Here, then, the macabre is no longer found in the corpse but in
the torture of a body suspended between life and death. The figuration of mar-
tyrdom in effect captures a transitory state: not of an earthly life to an earthly
death, but of an earthly death to a celestial life; a life for a death and a death for
a life. This figuration seeks also to capture a series of paradoxes that are con-
stitutive of martyrdom, beginning with that of victory in death. The power of
the martyr is that of faith in opposition to political power. Martyrdom is born
in effect from an action that has nothing of the heroic about it, at least noth-
ing of combative heroism, since it is characterised by passivity and receptivity.
Rather than being a lamb without self-​awareness, a simple innocent victim
which is sacrificed, martyrdom is driven by a desire that nevertheless cannot
be suicidal, even if there might have been excesses of sacrificial enthusiasm.
God’s witness must be moved by divine Providence. But this accepted and un-
sought sacrifice becomes the ultimate act of heroism, the model par excellence
of Christian courage. It is thus the values of religious patience and constancy
that are required when confronted with those of political power and violence.
From the ideal of physical power, we move to that of spiritual strength, a re-
signed and superhuman strength opposed to the animal weakness of the tor-
turer, as it is showed by many paintings from the 16th and 17th centuries which
contrast the bestiality of the executioners to the impassiveness of the martyr.
From action, we move to passion, but a passion whose effects are deemed to be
much deeper and much more enduring.
Furthermore, this inversion affects all actions and all roles: those who judge
and condemn are judged and condemned by God. The guilty one becomes
the victim and then the saint. The confession, in the sense of avowal, that is
sought through torture, becomes the confessio, in the sense of the profession or

8 For a more general approach and a comparison between the Protestant and Catholic
worlds: Peter Burschel, Sterben und Unsterblichkeit: Zur Kultur des Martyriums in der Frühen
Neuzeit (Berlin: 2004); Carolin Behrmann, Tyrann und Märtyrer: Bild und Ideengeschichte
des Rechts um 1600 (Berlin: 2015); Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English
Catholic Community, 1585–​1603 (Aldershot: 2003); Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Chris-
tian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: 2001).

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Dramatizing and Celebrating Death in Early-Modern Visual Arts 343

proclamation of an unshakeable faith in God. Execution on a scaffold is trans-

formed into sacrifice on an altar. Suffering is turned into victory, exemplary
punishment into divine election, defeat into triumph, torture into apotheo-
sis, scandal and horror into a spectacle of delights, arousing astonishment and
enthusiasm in the etymological sense of divine possession. It is through this
series of inversions and oppositions that holiness is revealed. As Frank Lest-
ringant has pointed out, the privileged figure of speech in the poetics of the
martyrs is the oxymoron, that is union of contraries.9
If the construction of this figure of the martyr, through hagiographical texts
and martyrologies, but also through images, inevitably resonates with the very
real violence perpetrated during the wars of religion or by the tortures inflict-
ed on Christians in newly evangelised lands, it also testifies to a desire to give
a meaning to this lived violence. This meaning works essentially through the
conjunction between three dimensions closely linked to one another in the
reaffirmation of Catholic ideals confronted with Protestant criticism: the di-
mensions of holiness, of relics, and of images. These three dimensions were ex-
amined together at the last session of the Council of Trent, the resulting decree
bearing the explicit title of On the Invocation, Veneration, and Relics of Saints,
and on Sacred Images.10 Now, the unprecedented promotion of the figure of
the martyr contributed to link together these three dimensions. We might say
that it was an attempt to re-​establish the legitimacy of the image in the spec-
tacle of sacrifice, and to build holiness on the testimony of the living image
that is the martyr, an image revealed by suffering and death and which in turn
engenders material relics and images.

2 The Return ad fontes

This promotion was, in addition, underpinned by the desire to (re)build a

Christian history. When dogma was no longer sufficient in counteracting the
adversary, who also sought to find legitimacy in the purity of the early times,
the Catholic Church attempted to revitalise itself through contact with the
early heroes of Christianity, the founders of a Church that gained its strength
in the persecutions it had to endure.11 “The blood of martyrs is the seed of

9 Frank Lestringant, Lumière des martyrs : Essai sur le martyre au siècle des Réformes
(Paris: 2004), 11.
10 Conciliorum oecumenicorum decreta, eds Giuseppe Alberigo et al. (Bologna: 1991), 774–​6.
11 Cf. the Magdeburg Centuries published by Lutheran scholars between 1559 and 1574 and
covering the first 1300 years of the history of Christianity. The Catholic reply was the

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344 Dekoninck

Christians,” in Tertullian’s words.12 Their death brings life and strength. It is this
seminal death and its contagious power that are to be celebrated, by writing
its history and even more by making it visible. The work of the historian and
the work of the artist are in effect joined in the same exercise of testimony, i.e.
in continuity with the original testimony of the earliest witnesses of the faith,
in accordance with the very etymology of the word “martyr” (martus in Greek
meaning “witness”). We must bear in mind that since Herodotus, the histôr
has been a witness who tells what he has seen with his own eyes. He is an eye
that writes and, in the present case, who proceeds to the “autopsy” (with the
etymological meaning of “seeing for oneself”) of martyrdom, that is to say, one
who supplies proof de visu.13 Now, as we will go on to see, the artist makes him-
self a historian by supplying, in a much more convincing and above all more
persuasive manner, proof via the image.
The link to death is thus also a link to history, the history of a succession of
martyrdoms, uninterrupted but of variable intensity (very strong in the early
centuries of Christianity and then reactivated in the 16th century); that is to
say, a history of sacrifices granted in imitation of an original and foundational
sacrifice, that of Christ. The promotion of sacrificial suffering made it possible
to reaffirm and consolidate the close link between the golden age of the primi-
tive Church and that of a modern Church that also presented itself as involved
in struggle, not against a dominant paganism but against heresies in Europe
and polytheisms in the new lands undergoing evangelisation, lands which in
turn produced their own share of new martyrs. We are dealing, then, with a
combative Church which claimed to be reliving forms of persecution and for
which holiness, born out of the trial of death, must be founded in that chain
of imitations which is a chain of testimonies. In the eschatological perspective
revived by the wars of religion, the present must nourish itself from a past in
order to walk towards a future, that of the Kingdom of God. We may there-
fore speak of a regime of presentist historicity: the account of a past is given
in the name of a present in which the cult of the dead assumes a ritualised
form, that of the reiteration of an origin, of the celebration of a transcendent

Annales Ecclesiastici by Cesare Baronius (1588–​1606) which retraces in 12 volumes the

history of the first 12 centuries of Christianity.
12 Sanguis martyrum, semen Christianorum. Tertullian, Apologeticus adversus gentes pro
Christianis, cap. L, PL i, 535 A.
13 Lestringant, Lumière des martyrs, 121–​2. See also Carolin Behrmann and Elisabeth Priedl
(eds), Autopsia: Blut-​und Augenzeugen. Extreme Bilder des christlichen Martyriums
(Munich: 2014).

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Dramatizing and Celebrating Death in Early-Modern Visual Arts 345

permanence.14 The “remember you will die” (memento mori) of Christianised

ancient ethics is thus complemented by a “remember those who have died”
(memento eorum qui mortui sunt) in the propagation of faith, the ars moriendi
that every Christian must practice, thus having to situate itself between this
past and this future of death. Salvation is therefore intimately linked to the
memory and to the cult of the finest flower of the community of Christians,
those dead whom one wishes to be living/​surviving, or whose death one wish-
es to make live once again in the collective memory.
The archaeological enterprise carried out by the post-​Tridentine Church,
with, for example, the new interest in the catacombs, was a part of this return
ad fontes.15 In this respect we may speak of a translatio not only studii and
imperii but also spiritualis which takes the form of a translatio reliquarium, in
the strict sense of the transfer of what remains, materially, of this past.16 So, it
was a matter of inventing, in the double meaning of the Latin verb invenire (to
find and to create), an original time and foundational sites, time and sites of
sacral recharging. Among these sacred “chronotopes” were those of martyrs’
tombs, martyria that are the foundation stones of the first Christian churches
(which were no more than mausoleums) and the cornerstones of the Church
itself. Along with the catacombs they too are sites from which sacrality was
spread.
This happened by means of two principal media, the medium of relics and
the medium of images. These had a double relationship to the sacred, and at
that time attempts were made to distinguish them: a metonymic or indexical
relationship, and a mimetic relationship, both of which were surpassed by the
relationship of presence that the eucharist alone was able to guarantee. Follow-
ing the Protestant crisis, one of the aims was to avoid any confusion between
these different regimes of presentation and representation, at the risk other-
wise of idolatry, the spectre at the heart of all debate. As the reformers never
ceased to emphasise, the cult of the early martyrs was at the root of idolatry.
People kneel today, they claimed, before images of those who have refused to
kneel before idols. This was the vicious circle, according to them: pagan idols
were destroyed in order to raise up new images that in turn became idols that

14 François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, trans. Saskia
Brown (New York: 2003).
15 The term ad fontes means literally, a return to the sources or origins. It is used to describe
an intellectual movement of returning to the early writings of the Christian Church, par-
ticularly the Bible, to study its origins and evolution over time.
16 That is, a movement of academic study and spiritual renewal, using the evidence of the
material remains of the past.

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346 Dekoninck

had to be destroyed. Conversely, the Catholics noted that the sanctuaries of the
martyrs were built on the ruins of pagan temples so as to destroy these defini-
tively. Hence the Jesuit Louis Richeome (1544–​1625), citing Theodoret of Cyrus
(A Cure of Greek Maladies, Book viii) states that:

the materials of the demolished temples, having served to construct the

churches and altars of the martyrs, have been purified. For Our Lord has
placed those who died in his name in the place of the false gods, whom
he has stripped of honour, and has honoured his servants.17

Furthermore, Richeome closely links the tribute paid to the tombs of the mar-
tyrs and the veneration of images. He thus reminds us that one of the character-
istics of the Christian martyrs of the early centuries was to have died precisely
for having turned away from images of “false gods.” They were, so to speak,
sacrificed because of their refusal to sacrifice to idols. Having thus spilled their
blood for having refused to worship these idols and having testified to their
unshakeable faith, these living and suffering images worthy of imitation ap-
pear as counter-​models to the dead and mortiferous images of idolatrous cults.
So, while the bodies of saints who refused to worship idols were tortured and
executed in the early centuries, in the present the Protestants destroy images
and bodies, re-​performing the martyrdom of the early times and confirming
the coincidence between bodies and images.
Whether on the Protestant side, in order to castigate papist idolatry, or on
the Catholic side, to denounce pagan idolatry and so distinguish it clearly from
the veneration of Christian images, the aetiology of this supreme sin led back
to the cult of the dead. It led back in particular to a mourning that tended to
gradually heroise mere mortals: they ultimately gained the status of authentic
divinities, a process encouraged, even for some unleashed by the arts. It was
necessary therefore to neutralise the effects of this resurrectional presence of
the image that Alberti spoke of. But in the wake of the crisis of mediation and
of representation resulting from nominalism and the Reformation, it was also
necessary to give meaning back to signs. And one of the ways to do this was
to make the image into a monument testifying to a truth that was no longer
ontological but historical; the memorial, as we have already emphasised, not
of a presence but of a survival, that of a living memory and not a simple aide-​
mémoire for souls that were naturally forgetful.

17 Louis Richeome, Trois discours pour la religion catholique: des miracles, des saincts et des
images (Bordeaux: 1597), 745. Author’s translation.

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Dramatizing and Celebrating Death in Early-Modern Visual Arts 347

To use Blaise Pascal’s words, the challenge was that the image conveyed si-
multaneously both absence and presence, for it was in this oscillation that its
virtus lay: its power was not in action but in potential, the force of truth and
of persuasion.18 Re-​presentation –​a word whose prefix gives it its meaning
of reiteration in difference –​thus takes its distance, in theory at least (for we
must bear in mind the promotion of certain images known as acheiropoieta,
vestiges-​witnesses of an original age of the Christian image), in relation to an
indexical regime that had long underpinned the sacred medieval image. By
dissociating the image from the relic and even more so from the sacrament, it
became anchored in a mimetic regime, which is precisely the regime promot-
ed by the renascent theory of art.
But faced with what was perceived in clerical spheres as mannerist excesses
that led to a proliferation of the uncanny and of unbridled fantasy, this regime,
which acknowledged the semiotic break, had to re-​legitimise itself in a differ-
ent way, to re-​establish its truth in a manner other than a simple imitation of
nature: it did so by means of history and emotion, but also through miracle.
Since this last dimension is closely linked to that of relics, covered by Freddy
C. Dominguez in this volume, let us examine the other two dimensions that
inflect martyrological imagery. This imagery has the distinctive characteristic
of combining an archaeological ideal with a dramatic effect, the former dis-
tancing in time and the latter bringing this past to life in the present. Bringing
together memory and affect in this way is, furthermore, to reconnect two of the
three main functions of the Christian image. As Thomas Aquinas notes, as well
as “the teaching of the unlearned,” images make it possible for “examples of
saints to be more present in the memory by being presented every day,” while
they are also created to “arouse the feeling of devotion, for what one sees stim-
ulates more effectively than what one hears.”19
In terms of history, it was first of all a matter of re-​narrativising the figure
of the saint. Indeed, the transition from the devotional figure to the narrative
scene characterises the iconographic transformations of the 16th century, as
can be seen in particular in the painting of the Southern Low Countries.20 The
devotional figure preserved the memory of martyrdom through the presence

18 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, in Œuvres complètes (Paris: 1963), 533.

19 Thomas Aquinas, Commentarium Super Libros Sententiarum, l. iii, d. 9, a. 2, q. 2. Author’s
translation.
20 David Freedberg, “The Representations of Martyrdom During the Early Counter-​
Reformation in Antwerp,” The Burlington Magazine 118 (1976), 128–​ 38; Koenraad
Jonckheere, Experiments in Decorum: Antwerp Art after Iconoclasm, 1566–​1585 (London:
2013).

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of attributes alone, which by now were no more than symbols almost emptied
of their tragic meaning. Falling into line with the precepts of ancient tragedy,
what mattered from now on was the actio (act) of the putting to death and not
the petrified outcome of one of the living dead attracting what was potentially
idolatrous devotion. The intention was to emphasise that the martyr is a true
dramatis persona who matters as much for what s/​he does as for what s/​he is,
if not more. The martyr is an exemplum rather than an exemplar, an example
of behaviour to be followed, rather than a prototype, that is to say a figure of
holiness whose image is worshipped in isolation.
This exemplum had to be inspired by the most trustworthy sources, in this
case those collected in the martyrologies.21 For the creativity of painters could
not draw on the imagination alone but had to stay very close to those accounts
deemed to be most truthful. Rather than imitating, it was a matter of reproduc-
ing “things as they are,” as the Italian ecclesiastic and writer Giovanni Andrea
Gilio states in his Dialogo nel quale si ragiona degli errori e degli abusi de’ pitto-
ri circa l’istorie of 1564. Aristotelian verisimilitude was therefore transformed
into pure conformity to holy story, “which should be painted in a faithful, pure,
simple, true, and chaste way.”22 And as the theologian of Leuven University
Johannes Molanus (1533–​1585) writes, citing St Basil:

we must emphasise that images and paintings based on well-​established

accounts must also be respectfully acknowledged by all. There is no need
to supply lengthy proofs. However, let us mention what we find in Ba-
sil the Great in his sermon on the forty martyrs: “What the story shows
through discourse, the painting reveals silently in reproducing reality.”
This is why, just as the Church venerates with total devotion the battles
of the holy martyrs and the Lives of the Fathers, when they are written
with rigour, so it calls on us to venerate with the same piety the painting
that shows them.23

The painter-​historian thus had to supplant the painter-​poet, and conform to

what the sources said, which amounted to stripping painting of the fabulous.

21 Together with the Martyrologium romanum (Rome: 1583), one of the most influen-
tial Catholic compilations is Laurentius Surius, De probatis sanctorum historiis, 12 vols
(Cologne: 1571–​1575).
22 Giovanni Andrea Gilio, Dialogue on the Errors and Abuses of Painters, eds Michael Bury,
Lucinda Byatt, and Carol M. Richardson, trans. Michael Bury and Lucinda Byatt (Los
Angeles: 2018), 51.
23 Johannes Molanus, De picturis et imaginibus sacris (Louvain: 1570), 77. Author’s translation.

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Dramatizing and Celebrating Death in Early-Modern Visual Arts 349

The painter was able to find assistance in the works of historical erudition
that proliferated at the time, some of which used images as aids to demon-
stration, assuming the form of a reconstruction. One of clearest examples in
this respect is the Trattato degli instrumenti di martirio e delle varie maniere di
martirizzare by the Oratorian priest Antonio Gallonio, published in Rome in
1591. Uniting texts and images (designed by Giovanni Guerra and engraved by
Antonio Tempesta), this work collects and reproduces the different forms of
suffering inflicted on the martyrs and the instruments used to torture them.24

3 The Truth of Emotion

In the transition from the figure to the act, from the idola or icona (idol or
image, depending on whether the point of view is Protestant or Catholic) to
the historia, which resituated the saint in the distant time of the story of his
death, it was important to arouse an intense emotion that actualised the scene
with a view to starting off a process of emulation. Given that one believes to
be truer that which produces an emotion, according to a belief widely held at
the time, truth can adapt to verisimilitude in terms of the display of cruelty, a
verisimilitude whose goal is strictly persuasive.25 As the Archbishop of Bolo-
gna and the author of one of the most influential treatises on images Gabriele
Paleotti (1522–​1597) points out, “There is leeway when that which is narrated
or depicted has a high degree of probability and is also apt to move hearts
and excite devotion.”26 Regarding the iconography of martyrdom, it is thus es-
sentially through the passions aroused (and the palette can be a highly varied
one: anger, indignation, regret, admiration …) that the efficacy of the image is
asserted, rather than through some ontological link to the model.
The most extreme emotions are truly those which are supposed to imprint
themselves most durably in the memory and move hearts most deeply.27 This
point is emphasised by those post-​Tridentine writers who took an interest in

24 Jetze Touber, Law, Medicine, and Engineering in the Cult of the Saints in Counter-​
Reformation Rome: The Hagiographical Works of Antonio Gallonio, 1556–​1605 (Boston/​
Leiden: 2014).
25 “The verisimilar is that which sets forth things of which there is no clear record so ratio-
nally and with appropriate circumstances that it makes them convincing and satisfies the
common understanding of persons” Gabriele Paleotti, Discourse on Sacred and Profane
Images, trans. William McCuaig (Los Angeles: 2012), 223.
26 Paleotti, Discourse, 161.
27 We should remember that the imago agens promoted by the arts of memory in ancient
rhetoric had recourse to precisely these lively emotions.

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­f igure 12.2 
Pietro Testa, Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus, ca 1630-31
source: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (copyright: public domain)

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Dramatizing and Celebrating Death in Early-Modern Visual Arts 351

art and the image. They remind us of the legitimacy and even the necessity
of the display of violence and death in religious matters. Thus, while Paleotti
condemns all scenes of horror and all bloody spectacles that are depicted with
no virtuous aim (gratuitous violence and death stimulate in some people an
unhealthy fascination and in others disgust), he does recommend, when it is
a question of encouraging people to love virtue, the representation of saints
with all the instruments of their martyrdom and the cruellest torments inflict-
ed on them. This is in order to give these “heroic emblems” of patience and
magnanimity as an example to the Christian people.28 Taking as his ultimate
reference the horror of Christ’s Passion, which artists could not gloss over in
wishing to submit themselves to the beauty of art, the Jesuit Antonio Possevi-
no (1533–​1611) also advocates a certain utilitarian verism:

And if one asks about the reason why they do not express these suffer-
ings of Christ, they reply that one must submit oneself to art, so that this
above all things be recognised. They say that they achieve this by painting
the Lord as extremely handsome, and very elegant. But it is clear that
art demands that, as far as possible, the truth of such a great event be
established. In fact, the truth is that the Lord wanted the whole world
to see his son Jesus sullied because of our sins, spilling his blood, flayed
by the blows of the whip, covered in spittle, deathly pale, overwhelmed
by blows. Indeed, it is certain that it is in this manner that the weight of
the crimes is felt more profoundly and more correctly by sinners, and
that these sinners therefore feel contrition and sadness in preparation
for Salvation.29

The truth of the death throes –​of which the ancient model cited is the Laoc-
oon –​must prevail over beauty if one is to arouse a feeling of contrition.30 This
was a profound grief felt at the idea of having offended God.31 This truth works

28 Paleotti, Discourse, 257–​8.

29 Antonio Possevino, Tractatio de Poesi and Pictura ethnica, humana, and fabulosa collata
cum vera, honesta, et sacra (Lyon: 1594), 295–​96. Author’s translation.
30 “In fact, the bitterness of pain was also expressed in the statues of the ancient pagans, as
can been in the Vatican in the figure of Laocoon, close to death, tormented by pain, he
and his sons cruelly defeated by the serpents: therefore, who could deny that the same
thing may be obtained in relation to Him in whom all types of pain and cruelties are
brought together?” Possevino, Tractatio, 296. Author’s translation.
31 On the relationship between art and compunction, see Steven F.H. Stowell, The Spiritual
Language of Art: Medieval Christian Themes in Writings on Art (Leiden/​Boston: 2014), 16–​70.

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352 Dekoninck

through all the details related to the instruments of torture as well as to the
passions, vile or virtuous, that this torture provokes:

Hence, no person of sound mind would deny that it is necessary to paint

Blaise torn apart by iron combs, Sebastian pierced by many arrows, Law-
rence burned on a gridiron, lacerated and with his entrails spread about,
stripped of all beauty. To what end might one object to me that Stephen was
stoned without rocks, that Blaise maintained his body intact and beautiful,
on a rack without blood, that the apostle James is without a club in his head,
Sebastian without arrows, Lawrence radiant in the flames? Truly, since (it is
said) art and the details of muscles and veins demand that it should be so.
For my part, I strongly maintain that the summit of art is to imitate reality
itself, that is to say martyrdom and martyrs; to express the tears of those who
weep, the pain of those who suffer, the glory and the joy of the resurrection
and to fix all that within souls. Such is assuredly the very essence of art: it is
what gives art its beauty, that is to say what is worthy of being seen.32

This last sentence says it all: the beauty of art is to show everything concerning
cruelty and holy deaths. The feeling one should take from it cannot be that of
pleasure, contrary to what a certain idea of mimesis and of Aristotelian cathar-
sis continues to maintain, an idea according to which if the real spectacle of
torture produces no pleasure, but rather disgust, that of its theatrical or picto-
rial representation does in fact do so.33 This pleasure of representation is said
to derive from a distancing that transforms the true into the credible and from
an aesthetic mediation that attracts the gaze by reason of its expressive qual-
ities. While this principle holds true for many horrific subjects (monsters or
corpses), there is nevertheless an exception, which is precisely that of martyr-
dom.34 The rule of decorum that imperatively applies to it demands that minds
be struck violently, a necessity leading to what one might call an anti-​aesthetic
approach, characterised by a sober and severe style.

32 Possevino, Tractatio, 296–​7. Author’s translation.

33 This example does not appear in Aristotle’s Poetics but is highly evident in the Poetics
of the 16th and 17th centuries. See Emmanuelle Hénin, Ut pictura theatrum: Peinture et
théâtre, de la Renaissance italienne au classicisme français (Geneva: 2003), 492–​6.
34 “Such is the delight that imitation brings, that things that by their nature normally cause
repugnance and horror in the viewer, like seeing a monster or a cadaver or a mole, have
the opposite effect when they are well imitated, and delight us miraculously.” Paleotti,
Discourse, 113.

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Dramatizing and Celebrating Death in Early-Modern Visual Arts 353

In addition, following the famous Horatian formula Si vis me flere, dolen-

dum est primum ipsi tibi (“If you would have me weep, you must first feel grief
yourself”),35 it is recommended that the artist draws inspiration not from his
intellect but from his own emotions born out of meditation on the sufferings
of the martyrs:

Since this is the case, the painter must understand that it is necessary
for him to conceive, in his prayer (a thing of the utmost importance), as
in his meditation, not so much the idea of his future work, as the feeling
of suffering that Our Lord Jesus, and those who followed him fearlessly,
endured long ago.36

It can be seen very clearly here that what should guide the painter is not the
idea that he conceives or contemplates in his mind, but deep feeling. This is
precisely what Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–​1680), if we are to believe the bi-
ography written by his son, wished to experience when he was attempting to
create the expression of suffering on the face of his martyred Saint Lawrence,
a saint to whom he paid special devotion, even going so far as emulating him
through the use of his very name.37 But Bernini was not content with an inner
experience of this suffering, and he took emulation even further by burning
himself in order “to feel in himself the martyrdom of the saint” (“per cui venen-
do a provare in se il Martirio del Santo”).38

4 The Strength of Evidence

History and rhetoric constitute the two pillars of a re-​foundation of the pow-
ers of the image. These powers are no longer those of a presence in or of the
image, but of an effect of presence and of the real, that cancels out historical
and interpretative distance in order to offer raw images, images that are both

35 Horace, Ars Poetica, 102.

36 Possevino, Tractatio, 300. Author’s translation.
37 See Maarten Delbeke, “A Thin Line between Love and Hate: Martyrdom and the
White Marble Statue,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 82 (2019), 355–​ 76; Maarten
Delbeke, Evonne Levy, and Steven S. Ostrow (eds), Bernini’s Biographies: Critical Essays
(Pennsylvania: 2006), 172–​3.
38 Domenico Bernini, The Life of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, trans. Francesco Mormando
(Pennsylvania: 2011), 102–​3.

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354 Dekoninck

­f igure 12.3 
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, 1617
source: © uffizi gallery, florence

brutal and basic, that is to say, images that offer up reality just as it is or just as it
was supposed to be. Hence, we may speak of evidence, that is, of what imposes
itself on the sight and on the mind in so forceful a manner that it becomes
irrefutable. Let us recall that the Latin word evidentia is derived from the com-
bination of philosophical and rhetorical meanings in the Greek word enargeia,
referring to what is presented to the sight in all its splendour and imposes itself
forcefully on the perceiving subject. Images thus become the site of evidence,
for “when seen, they are immediately recognized by everyone and serve as the
common tongue of all nations,” but also as stimulus for all the passions.39 Ac-
cording to Quintilian, through this effect of presence “our emotions will be no
less actively stirred than if we were present at the actual occurrence.”40 This
evidence is therefore particularly effective in arousing the passions. Note too
that enargeia is mixed with energeia in the Aristotelian sense, that is to say, of
that which is in movement.
This setting before the eyes and this setting in motion are the two con-
stitutive dimensions of martyrdom and its representation. For one of the

39 Paleotti, Discourse, 63.

40 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, vi, 2, 32.

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Dramatizing and Celebrating Death in Early-Modern Visual Arts 355

fundamental features of martyrdom which the visual arts were to exploit –​the
theatre even more than painting, perhaps, and this since the mystery plays
of the late Middle Ages –​is to be first of all a spectacle, which it had been
since its Roman origins. It is underpinned by an urge to be seen and to see. The
martyr offers his/​herself in a spectacle, for the testimony has meaning only if
it is made public, the spectator of martyrdom becoming the witness of holy
witnesses, a second-​degree martyr who must endure the sight of violence and
death. The martyr, paroxysmal figure of compliance with the divine will, must
display his/​herself, put his/​herself on stage as a living image ready to die. But
this is a spectacle whose horror is transformed into jubilation. Such is the par-
adox, noted earlier, of this triumph through suffering and death. What final-
ly matters in this jubilation faced with the display of violence, suffering, and
death, is the effect of emulation. But in order for the testimony of truth, creat-
ed by the image of an exemplary death, to produce a real mimetic contagion, it
must be broadcast. Hence the importance of the image in this propagatio fidei
(propagation of the faith) which here assumes the form of an imitatio martyrii
(imitation of the martyr).
If the imitation of Christ was conceived of as sympathy, that is to say, as
imitation in suffering, then the images that martyrdom offered to the view
functioned according to this same principle. The spectacle of this sympathy
for the martyr had to arouse the empathy –​that is the suffering one feels inside
oneself –​of the spectator, according to a view widely held at this time. The
classical and frequently cited, example of this was the tears shed by Gregory
of Nyssa (4th century) at the sight of an image of the sacrifice of Isaac.41 This
example was part of the battery of Catholic arguments designed to show the
Protestants the greater efficacy of images in shaking up the feelings. For exam-
ple, Paleotti wrote:

Let us first recall what Saint Gregory of Nyssa writes, adduced more than
once in the seventh synod, that the story of Abraham’s willingness to sac-
rifice his son Isaac had been so vividly and piteously portrayed by a paint-
er that every time the saint gazed upon it, he was so entirely altered that
he was unable to hold back his tears.42

The force of the image therefore resides in its capacity to strike the spectator’s
imagination and, in the present case, to extract tears from him; emotion which

41 Gregory of Nyssa, Oratio laudatoria sancti ac magni martyris Theodori, pg 46, 737–​739.
42 Paleotti, Discourse, 121–​2.

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356 Dekoninck

is not, however, an end in itself, since it must ultimately lead to virtuous and
holy action.

5 Proof by Image

The showing and proving power of martyrdom would find fertile ground in
the visual arts, continuing this intimate and original link between image and
martyrdom. The figuration of martyrdom thus became one of the main sites of
expression of a power of visibility and a visibility of power, but of a power that
is supposed to be strictly Christian. So, let us now focus on the way in which
the arts of the 16th and 17th centuries staged and brought into play all these di-
mensions specific to martyrdom, and in particular the paradox and the conflict
which are its constitutive features.
The example par excellence of the anti-​aesthetic and of martyrological ver-
ism is undoubtedly the cycle of 32 frescoes commissioned by the Society of
Jesus and created, around 1582–​83, by Niccolò Circignani, also known as Poma-
rancio, for Santo Stefano Rotondo, the church of the Jesuit College of the Hun-
garians in Rome.43 This cycle is a part of a series of other groups of frescoes cre-
ated at the same time by the same artists for the church of the English College
of St Thomas and the church of the German College of Sant’Apollinare. These
last two groups no longer exist but remain known to us through engravings.
The frescoes in Santo Stefano Rotondo represent the tortures of the early
Christian martyrs, sparing viewers none of the sordid details. The rector of the
Hungarian College, Michele Lauretano, wrote of them:

The fact of seeing an infinity of kinds of torments and such a great num-
ber of martyrs awakens much devotion; the painting is of mediocre beau-
ty (mediocremente bella), but very pious; many cannot see without tears
and spiritual movement (moti spirituali).44

The emphasis is thus placed on the spiritual and affective dimension, which
in relation to martyrological iconography derives from the commonplace,

43 Leif H. Monssen, “The Martyrdom Cycle in Santo Stefano Rotondo, Part I,” Acta ad
archaeologiam et artium historiam pertinentia 2 (1982), 175–​310; “Part II,” 3 (1983), 11–​106;
Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Between Renaissance and Baroque: Jesuit Art in Rome, 1565–​1610
(Toronto: 2003), 122–​52.
44 Michele Lauretano, Diario. Archivio del Collegio Germanico-​Ungarico, Rome. MS, Hist.
103, fol. 49. Author’s translation.

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Dramatizing and Celebrating Death in Early-Modern Visual Arts 357

­f igure 12.4 
Niccolò Circignani, Martyrdom of Saint Peter bishop of Alexandria, detail, 1582
source: © santo stefano rotondo, rome

at least as seen in the aforementioned example of Gregory of Nyssa’s tears,

which resonate too with those shed by Pope Sixtus v on seeing the frescoes
of Santo Stefano Rotondo. If it was necessary to make tears flow, it was in
order to shake souls all the more. Emotion must lead to internal movement
(moti spirituali) and ultimately to external movement. Representation of the
martyrs must in fact have stimulated a form of emulation in young Jesuits and
in the students of their colleges, ready in their turn to sacrifice themselves
spiritually or physically in the lands of the Protestant mission or in even more
distant ones, such as Japan. We have here, then, a summary of many Triden-
tine ideals: those of a Church militant and triumphant, spreading a message
that is as unambiguous as possible, in a style that is sober but with a strik-
ing iconographic content, and all this for the aims of conversion or rather
strengthening of convictions.
In addition, these frescoes have the distinctive feature of being punctuated
by letters referring to a legend identifying each scene, a device which counter-
balances the highly dramatic dimension of the paintings, by revealing the ar-
tifice of such a presentation. To put it another way, it breaks the mimetic pact
which is, however, fundamental in terms of projective or immersive effects

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358 Dekoninck

and, hence, of emotions. This lettered presence aims to be the guarantor of

fidelity to the texts to which each scene of martyrdom refers, and thus of the
accuracy of what is offered up to the sight. We thus get the idea of a reading
of the image, of a lettered image, with a horizon that is, so to speak, bookish,
which the almost instant reproduction of the frescoes in engravings, with in-
ternational distribution in book form, seems to confirm.45
As we have seen, from a stylistic, if not iconographic, point of view the rec-
tor of the college describes the style of the frescoes as “mediocre,” an epithet
one must understand in the rhetorical sense of a “medium” or moderate style
which curbs mannerist effects. To a certain extent it neutralises the emotions
of the protagonists, which constitutes a paradox for painting that must arouse
emotion and, in particular, empathy. On this art “senza tempo”46 Giulio Manci-
ni in his Considerations on Painting of 1615 is not wrong when he speaks of Cir-
cignani’s two styles or brushes (due pennelli): “the style of an ordinary master
and the other of a fine and expert master.”47 According to Mancini, the pennello
ordinario or ordinary style is certainly the one used for Santo Stefano Rotondo.
It is meant to evoke the ideal of the primitive Church at a time when there was
a veritable palaeochristian revival, which partly explains the new fashion of
inscriptions in the painting of the late 16th century.48 There is a stated inten-
tion to give an account of a historical, not to mention an archaeological, truth,
a dimension that has echoes of the excavations carried out at the same time in
the catacombs.49 What matters here is not conformity with a text but with a
time, that of the original Church.

45 To give this cycle of frescoes an even greater striking power, it was quickly distributed and
imitated throughout Europe by means of engraving (a first series circulated, from 1583,
with the title Ecclesiae militantis triumphi). In the records of the English Jesuit College in
Rome from 1582 we read that “we have distributed copies of this work very widely, as far
as the Indies, so that the infamy of these most disastrous of persecutions, the frenetic rage
of the heretics, the invincible resolution of the Catholics, may be known everywhere.”
Henry Foley, Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus (London: 1880), 6: 83. See
also Kirstin Noreen, “Ecclesiae militantis triumphi: Jesuit Iconography and the Counter-​
Reformation,” Sixteenth Century Journal 29 (1998), 689–​715.
46 Federico Zeri, Pittura e controriforma: L’arte senza tempo da Scipione di Gaeta (Turin: 1957),
56–​9.
47 Giulio Mancini, Considerazioni sulla pittura, ed. Adriana Marucchi, vol. i (Rome: 1956),
206–​7.
48 Emmanuelle Hénin, Ceci est un bœuf: La querelle des inscriptions dans la peinture
(Turnhout: 2013).
49 See for a recent contribution: Kelly Magill, “Reviving Martyrdom: Interpretations of
the Catacombs in Cesare Baronio’s Patronage,” in Death, Torture and the Broken Body in
European Art, 1300–​1650, eds John R. Decker and Mitzi Kirkland-​Ives (Burlington: 2015),

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Dramatizing and Celebrating Death in Early-Modern Visual Arts 359

The system of deconstruction of the image by letters must certainly have as-
sisted the meditation exercises of the Jesuits and their students, employing the
pedagogical techniques inculcated both in academic and spiritual subjects,
and in close connection with the arts of memory. But this system may also be
likened to the techniques of illustration employed in scientific works, in par-
ticular those of the anatomists, whose illustrations resonate with the iconog-
raphy of martyrdom.50 We may even speak of a martyrological imaginary in
certain engravings of the early treatises of anatomy, beginning with the De hu-
mani corporis fabrica of Vesalius (Basel, 1543) and the Anatomia del corpo hu-
mano of Juan de Valverde (Rome, 1560). In these captioned plates, the letter is
the instrument of dissection. Hence, in the same way that the anatomical plate
proceeds to a real dissection of the human body represented, we might speak
of an anatomy of martyrological images in Santo Stefano Rotondo. This analo-
gy is further strengthened by the theatrical dimension shared by the spectacle
of martyrdom and the spectacle of anatomy. The aptly named “anatomical the-
atres” were built in such a way as to stage dissection, like the theatres of cruel-
ty staging executions, and not just those of martyrs. The panoptic dimension
of the church of Santo Stefano Rotondo reinforces this analogy, even if at the
centre of the device there is no longer the body of the martyr or the dissected
body but the body of the spectator contemplating the entirety of the frescoes
on the ambulatory of this circular church. It is not excessive, then, to speak
of a real anatomy or autopsy of martyrdom, exhibiting with a certain veraci-
ty the almost surgical atrocities suffered by the early champions of the Faith.

87–​116. See also, among others, the study by Simon R. Ditchfield: Liturgy, Sanctity and
History in Tridentine Italy: Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation of the Particular
(Cambridge: 1995).
50 Ralph Dekoninck, “Alphabétisation et dissection de l’image: Retour sur le cycle marty-
rologique de Santo Stefano Rotondo,” in Aiutando l’arte: Les inscriptions dans les décors tri-
dentins d’Italie, eds Anne Lepoitevin and Gwladys Le Cuff (Paris: forthcoming); Antoinette
Gimaret, Extraordinaire et ordinaire des Croix: Les représentations du corps souffrant. 1580–​
1650 (Paris: 2011), 603–​19; Paola Pacifici, “Chairs mortifiées: Connaissance anatomique
et esthétique de la souffrance dans la représentation des martyrs au 16e et au 17e siè-
cle,” in Corps sanglants, souffrants et macabres, 16e-​17e siècles, eds Charlotte Bouteille-​
Meister and Kjerstin Aukrust (Paris: 2010), 19–​30; Carolin Behrmann, “Testimonium
und αύτοψία: Märtyrerbild und epistemischer Wert,” in Autopsia: Blut-​und Augenzeugen.
Extreme Bilder des christlichen Martyriums, eds Carolin Behrmann and Elisabeth Priedl
(Munich: 2014), 89–​108; Mateusz Kapustka, “Martyrs or Scientists, or: How to Prove
Torment with Images,” in Autopsia: Blut-​und Augenzeugen. Extreme Bilder des christ­
lichen Martyriums, eds Carolin Behrmann and Elisabeth Priedl (Munich: 2014), 109–​
124; Katharine Park, “The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in
Renaissance Italy,” Renaissance Quarterly 47 (1994), 1–​33.

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Furthermore, we can speak of violent scenes giving rise to violent images. The
painting is decomposed by references just as the holy bodies are torn apart and
dismembered, membra disjecta that will become relics. This ‘scientific’ imagi-
nary is based on the idea of visual proof in order to disclose a truth that is at
one and the same time historical and doctrinal. Above all, in order to make this
truth not only as convincing as possible but also as striking as possible, so as to
imprint it most profoundly on souls, this theatre of cruelties is also a theatre of
memory. In the end, the painted image that relates these atrocities in turn may
well be called a martyr, but this time in the etymological sense: it bears witness
to what surpasses the imagination.
This emphasis on the testimony of the image can also be found in Catholic
martyrologies such as the History of the Martyrs of Japan by the Jesuit Nicolas
Trigault.51 This work, published in 1624, transports us from the Europe of the wars
of religion to the new lands undergoing evangelisation, lands where the mis-
sionaries, Jesuits in this case, also endured martyrdom. We may read in the pref-
ace: “because there you will see torments peculiar to the tyrants of that country,
which are very difficult to imagine, the printer has had them printed on plates
which are at the front of each book, and which will give you a perfect understand-
ing of them.”52
These startling images thus help once again towards a belief in the unthinkable.
They were created in order to strike the imagination not of the witnesses of the
executions but of a European public discovering these inhuman scenes thanks
to the modern means of the reproducible image distributed on a very wide scale.
Here too, rather than leading to violence, driven by a thirst of vengeance –​which
must certainly have been fuelled by images of massacres, tortures, and executions
at the time of the wars of religion in Europe, the enemy quite possibly being a
neighbour or geographically very close –​the emphasis is placed on the empathy
with the victim that it is necessary to follow in suffering even unto death.
The logic is inverted in an illustrated work which also features as a pioneer
in the promotion of Catholic martyrdom. It no longer consists of encourag-
ing love of the victim and the desire to imitate him in sacrifice to the greater
glory of God but in arousing hatred of executioners. This work is The Theatre
of the Cruelties of Heretics of Our Time, published in Antwerp in 1587 by Rich-
ard Verstegan, an English Catholic exiled on the continent.53 It consists of 29

51 Nicolas Trigault, Histoire des martyrs du Japon (Paris: 1624), “Avis au lecteur,” n. p.
52 Trigault, Histoire des martyrs, “Avis au lecteur,” n. p.
53 Richard Verstegan, Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum nostri temporis (Antwerp: 1587).
See Paul Arblaster, Antwerp and the World: Richard Verstegan and the International Culture
of Catholic Reformation (Louvain: 2004). Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom, 243–​76.

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Dramatizing and Celebrating Death in Early-Modern Visual Arts361

­f igure 12.5 
Anonymous, Michael et Matthias occumbunt, engraving from Nicolas Trigault,
Histoire des martyrs du Japon (Paris, 1624)
source: © royal library of belgium, brussels

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362 Dekoninck

engravings denouncing the crimes of English “schismatics and Protestants,” of

French “Huguenots” and “Beggars” from the Low Countries. These engravings,
each one accompanied by a title, an accompanying text, and also dotted with
letters referring to a facing page in which each scene is identified and com-
mented on, offer us a showcase of horror. And indeed, we find in it a sample
of the worst atrocities committed by the Protestants on the Catholics, thereby
martyred for their faith. The use of engraving is justified in these terms in the
preface:

Gentlemen, we have erected this Theatre in order to show the miserable

tragedies that our heretics have played in our Europe, and to make you
see what they have committed and perpetrated […]; there is no mouth
to speak it, nor spirit to imagine it, far from it there is a cutting [that is,
engraving] that may represent it to your eyes.54

The theatre erected displays of the “cruelly performed” tragedies whose stage
directors, but also performers and executors, were the Protestants. If the ex-
ecutioners theatricalise death for propagandist goals, the theatrical analogy
also designates the dramatization that is at the heart of Verstegan’s project,
which essentially works through the staging of images designed to show what
cannot be said or written, for one cannot imagine all their horror. Indeed, ev-
ery engraving is saturated with scenes of nameless cruelty: stake, decapitation,
dismemberment, evisceration, etc. Every atrocity is included in order to obtain
the maximum emotional shock.
It is a question of showing in order to demonstrate and disseminate truth,
which is the truth of the martyr but even more so, through him, the truth
of God:

So that the truth and glory of the martyrs be not obscured and hidden,
but imparted to and known by the whole world, we have shown in certain
images a part of the torments and cruelties committed by the Huguenots
in France, by the Beggars in the Low Countries, and the schismatics and
protestants in England […]. So that if one looks at these paintings and
plates, one will find that never has a Church endured such a cruel and
deadly plague, nor suffered more violent ruin […]. Hence I desire that
in the contemplation of these images each of the faithful be moved to

54 Richard Verstegan, Théâtre des cruautés des hérétiques de notre temps (Antwerp: 1588),
prologue, n. p. Author’s translation.

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Dramatizing and Celebrating Death in Early-Modern Visual Arts 363

­f igure 12.6 
Anonymous, Horribilia scelera ab Huguenotis in Gallia perpetrata, engraving
from Richard Verstegan, Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum nostri temporis
(Antwerp, 1587)
source: © royal library of belgium, brussels

praise God for the constancy of his martyrs, and to detest the impiety of
heretics, and their doctrine.55

The image thus broadcasts as widely as possible the truth of a suffering Church
that cannot but move to emotion, but an emotion instantly converted into
praise addressed to God and into hate towards the heretics.
While violence has no name, being of the order of the unspeakable, it is
manifestly not of the order of the unimaginable. For it is necessary to see it to
believe it and it is necessary to show it to make it believed, which proves that in
matters of cruelty the shock of images wins out over the weight of words. The
writer powerless to name the unnameable must turn himself into an exhibitor
of tableaux vivants or rather of tableaux morts. Moreover, Verstegan takes care
to make it clear:

55 Richard Verstegan, Théâtre (Antwerp: 1607), 15. Author’s translation.

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364 Dekoninck

that if you think that this spectacle has been invented to give you plea-
sure, we beg you to pardon us; for to the contrary we intend to draw tears
from your eyes, moans from your mouths, sighs from your hearts and sobs
from your breasts, unless you be without eyes, mouth, heart and breast,
and there is within you no humanity.56

This remark shows clearly the paradox of the beauty of horror or of the plea-
sure associated with the spectacle of violence, that is supposed to make tears
flow but which we suspect had the effect of fascination on minds avid for this
kind of cruel display.
The fortunes of the iconography of martyrdom were not confined to the
illustrated book or to widely circulating engravings but also flourished in 16th-​
and 17th-​century painting. Among these many representations, of which it is
impossible here to list all the variations of theme, place, time or commission,
let us look at one sufficiently emblematic example of the iconography of mar-
tyrdom at the beginning of the 17th century: the Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus
painted by Nicolas Poussin around 1628 for one of the altars of St Peter’s in
Rome.57
Here we can recognize the typical iconography of evisceration (as popular-
ised by Dirk Bouts in the 15th century), the last torture before death, inflicted
on the Bishop of Antioch as part of his persecution by the Emperor Maximian
Hercules. According to the Golden Legend, from which Poussin clearly drew
inspiration, the emperor ordered the saint to sacrifice to the gods, but the saint
replied that “he refused to sacrifice to the gods of stone that you resemble.”58
Once the statue had been taken into the temple of Jupiter, it crumbled into
dust. But the statue shown here at the upper right represents not Jupiter but
Hercules, so reminding us of the emperor’s surname. In a diagonal composi-
tion that was to enjoy great success, Poussin features the dominant figure of
the idol. Hence the tension between the two images, the true and living image

56 Verstegan, Théâtre (Antwerp: 1588), prologue, n. p. Author’s translation.

57 Mickaël Szanto, “Le Martyre de saint Érasme,” in Poussin et Dieu, eds Nicolas Milovanovic
and Mickaël Szanto (Paris: 2015), 164–​6; Louise Rice, The Altar and Altarpieces of the New
Saint Peter’s Outfitting the Basilica 1621–​1666 (Cambridge: 1997), 225–​32; Konrad Oberhuber,
Poussin. The Early Years in Rome: The Origins of French Classicism (Oxford: 1988), 195–​
8; Giuliano Briganti, “L’altare di Sant’Erasmo, Poussin e il Cortona,” Paragone. Arte 9
(1960), 16–​20.
58 “Alquale disse l’imperatore: posati e sacrifica agli dei, altrimenti io ti farò morire di mala
morte. Rispose il Beato Erasmo: Imperatore, non sarà mai vero che alle pietre e alle statue
a cui tu sei simile io sacrifichi; io sacrifice a Dio vivo.” Jacobus de Voragine, Legendario
delle vite de’ santi (Venice: 1588), 406.

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Dramatizing and Celebrating Death in Early-Modern Visual Arts365

­f igure 12.7 
Nicolas Poussin, Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus, 1628
source: © vatican museums, rome

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366 Dekoninck

of the saint and the dead and false one of the idol, is conveyed eloquently.
This polarised construction clearly takes its inspiration from the treatment by
16th-​century Italian painters of the martyrdom of St Lawrence, who adopted
the same opposition.59 Poussin re-​used and refined this confrontation: the fig-
ure of St Erasmus, thrown backwards, is opposed to the Hercules raised up on
his pedestal, here an incarnation of brutal force, that of the violence of the
idol as condemned by the Prophets and the Church Fathers. The face of this
idol resembles that of the main executioner, but also the face of Erasmus him-
self, a new Hercules at the crossroads between idolatrous abomination and
iconophile salvation. This agonistic relationship is reinforced by the gestural
rhetoric: the gesture of the priest dressed in white attempting to extract a final
conversion while pointing at the idol, but also the gesture of a Roman soldier
on horseback pointing out Erasmus to one of the executioners. All these inter-
laced postures and gestures of pointing turned in opposite directions not only
articulate terrestrial space, that of the suffering endured with resignation by
the saint and the celestial space of the triumph of the Christian over the pagan,
but they also contrast the quasi invisible power of divine intervention and the
only too visible –​impotent, although dominant and violent –​pagan power.
Now, it is interesting to note that this scene in which the idol is displayed at
the time of torture and execution, finds an inverse counterpart in the religious
practices of the period: in Italy there existed brotherhoods of San Giovanni de-
collato (Beheading of St John the Baptist) whose members would accompany
to the scaffold those condemned to death.60 Their mission was to keep before
the eyes of these condemned people tablets (tavolette) fixed to a handle and
painted on both sides: on one side was the image of the crucified Christ and
on the other side that of a scene of martyrdom related to the type of execution
which would be inflicted on the criminal. Instead of extracting a conversion by
forcing the martyr to worship the idol, the image of the martyr, true antidote to
idolatry, is intended to encourage the sinner to repent and above all to endure
with strength the ultimate trial of suffering and of death.

59 See for example Titian, 1557–​1559 (Venice, Gesuiti); Agnolo Bronzino, 1569 (Florence, San
Lorenzo); Palma Giovane, 1581–​82 (Venice, San Giacomo dall’Orio); Pellegrino Tibaldi,
1592 (El Escorial). But it is also true of other scenes of martyrdom, such as the martyrdom
of St George (for example: Veronese, 1564, Verona, San Giorgio in Braida).
60 Samuel Y. Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during
the Florentine Renaissance (Ithaca-​London: 1985), ­chapter 5; Massimo Ferretti, “In
Your Face: Paintings for the Condemned in Renaissance Italy,” in The Art of Executing
Well: Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy, ed. Nicholas Terpstra (Kirksville: 2000), 79–​
97; Larry J. Feinberg, “Imagination all Compact: Tavolette and Confraternity Rituals for
the Condemned in Renaissance Italy,” Apollo 161 (2005), 48–​57.

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Dramatizing and Celebrating Death in Early-Modern Visual Arts 367

6 Conclusion

By means of these images we can see how post-​Tridentine Catholicism sought

to regenerate itself by commemorating the violent deaths that marked the tri-
umph of a truly Christian heroism, the heroism of Grace, with martyrdom is-
suing out of the encounter between a human desire and a divine gift. This kind
of representation attempted to comprehend this divine choice, the acme of an
improbable time that joined past, present, and future through the temporal
crashing together of torture, death, and salvation. Furthermore, these imag-
es constructed a figure of holiness through the contrast with or opposition to
everything that is presented as its contrary: sin, madness, abjection, bestiality,
inciting hatred of the executioners, who unleashed their own hatred against
Christians, and love for the martyrs, whose own love for Christ led them to
death. From the imitatio Christi (imitation of Christ) to the imitatio martyria
(imitation of the martyrs), a whole process of mimetic conformation presents
the image itself, which becomes re-​legitimised in its opposition to the idol.
This fight for and with the image is that of the reconquest of a deiformitas in
suffering and in death; one might even say, a deiformitas through deformitas,
that is to say through disfigurement, to use the very words of St Augustine: De-
formitas Christi te format (“The deformity of Christ forms you”).61
61 Augustine, Sermones, xxvii, pl 38, col. 181.

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 ­c hapter 13

The Motion of Another’s Death: Grief and

Mourning

Christopher Ocker

Pleine de deuil et de mélancolie,

Voyant mon mal qui toujours multiplie
Et qu’en la fin pluz ne le puis porter,
Constrainte suis pour me réconforter
Me rendre a toy le surplus de ma vie.
Je te requiers et humblement supplie,
Pour les douleurs de quoy je suis remplie,
Ne me vouloir jamais abandonner.
Puisqu’a vous suis la reste de ma vie.

Full of grief and melancholy,

Seeing my pain only multiply
And that its end I can no longer bear,
To comfort myself I am constrained
To give you the surplus of my life.
So I beg you and humbly appeal,
For the sufferings with which I am filled,
Wish never to abandon me.
For I am for you the rest of my life.
josquin desprez (d. 1521), Pleine de deuil

These verses from a love song by Josquin Desprez point to the affective
spectrum along which grief ran throughout one’s life. Grief was a species
of pain.1 Its degree was felt in comparison with equal pleasures, and people
knew grief in a proportion to the desire for happiness. From the 12th to the
17th centuries, these proportions could be studied in scholastic debate, in
devotional literature and art, and in popular fictions. Consider Ovid’s sto-
ry of Pyramus and Thisbe, which dramatized the linkage between feelings

1 Barbara Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–​700 (New York: 2016),
248–​87.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004443433_015

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The Motion of Another’s Death: Grief and Mourning 369

of sorrow and love.2 Kept separate by their parents, Pyramus and Thisbe
planned to meet secretly by a tree near a tomb to consummate their frustrat-
ed longing. But when Thisbe arrived, she found Pyramus dead. Falling over
his body, mingling her tears with his blood, she ended her life with the same
dagger that he, driven to despair by misapprehension (he thought she had
been killed by a terrible lion), had used to take his own. That was where grief
could lead. It was triggered by the loss of an object of desire and intensified
by the strength of attachment. Alcuin, the leading scholar at Charlemagne’s
court once noted, “Love cannot endure forgetting,” caritas oblivionem non
patitur.3 Grief could express not mere association with a love that was gone,
but a share in dying, or as Desprez suggested, it reflected a kind of substitu-
tionary, consolatory economy, because the mourner sought relief by sharing
a surplus of one’s own living with the grieved. For grief, like love, could not
let go.
This sorrow designated a soul moved by separation, and mourning was the
activity that performed, replicated, exercised, and compensated for grief. Me-
dieval and early modern scholars understood grief as a kind of internal motion,
which Renaissance musicians expressed through overlapping, harmonic waves
of slowly falling and rising cadences.4 Historians today see it as a manifestation
of a soul in a turbulent state, unless it slips into a morbid, melancholic stasis,
a condition more threatening still; although melancholy could also provoke
reactions of intellectual or artistic genius.5 In the turbulent nothing left by an
interrupted attachment, mourning ritual –​prayers, masses, and other memori-
ae –​filled the emptiness with compensatory affections. This required not only

2 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Brookes More (Boston: 1922), iv.55–​166, and 140 for tears and
blood, http://​data.perseus.org/​texts/​urn:cts:latinLit:phi0959.phi006.perseus-​eng1 (last ac-
cessed 14/​9/​2019); Gabriele Bucchi, “Au-​delà du tombeau: Pyrame et Thisbé dans deux réécri-
tures de la Renaissance italienne,” Italique 13 (2010), 53–​80.
3 Alcuinus, Epistolae, Ep. 189, ed. Ernst Dümmler, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistulae,
vol. 4, part 2 (Berlin: 1895), 316, line 21. This is a letter written near the end of the 8th century
to Cunebert, Bishop of Winchester. Joachim Wollasch, “Memoria,” in Enzyklopädie des Mit-
telalters, eds Gert Melville and Martial Staub, 2 vols (Darmstadt: 2008), 1:364–​6, here 365.
4 This was especially characteristic of the Renaissance motet, Edward E. Lowinsky, “Music in
the Culture of the Renaissance,” Journal of the History of Ideas 15 (1954), 509–​53, on 523–​5.
For Ockeghem, a particular influence on Desprez and on Renaissance mourning, see Sean
Gallagher, Secular Renaissance Music: Forms and Functions (New York: 2016), 143–​6. For post-​
Renaissance developments, Michael Tolmouth and David Ledbetter, “Tombeau,” Grove Music
Online, https://​doi.org/​10.1093/​gmo/​9781561592630.article.28084 (last accessed 26/​8/​2019),
and the literature noted there.
5 Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, 248–​52 and the literature noted there; Erin Sullivan, “A
Disease unto Death: Sadness in the Time of Shakespeare,” in Emotions and Health, 1200–​1700,

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370 Ocker

an imagination directed toward an absent or departed love through a set of

routinized activities (rites of mourning), but time and space to perform them.
Grief had a psycho-​physical quality, and it had an obvious dependency on the
rituals discussed in this volume. It was a movement inside the self’s envelope
of skin, and mourning was its external, social channel. For on the outside, since
Carolingian times, the rites of mourning helped knit together not only the liv-
ing with the dead, but also the living with the living, the many people who
spoke or heard the names of the departed spoken in public memoriae.6 These
linkages are precisely what the Reformation seemed to challenge, by removing
the possibility of helping dead people with the suffragia by which an “emo-
tional community” was formed.7 But could Protestants destroy the bonds of
love between the living and the dead, or the living with the living? Did they
even want to? The religious controversy around Luther certainly intensified
Catholic memorials, but it also diverted others to different (Protestant) me-
morialization practices. And the anatomy of grief, the form and purpose of sad
motion, remained consistent from the late Middle Ages through Renaissance
and Reformation, even while the practices of mourning changed.
The following introductory account must be highly selective, even while it
tries to draw from scholarship that ranges across the medieval-​Renaissance di-
vide in diverse historical subfields, such as theology, science, and literature.
A first section describes a general consensus among medieval and Renaissance
intellectuals on emotion and grief as psycho-​mechanical motion. The chap-
ter then turns to religious dimensions of grief, namely, the centrality of this
emotion in a Christian view of ultimate human purpose. A concluding section
considers the continuity of sorrowful affect that predated and survived the
Reformation’s challenges to mourning rituals and customs.

1 The Anatomy of Grief

Scholars in medieval and early modern Europe tried to explain emotion in a

systematic, psycho-​mechanical manner. To them, grief, or any feeling, was a

ed. Elena Carrera (Leiden: 2013), 159–​83; Angus Gowland, “Medicine, Psychology, and the
Melancholic Subject in the Renaissance,” in Emotions and Health, 1200–​1700, ed. Elena Carrera
(Leiden: Brill, 2013), 185–​219.
6 Consider Joachim Wollasch, “Die mittelalterliche Lebensform der Verbrüderung,” in Memo-
ria: Der geschichtliche Zeugniswert des liturgischen Gedenkens im Mittelalter, eds K. Schmid
and J. Wollasch (Munich: 1984), 215–​32.
7 Adapting Barbara Rosenwein’s term, Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, 3–​10.

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The Motion of Another’s Death: Grief and Mourning 371

complex set of variable movements. The scholar’s view of grief was shaped by
an Aristotelian-​Hippocratic, hybrid view of the physical, sensitive body and
the powers of soul that lent a person self-​awareness and deliberate control.
The hybrid was transmitted to the Latin Middle Ages through Galen and Ara-
bic commentary on Aristotle.8 Aristotle’s De anima added depth to the psycho-
logical explanation of emotion, while new Renaissance translations of Galen
and growing interest in anatomy would eventually expand earlier accounts of
the medical conditions and physical consequences of affect.9 Aristotle’s Phys-
ics, first translated into Latin by James of Venice sometime between 1125 and
1150, provided a general theory of change as the movement between potential
and actual states of being. Translations of Arabic commentaries, written at the
tail end or in the immediate aftermath of the Abbasid Golden Age, in the 9th
and 10th centuries, and the abiding impact of Galen on medical science in the
west well into the Enlightenment stood on an Aristotelian foundation, allow-
ing scholars to think of the passions in a generally consistent manner.10 It went
like this.
Passions were movements of attention and affect toward desirable objects (for
example, the body of a loved one) or away from repugnant objects (for example,
the deadness of such a body), and these objects were either present to the senses,

8 Galen was mediated largely through Stephen of Antioch’s translation of the Book of Med-
icine or Royal Book (Regalis dispositio in the most common Latin translation) by ʿAlī ibn
al-​ʿAbbās al-​Mağūsī, known as Haly Abbas, which circulated in manuscript and was also
published at Venice in 1492 and Lyons in 1523. Aristotle was mediated largely through Wil-
liam of Moerbecke’s enormously influential retranslation of the Shifāʾ (Liber de anima in
the Latin west) by Ibn Sina, known as Avicenna. Simo Knuuttila, “Medieval Theories of the
Emotions,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), ed. E ­ dward
N. Zalta, https://​plato.stanford.edu/​archives/​sum2018/​entries/​medieval-​emotions/​ (last
accessed 29/​8/​2019). For the relevant section of Haly Abbas (his treatment of tempera-
ments) in an early edition, Haly Abbas, Liber totius medicine, trans. Stephen of Antioch,
ed. Michael de Capella (Lyons: 1523), 7r-​19v. Avicenna treated grief in his discussion of the
passions of the soul. Avicenna, Liber de anima seu sextus de naturalibus, pars 5, cap. 1, ed.
S. van Riet, 2 vols (Leiden: 1968, 1972), 2:69–​81, esp. 74. Sadness is discussed in conjunction
with fear, as accidents triggered by imagination and memory, ibid., 2:43, 58, and 61. Bodily
spirit is treated as a nexus with the powers of soul in his discussion of sensation, in con-
nection with the nervous system, ibid., 1:125–​126, 139, 214, and passim.
9 Nancy Siraisi, “The Faculty of Medicine,” in Universities in the Middle Ages, ed. Hilda De
Ridder-​Symoens, 4 vols (New York: 1992), 360–​87, here 382–​3; Knuuttila, “Medieval Theo-
ries of the Emotions,” provides an excellent summary of medieval views.
10 For changes in the 17th and 18th centuries, see Amy Schmittler, “17th and 18th Century
Theories of Emotions,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition),
ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://​plato.stanford.edu/​archives/​win2016/​entries/​emotions
-​17th18th/​ (last accessed 29/​8/​2019).

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372 Ocker

remembered, or imagined. Once the impact of Aristotle’s psychology came to be

felt, beginning in the early 13th and continuing into the 14th century, scholars be-
came increasingly preoccupied with the details of an affective psychology. They
differentiated the soul’s specific motions of attraction and aversion, analysed the
connections between particular feelings, studied the objects that elicited these
responses, and reconstructed the steps by which the responses progressed.11 They
also disagreed about many things. What exactly were the names of discrete emo-
tions, and how were they organized? While the names and their number varied, it
became common to group feelings as either “concupiscent” (the soul desiring x)
or “irascible” (the soul averting x). But was the movement of the soul a response to
an “intention” intrinsic to the provoking object, as Avicenna and, in adapted form,
Aquinas believed, or was it rather a response to a representation of the object, as
John Duns Scotus (d. 1308) argued? Was the movement a feature of the soul’s ca-
pacity to integrate and evaluate sense input (Aquinas) or a volitional dimension in
its power of intellect, which granted passion a place in rationality itself (Bonaven-
ture, Scotus)? Creative variations of opinion about narrow arguments relative to
such things, very generalized here, multiplied, just as opinions did in every topic
of theology in the generations after John Duns Scotus. Those arguments contin-
ued well into the 16th century. They helped scholars give account, for example, of
the arduousness of objects of the “irascible” passions, like fear or anger, feelings
often hard to get started but very hard to end. They allowed for an increasingly
complex view of the relationship of many shades of desire and aversion. And they
helped scholars try to analyse the possibility and limits of emotional control.
The psychology of emotion was coupled with a physiology. The soul was
thought to exercise its power upon the body by means of a vital, animal sub-
stance called spiritus, or πνεῦμα in Galen’s mother tongue, the word for air,
breath, or spirit. Galen thought it was essential to life (hence πνεῦμα ζωτικόν,
spiritus vitalis, life-​giving or vital spirit), a vaporous, corporeal fuel that the liv-
er, heart, and brain produced, mixed with blood, accumulated, refined, and
dispersed throughout the body –​the chest-​central, throbbing heart occupying
pride of place in the system.12 Spirit was essential to the physiology of emotion,

11 Summarized as classifications of emotions by Knuuttila, “Medieval Theories,” sections

3–​5, on which the following liberally paraphrased account relies.
12 “spiritus est subtilis uapor ex sanguine expressus, uirtute cordis incensus, ut sit uelut
flammula, suppeditans uim in exercendis actionibus.” Melanchthon, Commentarius de
anima (Wittenberg: 1540), f. 134r (=sig. R6r); on bodily “spirits” in general, ff. 134r-​136r (=sig.
R6r-​R8r); ff. 136r-​177v (=sig. R8r-​Z1v) for a Galenic account of the physical basis of the
soul’s operations; ff. 117v-​197v (= sig. Z1v-​b5v) treats the passions. Also Sachiko Kusukawa,
The Transformation of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: 1995), 75–​123; G. Verbeke, “Le ‘De
anima’ d’Avicenne, une conception spiritualiste de l’homme,” in Avicenna, Liber de anima

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The Motion of Another’s Death: Grief and Mourning 373

because it formed the tangible link between the physical body and the soul,
the soul being a name for the subsistent powers (thus a “substance”) that dis-
tinguished animals and plants from non-​living things. Willpower, a faculty of
soul unique to animals and possessed by humans in a more deliberative, “ra-
tional” configuration, could directly affect the production and flow of spiritus,
while spiritus in turn moved the physical body. So too, the physical conditions
of the body could constrict or improve this “spiritual” current, while the force
or weakness of the current could rebound onto the soul and affect the actions
that settled into, or tried to escape, the rutted pathways of habit. That is, hu-
man biology was thought to influence a person’s ability to think or exercise
willpower, and consciousness was thought to influence biology. And this, by
the way, was basically thought to be an animal trait, not only a human one.
Emotions belonged to a comprehensive “ecology.” At any given time, the
body’s “temperament” or “complexion” consisted of a physical proportion of
mixed substances in living flesh, the four “humours”: blood, yellow bile, black
bile, and phlegm. The four humours were physically associated with the four
elements of air, fire, earth, and water. The natural qualities of the four ele-
ments –​dry, hot, cold, and wet –​were made physically present in the body’s
mixtures of humours and in the natural world, while the gyrations of heavenly
bodies, among other things, also impacted the mixtures of dry, hot, cold, and
wet, most obviously in the four seasons of the year. Accordingly, one’s physical
“complexion” was affected by both its individual physical tendencies and its in-
teraction with the environment that conditioned it at every point of intersec-
tion between the body and its surroundings, from eating, breathing, the way
one directed one’s five senses (hearing the right kind of music was healthy),
and just inhabiting a specific geography and weather.13 There was a physical
connection between both realms of operation, the individual, embodied per-
son and the universe.
In this medieval-​Renaissance conception, the soul naturally “moved” to-
ward or away from real and imagined stimuli. The motion could be a sponta-
neous response to circumstances or prompted and conditioned by deliberate

seu sextus de naturalibus, ed. S. van Riet, 2 vols (Leiden: 1968, 1972), 2:1*-​73*, esp. 54*-​56*;
Avicenna, De medicina cordialibus, tractatus 1, c­ hapters 7–​8, and the concluding section of
the cantica Avicennae included in the volume. See also Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling,
144–​168; Nicholas E. Lombardo, “Emotions and Psychological Health in Aquinas,” in
Emotions and Health, 1200–​1700, ed. Elena Carrera (Leiden: 2013), 95–​146; Alan R. Perreiah,
“Scotus on Human Emotions,” Franciscan Studies 56 (1998), 325–​45.
13 Penelope Gouk, “Music and Spirit in Early Modern Thought,” in Emotions and Health,
1200–​1700, ed. Elena Carrera (Leiden: 2013), 221–​39.

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374 Ocker

choice, by habit, and by the balance of humours and the production of vital
spirit.14 When a passion was “felt,” one was sensing an increase or decrease of
spirit in the chest, in the diaphragm, in the head, or throughout one’s frame, as
a consequence of a motion happening in the soul, and the bodily motion re-
bounded on the soul’s apparatus itself, shifting or reinforcing its natural or ha-
bitual desires and aversions. Feelings were so changeable because soul, body,
and environment were in constant flux.
Scholars could therefore agree that, whether prompted spontaneously, con-
sciously, unconsciously, from a disappointed hope or an actual loss, sadness
and grief were both cognitive-​emotional and physical. When Avicenna said
that the power of judgement becomes “thin” in a person hurting with moaning
and sadness, contributing to a crushing dissolution, he meant it literally, be-
cause sadness was actually linked to the operation of the heart, which made it
particularly dangerous.15 His psychology, which delineated emotions and their
connection to sense input, memory, deliberation, and will, suggested how one
emotion could progress into a distinctly other feeling, for example, moving
from fear to grief.16 For Aquinas, in a more purely psychological explanation
of feeling, sadness was no more harmful to the body than other passions were,
but sadness nevertheless impacted all the operations of the soul. Contrary to
Avicenna, he thought it was connected not to fear, which reacted against a
future bad, but arose directly from loss in the present.17 Although Aquinas’s
treatment of the passions in the Summa theologiae was arguably larger and
more detailed than any other medieval discussion, it left room for compet-
ing opinions. Among the most influential alternative approaches, John Duns
Scotus distinguished between sadness as an expression of present desire (“one
grieves desiringly” with “care for an object of desire”) and sadness as an expres-
sion of aversion to a future bad result or experience (“one grieves about ‘what
cannot be claimed,’ when there is no power of claiming”), each of which had
noticeably different physical effects.

14 Consider Melanchthon’s De anima commentary of 1540 and Juan Luis Vives’s De anima
et vita, which both recognized the overlap between Galen’s medical description of the
passions and Aristotle’s “psychological” one, trying, in effect, to coordinate Galen and
Aristotle. Juan Luis Vives, The Passions of the Soul: The Third Book of De anima et vita,
trans. Carlos G. Noreña (Lewiston: 1990).
15 Avicenna, Liber canonis, de medicinis cordialibus, et cantica, trans. Gerard of Cremona
(Basel: 1556), 1043–​4, 1062.
16 Avicenna, De anima, pars 5, c­ hapter 1, 2:73–​74.
17 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Prima Secundae, questions 36–​37, S. Thomae
Aquinatis Opera omnia iussu impensaque Leonis XIII P. M. edita, 47 vols (Rome: 1882–​
2014), 6:249–​256; Lombardo, “Emotions and Psychological Health in Aquinas,” 19–​46.

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The Motion of Another’s Death: Grief and Mourning 375

Sadness of the desiring kind involves a different interaction with an or-

gan in the sensitive part than does sadness of the averting kind. The de-
siring kind comes with a restriction, since desire is set against delay, while
sadness of the averting kind happens with a warming, which is an accu-
mulation of blood around the heart.18

And this meant that, involving different organs, the two kinds of sadness could
be remedied by different contrary motions in a parallel way. They did, Scotus
believed, different things in the body, and they felt very different.
The payoff of studying grief in such terms, at once psychological and physi-
cal, is conveniently suggested by Robert Burton, the Elizabethan writer whose
massive study of melancholy represents a highpoint of Renaissance emotional
theorizing. Burton described, in unprecedented detail, the physical symptoms
of melancholy and the food, environmental conditions, physical health, and
internal affective networks that conspired to undermine the contented equi-
librium of humours and feelings.19 To him, depression, self-​harm, or suicide
could be triggered by the death of someone near. But this was systemically
connected to lesser losses, such as the departure of a visiting friend, which
drove some people to wailing and a deep emotional gutter.20 One harm could
succeed or compound another. Emotions were also linked to each other by
counterposing pathways. The Renaissance commentator Jodocus Badius once
noted that laughter was mingled with sorrow, and mourning occupied the
endpoint of joy.21 A miracle investigation from the mid-​14th-​century Venaissin
region, in the south of France, discussed a terrible case of maternal despair, in
which the mother, mourning the death of a child, teetered between murderous
rage against the attending wet nurse and the desire to show her mercy.22 The
quixotic nature of emotional linkages gave affect its dramatic flux.
What matters most to the cultural historian examining death and dying is
not necessarily the growth and diversity of taxonomies of emotion or the exact

18 John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, iii, d. 34, in Opera omnia, ed. Commissio Scotistica, 21 vols
(Vatican City: 1950–​2013), 10: 198.
19 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Philadelphia: 1883), 232–​59 and passim.
20 Burton, Anatomy, 218–​22.
21 Iodocus Badius Ascensius, In Parthenicen Catharinariam Baptiste Mantuani expositio,
book 2, ed. A.P. Orbán, cccm, 353 vols (Turnhout: 1992), 119A: 443–​583, line 429; book 3,
line 1340. In general, Paul White, Jodocus Badius Ascensius: Commentary, Commerce and
Print in the Renaissance (New York: 2013).
22 Nicole Archambeau, “Tempted to Kill: Miraculous Consolation for a Mother after the
Death of Her Infant Daughter,” in Emotions and Health, 1200–​1700, ed. Elena Carrera
(Leiden: 2013), 47–​66. For Badius and Mantuan, White, Jodocus, 235–​42.

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376 Ocker

mechanical differences medieval and Renaissance scholars argued in their con-

cepts of grief, which belonged to rigors of the classroom or intellectual salon
and all of which are beyond the scope of this chapter. What matters is a consen-
sus that sadness was not merely an emotional condition with a physical expres-
sion, but rather belonged to a comprehensive and dynamic psycho-​physiology,
a comprehensive system of constantly moving parts. Even theologians deeply
sceptical of the value of natural philosophy in Christian doctrine, like Martin
Luther and John Calvin, seemed to accept a basic medical consensus on feeling
and spiritus, which had to influence their understanding of a spiritual and affec-
tive vocabulary, when they read words like spirit, heart, or sadness in the Bible
or repeated them in their pamphlets and sermons.23 It meant that the embod-
ied feeling of grief moved with mutable elements of soul, body, and their social,
inter-​psychic, and physical surroundings –​a self and an environment in motion.

2 “Blessed are those who mourn”

In medieval and early modern Christianity, grief was a privileged emotion,

which is easily illustrated by the third beatitude, “blessed are those who
mourn.” The beatitude associated the feeling of religious grief, lugere, with pu-
rity, rather than coupling two contrary feelings as such, sadness and its joyous
remedy. Jerome’s translation of this beatitude, beati qui lugent for the Greek
original’s μακάριοι οἱ πενθοῡντες, “happy are those who wail,” tried to preserve
the irony of the original Jesus-​saying, when he chose to render the Greek
term for “happy,” “prosperous,” or “blissful” with the Latin beati, “gladdened”
or “fortunate.” But under the weight of a Christian theory of salvation, by the
high Middle Ages beati came to mean sancti, the very truly and permanently
happy, namely the saints in heaven. In canon law, the word acquired a spe-
cialized meaning, which remains the official teaching of the Catholic church
today: beati were those who had not yet been acknowledged as saints by legal
procedures that emerged in the high Middle Ages to confirm their intercessory
powers.24 It turns out that this technical difference between sancti and beati

23 Christopher Ocker, “The Physiology of Spirit in the Reformation: Medical Consensus and
Protestant Theologians,” in Miracles Revisited: New Testament Miracle Stories and their
Concepts of Reality, eds Stefan Alkier and Annette Weissenrieder (Berlin: 2013), 115–​57.
Christopher Ocker, “Spirit, Writers, and Biblical Readers in ‘the Practical Circumstances of
Life’: A Political Hermeneutic,” in Sola scriptura, ed. Stefan Alkier (Tübingen: 2019), 59–​82.
24 Matt. 5:3; Jacques Verger, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (New York:
1997), 85–​103.

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The Motion of Another’s Death: Grief and Mourning 377

(officially acknowledged vs unconfirmed saints) did little to weaken the syn-

onymity of both words in popular usage. While canon law regarded the beati as
possibly dodgy objects of local devotion, popular religion saw beati simply as
saints.25 They were, in other words, extraordinarily holy dead people.
Accordingly, the most widely used scholastic commentary on the Bible,
the Ordinary Gloss, treated the eight beatitudes as a roadmap marking the
prime qualities of a holy soul, namely the seven virtues, the first and last
beatitudes treating a prime virtue of humility and the remaining virtues
sandwiched between humility in the first and last.26 They set this species
of sadness in a context of salvation theory. The blessed who mourn in the
third beatitude felt not just grief, but sorrow “for their sins and the sins of
others”: “The person who mourns for sins or on account of longing for heav-
en earns consolation, and no other,” said the Ordinary Gloss.27 Their conso-
lation was eternal joy in the Holy Spirit or the solace of being a saint. This
reiterated a common patristic theme, as Thomas Aquinas would soon point
out, in quotations he took from Ambrose, Chrysostom, and Jerome. In his
commentary on this passage, Aquinas used Augustine and a gloss by Anselm
of Laon (quoted anonymously) to expand the idea, saying that mourning was
also provoked by the loss of cherished possessions, which the blessed give up
in exchange for consolation from the Holy Spirit. Luctus (sorrow, mourning)
involved two kinds of compunction, according to Aquinas, for the miseries of
this world (an irascible aversion to the bad, by the way) and desire for heaven
(concupiscent), and only the poor and meek, who do not desire the world,
could feel this luctus.28
The Ordinary Gloss and Aquinas expressed what remained an utterly common
view of grief among theologians and spiritual writers. The church was a domus
luctus, the early Cistercian Aelred of Rievaulx once said in a sermon for the Feast
of the Circumcision, a house of mourning for mortality, a consequence of sin,
but also the house where Christ was born, and therefore “a house of joy, a house

25 Verger, Sainthood, 95.

26 Glossa ordinaria, at Matt. 5:3. Glossae scripturae sacrae-​electonicae (Gloos-​E), https://​
gloss-​e.irht.cnrs.fr/​php/​editions_​chapitre.php?livre=../​sources/​editions/​GLOSS-​liber
55.xmlandchapitre=55_​5 (last accessed 22/​8/​2019). This electronic edition reproduces
the 1481 version edited by Adolf Rusch and published at Strasbourg. For recent scholar-
ship on the gloss, see Christopher Ocker and Kevin Madigan, “After Beryl Smalley: Thirty
Years of Medieval Exegesis,” Journal of the Bible and Its Reception 2 (2015), 87–​130,
here 91–​4.
27 Glossa ordinaria, at Matt. 5:5, reading the interlinear and marginal comments together.
28 Thomas Aquinas, Catena aurea (Mt.), eds Martin Morard et coll. (Paris: 2019), CMT5#3,
https://​gloss-​e.irht.cnrs.fr, version of 25.3.1.2019 (accessed 22/​8/​2019).

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378 Ocker

of mirth, a house of laughter” among the sinners Christ had saved.29 One or an-
other version of the sin-​specific form of grieving could be found in the work of
many different preachers, commentators, and spiritual writers, for example, Ber-
nardino of Siena, Denys the Carthusian, Jan Hus, the devotio moderna adherent
Arnold Gheyloven, Desiderius Erasmus, the Dominican theologian Tommaso de
Vio Cajetan, Martin Luther, and the Puritan Robert Bolton.30 The motion of grief
revealed a soul’s comprehension of the ultimate cause of death, the transgression
of Adam and Eve and the transmission of Original Sin to all human beings. Rec-
ognizing this connection began the ultimate life-​turn of conversion from grief to
permanent beatitude. The goal of spiritual counsellors was therefore diversion-
ary, to move the mourner from “profane consolations” to “mourn for the remis-
sion of sin, for the salvation of good neighbours and the condemnation of evil
ones, for liberation from their exile, for the evasion of future punishment, and for
obtaining future glory.”31 In the best case, grief should be embraced and directed
to achieve its holy purpose.32 For the body was a medium, a contact point, in
which the holy and the profane manifested themselves.33
But the animal boundaries of emotional instinct were characterized by
flux, and salvation was discovered within them. Peter von Moos, author of a

29 Aelred Rievaulx, Sermones, ed. G. Raciti, 3 vols, cccm vol. 2C (Turnhout: 1989, 2001,
2012), 2C:43.
30 Bernardino of Siena, Tractatus de octo beatitudinibus euangelicis, sermo 1, art. 3, in S.
Bernardini Senensis Opera omnia (Quaracchi: 1959), 6:343, 347; Denys the Carthusian,
Commentaria in Psalmos omnes Dauidicos, Opera omnia, 42 vols (Monstrolius: 1896–​1912),
6:326, 380, 526, 587; Jan Hus, Postilla adumbrate, sermo 127 (in festo omnium sanctorum),
and sermo 128 (in festo omnium sanctorum), ed. B. Ryba, CCCM 261 (Turnhout: 1992), 506,
508; Arnoldus Gheyloven, Gnotosolitos paruus, ed. A.G. Weiler, cccm 212 (Turnhout: 2008)
393; Desiderius Erasmus, Paraphrasis in Evangelium Matthaei (Cologne: 1522), sign. g4r-​g4v;
Martin Luther in the defense of his 95 theses he produced in late spring 1518, “Resolutiones
disputationum de indulgentiarum virtute, conclusio 1,” WA 1:530–​531. Tommaso de Vio
Cajetan, in an interesting gloss on the standard interpretation, dissociated luctus in the
beatitude from the ordinary emotion of sadness, such as people feel when they observe
the anniversaries of the dead, but described it as the controlled and guided emotion of
those who feel sorrow for sin, the affect of the penitent who contrast sorrow in this life
with the joys of heaven. Tommaso de Vio Cajetan, Evangelia cum Commentariis Caietani
(Venice: 1530), 11v. Consider also Calvin in note 32, below. Another variation can be detected
or the Puritan Jeremiah Burroughs (d. 1646), for whom the blessed mourner recognizes not
the penalty of sin but the hand of providence in one’s sufferings. Jeremiah Burroughs, The
Saints Happiness (London: 1660), 94; Stephen Pender, “Rhetoric, Grief, and the Imagination
in Early Modern England,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 43 (2010), 54–​85, here 55.
31 Gheyloven, Gnotosolitos paruus, 393.
32 Gheyloven, Gnotosolitos paruus, 394.
33 Christian Kiening, Fülle und Mangel. Medialität im Mittelalter (Zurich: 2016), 244.

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The Motion of Another’s Death: Grief and Mourning 379

two-​volume study of consolation literature and death, finds medieval grief to

move between opposite poles, between

reason and passion, denial or justification of tears, stress on the com-

mandment to love or the commandment to believe, pastoral responsi-
bility or compassionate participation, rejection of death-​wish for com-
munity’s sake or envy for the blessed, certainty of salvation or anxiety in
connection with the fate of the dead.34

Christian Kiening observes that medieval writers tried not to smooth over such
tension, but rather to give it voice. He cites Bernard of Clairvaux’s mourning of
Brother Gerhard, included in a sermon on the Song of Songs and the dialogue of
Lawrence of Durham on the death of his friend as examples of the dialectic of
grief and consolation. He also notes a growing prevalence since the 12th century
of themes that intensified affect associated with death in salvation history: the
expulsion from Paradise, where Adam and Eve run with horror from the garden
toward death, the suffering of Job, Herod’s massacre of the children of Bethlehem,
the mourners in scenes of Lazarus, and of the course Christ’s passion, where in-
creasingly bystanders are drawn into the affects of participants in the event.35 Lay
literature cannot be juxtaposed to “the affective praxis of clerical thought-​and
life-​worlds.” Clerical discourse had embraced a Christianized Stoic repression or
relativizing of grief already in late antiquity, and the current continued in later
concern for decorous grieving.36 That concern could only increase as preoccupa-
tion with emotion steadily grew over our period –​and grow it did. A tendency to
portray “the ‘factual’ external world as an ‘experienced’ internal world” has even
been detected in account books and diaries, family albums, autobiographies, and
etiquette books, all of which increased in number after 1500.37

34 Peter von Moos, Consolatio. Studien zur mittellateinischen Trostliterature nd zum Problem
der christlichen Trauer, 2 vols (Münster: 1971–​1972), 1:75. Quoted by Christian Kiening,
“Aspekte einer Geschichte der Trauer im Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit,” in Mittelalter
und Moderne: Entdeckung und Rekonstruktion der mitelalterlichen Welt, ed. Peter Segl
(Sigmaringen: 1997), 31–​53, here 39; Han Baltussen, “Nicholas of Modruš’s De consolatione
(1465–​1466): A New Approach to Grief Management,” in Ordering Emotions 1100–​1800, ed.
Susan Broomhall (Leiden: 2015), 105–​120.
35 Kiening, “Aspekte,” 39–​41, also for what follows.
36 Susan Karant-​Nunn, The Reformation of Feeling (New York: 2010), 194–​6, 210–​14. Philippe
Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (London: 1977), 144–​5, 162–​3.
37 Kiening, “Aspekte,” 41, 47, and passim. Kiening cites (from Richard C. Trexler, Public
Life in Renaissance Florence [Ithaca: 1991], 172–​185) diverse materials by merchants
and clergy: Giovanni di Pagolo di Bartolomeo Morelli; Ludwig von Diesbach; Lucas
Rem; Magdalena Paumgartner; Balthasar Sibenhar; Johannes Tepl. Consider also the

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380 Ocker

Other stories explored the tensions between the passive virtue of persecut-
ed women and a virility associated with their patient righteousness. These are
perhaps best known in Philippe de Rémi’s 13th-​century novella, La Manekine,
which presents a woman who was wrongfully maimed and survives long, ex-
ilic despair, before finding herself restored to good fortune. They are known
in Boccaccio’s Griselda, a mother who bears patiently her husband’s demand
that each of their daughters be killed: her patient concessions to that perverse
man were finally rewarded by the discovery that the daughters lived, and the
husband was only putting her to a test.38 Stories like these and their varia-
tions valorised patient grieving, but also transferred virtues associated with
widowhood to marriage, challenged the cult of beauty and teasing affection,
and could elevate women as political agents, Yasmina Foehr-​Janssens argues.
Laments by Mary Magdalene and the Blessed Virgin during the crucifixion,
which arose in the 12th century and continued as a staple of passion plays
and devotional literature in European vernaculars, toyed with the distinct nu-
ances of the Magdalene’s regret for sin and the Virgin’s despair at her son’s
suffering.39
The “emotionalization” of religion can be easily tracked from Bernard of
Clairvaux to 18th-​century pietism. It has been associated mostly with the
feeling of love.40 But it was also associated with grief, as displayed in diverse
genres. Medieval lullaby lyrics, for example, “transform the emotional intima-
cy of the first interactions between mother and child into a lesson in parental
mourning.”41 This is reinforced by two general characteristics of English nativ-
ity lyrics, the fact that they always referred to the crucifixion and their stress
on the emotional interaction between Mary and Christ child. Self-​control,
however, was both relative and variable, and much evidence can be found of

role of guilds and fraternities in urban memoria. Christian Kuhn, “Totengedenken und
Stiftungsmemoria: Familiäres Vermächtnis und Gedächtnisbildung der Nürnberger
Tucher (1450–​1550),” in Haus-​und Familienbücher in der städtischen Gesellschaft des
Spätmittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Birgit Studt (Cologne: 2007), 121–​34, and the
literature noted there. Veronique Pasche, “Pour le salut de mon âme”: Les Lausannois face
à la mort (XIVe siècle) (Lausanne: 1989), 86–​90.
38 Yasmina Foehr-​Janssens, La veuve en majesté (Geneva: 2000), 263–​273 and passim.
39 Peter Dronke, “Laments of the Maries: From the Beginnings to the Mystery Plays,” in
Intellectuals and Poets in Medieval Europe (Rome: 1992), 457–​89.
40 Otto Gründler and Ulrike Strasser, “Die Emotionalisierung der Religion von Bernhard von
Clairvaux bis zum Pietismus,” in Empfindsamkeit, ed. Klaus P. Hansen (Passau: 1990), 15–​33.
41 Amy N. Vines, “Lullaby as Lament: Learning to Mourn in Middle English Nativity
Lyrics,” in Laments for the Lost in Medieval Literature, eds Jane Tolmie and M.J. Toswell
(Turnhout: 2010), 201–​23.

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The Motion of Another’s Death: Grief and Mourning 381

scholars reacting against bottled up grief.42 Even John Calvin, who document-
ed the influence of Stoicism in his first academic publication, a commentary
on Seneca, insisted that weeping was a natural and appropriate response to
suffering.43 They understood the mobility of grief, a “dialectic of mourning,”
and “the field of movement of all affective phenomena determined by the
mortality of a love object.”44 This dynamic field of movement has a western
genealogy that includes the Iliad, the Gospel of John, Dante, Shakespeare, Ma-
dame de Lafayette, Edmund Spenser, Joseph Conrad, and Jacques Lacan. It
is motivated by what originated as the Platonic hierarchical arrangement of
libidinal object to love, in which the highest love is imperturbable and tran-
scendent, but in Christian sources stands in tension with the desired individ-
ual. Tension begets motion.
The mobility of grief can be illustrated by the foremost exemplar of Chris-
tian mourning, Mary, the mother of Jesus, and by one of the most striking

42 Christian Kiening adduces evidence from Italian consolation literature, which multi-
plied from the early 15th century, drawing on George McClure’s Sorrow and Consolation
in Renaissance Humanism (Princeton: 1990): Coluccio Salutati’s argument with Francesco
Zabarella (1400/​ 1) and Giannozzo Manetti’s Dialogus consolatorius (1438). Kiening
also adds evidence from Central Europe, namely the Vienna Franciscan Guilhelmus
Savonensis’s An mortui sint lugendi an non (1453) for the Klosterneuburg canon Wolfgang
Winthager, mourning the loss of his mother and his friend Johannes Schwarz (notable,
says Kiening, not for Guilhelmus’s consolatory rhetoric but for Winthager’s –​a character
in the dialogue –​attachment to grieving); and Heinrich Lur’s argument against Hermann
Schedel, defending the compatibility of grief with the right ordering of reason and will;
and even Jean Gerson’s Tractatus de consolatione in mortem amicorum, and Geiler von
Kaysersberg’s German translation of it, which complains of the uselessness and harm-
fulness of wailing and sadness, but nevertheless consider mourning natural. Kiening,
“Aspekte,” 50–​3.
43 Calvin, otherwise anxious to stress the importance of humble remorse for sin, thought
mourning in the third beatitude was caused by persecution of those who follow
Christ’s teachings. John Calvin, Commentarius in harmonium evangelicam, Matt. 5 and
Luke 6, Calvini Opera, 59 vols., eds Guillaume Baum, Eduard Cunitz, and Eduard Reus
(Braunschweig: 1863–​1900), 45:162. His French version of the commentary (which stressed
an affective interpretation by using the terms bien-​heureux for beati and qui pleurant for
qui lugent, “happy are those who weep”) described the suffering of people in “the school
of our Saviour” at some length and stressed how natural it was to weep when persecuted.
John Calvin, Harmonie évangélique, sermon 62, Calvini Opera, 46:771–​784, esp. 781–​784.
44 For this and the following, Henry Staten, Eros in Mourning (Baltimore: 1995), xi for the
quotation, 1–​20 and passim for the argument. The source of the notion of mourning as
loss of an object of libidinal desire: Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917),
The Standard Edition to the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and
trans. James Strachey, 24 vols (London: 1953–​1974), 14:243–​258. Also Julia Kristeva, Black
Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: 1989).

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382 Ocker

­f igure 13.1 
Rogier van der Weyden, Descent from the Cross, ca. 1436
source: © museo del prado, madrid (used with permission)

portraits of her sorrow from the early Renaissance, Rogier van der Weyden’s
Descent from the Cross.
Art historians have long been aware of the painting’s argument for Mary’s
co-​redemptive compassion with Christ.45 It is obvious in how her body mir-
rors the posture of her dead son and Saviour. But the painting also freezes a
riot of movement between distinct forces. One force presses downward, in
the two central, falling bodies, in everyone’s downcast gazes, in the elaborate
drapery of several figures, in the contorted arms and bent knees of Mary Mag-
dalene at the right, and in the falling tears that litter the faces of Joseph of Ari-
mathea, holding Christ’s legs, and Mary’s half-​sister Mary Cleophas, the veiled
woman at the far left with her eyes buried in a kerchief.46 A single tear eludes

45 O.G. von Simson, “Compassio and Co-​redemptio in Roger van der Weyden’s Descent from the
Cross,” The Art Bulletin 35 (1953), 9–​16. Also Jennifer R. Hammerschmidt, “Beyond Vision: The
Impact of Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross,” in Religion and the Senses in Early
Modern Europe, eds Wietse de Boer and Christine Göttler (Leiden: 2013), 201–​18.
46 Following identifications made by the Prado description, which includes an extensive
bibliography. L. Campbell, “Rogier van der Weyden,” Museo Nacional del Prado, 2015,

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The Motion of Another’s Death: Grief and Mourning 383

self-​control, falling from the right eye of the Apostle John, who reaches for the
fallen Virgin’s shoulder; and another tear drops over the cheek of Mary’s other
half-​sister, Mary Salome, the woman who helps John hold the falling Virgin in
her imitative pose.
A second motion moves bilaterally. Amy Powell poignantly observes that
Christ is being taken to the right, while Mary falls to the left, implying that the
motions are about to proceed beyond opposite sides of the crowded frame:

In the centre of the composition, there is a hole that will expand as the
centrifugal movement of the figures prevails, moving the centre to the
periphery and eventually completely out of view. That surprisingly deep
space between Christ and the fainting Virgin, which is filled with the im-
possibly abundant folds of Mary’s robe, stands as a portent of what is to
come: the scattering of the image to the four winds.47

Mary is vanquished by grief, collapsing under the impact of a dangerous con-

traction of heart, a depletion of spirit that mirrors the Son’s loss of life, who
“bowed his head and surrendered his spirit” (et inclinator capite tradidit spir-
itum, John 19:30). But the falling body of a decidedly extraordinary human
corpse sets the entire ensemble in downward and sideways motions.
Early viewers would have ‘read’ this painting with an array of familiar scenes
depicting Mary as she endured the passion of her Son in mind. In this con-
text, van der Weyden’s portrait shows a woman whose inner turmoil reaches
its mortifying collapse, but numerous narratives of Mary’s trials stood behind
this moment. They involved a tension between two distinct Mariological tradi-
tions, Reindert Falkenburg points out. In one tradition, suggested by Ambrose
and promoted by Bernard of Clairvaux, Mary contained her grief in exemplary
self-​control. In another, promoted by much late medieval passional devotion,
Mary shared Christ’s suffering. Both traditions found support in the late Middle
Ages.48 Moreover, taken as a whole, late medieval painting had Mary display

74–​81 at: https://​www.museodelprado.es/​en/​the-​collection/​art-​work/​the-​descent-​from-​

the-​cross/​856d822a-​dd22-​4425-​bebd-​920a1d416aa7 (last accessed 1/​ 9/​
2019). See also
Moshe Barasch, “The Crying Face,” Artibus et Historiae 8/​15 (1987), 21–​36, stressing the
function of tears as indicators of sanctity.
47 Amy Powell, “Errant Image: Rogier van der Weyden’s Deposition,” Art History 29 (2006),
540–​62, here 557.
48 Reindert Falkenburg, “Decorum of Grief: Notes on the Representation of Mary at the
Cross in Late Medieval Netherlandish Literature and Painting,” in Icon to Cartoon: A
Tribute to Sixten Ringbom, eds M.T. Knapas and A. Ringbom (Helsinki: 1995), 65–​89, here
66–​7; K.C.J.W. de Vries, De Mariaklachten (Zwolle: 1964), 262–​5 note 11.

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384 Ocker

a spectrum of feelings, ranging from numbed acedia to inconsolable weeping.

She displayed an internal conflict “with the feelings of decorum of the com-
piler or with those of the intended audience for the book. That is the problem
that faced the writer of a Passion narrative and which can be seen operating
in a number of Vita Christi tractates.”49 Devotional writing described different
forms of emotional flux. Some writers saw Mary’s grief concentrated in deco-
rous weeping until she was overcome and fainted.50 Others portrayed a moth-
er seized by conflicted feelings, silent when others wailed at the crucifixion,
but kissing the drops of blood falling from the cross so ardently that her face
was soon covered with blood.51 One Dutch version of the Seven Sorrows of the
Virgin alleged that when the cross was erected, Mary cried till her eyes bled,
then later cried herself into a faint when Christ expired, yet somehow avoided
a grotesque show.52 Mary’s grief-​management, her ‘mannered’ fainting at the
cross, was sometimes contrasted with Mary Magdalene’s clamorous behaviour
(her weeping lacks control in van der Weyden’s Descent).53 But taken together
such scenes rendered the idea of a mourner’s holy stasis absurd. Grief involved
a complex of emotions, and emotions were movements of body and soul.
The physical environment of the painting localized its portrayal of grief in
a geography. When Amy Powell refers to the scattering of the image to four
winds, she alludes to the movement of the work from its original home in the
church of Leuven’s hoofdgilde of crossbowmen, one of the most prominent
guilds of the city and all of Brabant, to the court of Mary of Hungary by the
1540s, and finally to the Spanish court of her nephew Philip ii in 1564; and
she refers to the more than fifty copies of the image that are known to have
been made.54 It is tempting, but very speculative, to think of this as a result
of an impetus invested in the panel by the emotions it so powerfully portrays.
Such intrinsic power seems less speculative in the painting’s early use, how-
ever, when it adorned the altar of the chapel of the crossbowmen’s guild. Jen-
nifer Hammerschmidt, like most art historians who have examined the work,

49 Falkenburg, “Decorum,” 68.

50 John of Caulibus [Pseudo-​Bonaventure], Meditations on the Life of Christ, lxxviii, lxxix,
trans. Francis X. Taney, Anne Miller and C. Mary Stallings-​Taney (Asheville: 2000), 256,
258. Josse Clichtove, De dolore beatae Virginis in passione Filii sui (Paris: 1513), 67v-​69v.
51 Dutch variations of Ludolf of Saxony’s Life of Christ: Dit is dleven ons heeren Jhesu cristi,
published at Antwerp in 1536, was the version with Mary’s face covered in Christ’s blood,
which the translator apparently considered “decent and well mannered.” Falkenburg,
“Decorum,” 69.
52 Falkenburg, “Decorum,” 70.
53 Falkenburg, “Decorum,” 71.
54 Hammerschmidt, “Beyond Vision,” 201–​18 and the literature noted there.

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The Motion of Another’s Death: Grief and Mourning 385

points out the importance of Marian devotion to the guild and the prominent
place the crossbowmen enjoyed in the city’s famous annual procession on the
Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. They marched in full armour near the end of the
train, just before the Leuven magistrates. During the feast, the guild retreated
to their chapel for mass. Hammerschmidt argues that the painting culminated
scenes represented during the procession in tableaux vivant, on wagons, and
in open air performances of scenes from the Virgin’s life and the crucifixion, all
of which entangled the sufferings of mother and child.55 The theatricality of
the procession had grown since the end of the 14th century, with an increase
in the number of tableaux and new plays along the route to further elaborate
themes in the tableaux just at this time. The Descent from the Cross was not
included in the performances of the feast day, so that the painting seemed to
add an ersatz display to conclude Mary’s suffering through the crucifixion in
the crossbowmen’s church. The events of the day, an expression of the growth
of interest in Mary’s co-​passionate suffering, which was attested by sermon
literature and drama, intensified the viewer’s empathy, or as Hammerschmidt
says, “the rendering of pain for the purpose of sensory evocation” and “a phys-
ical experience as well as an emotional one.”56 Van der Weyden set the scene
within the frame of a painted niche, as though its sainted figures moved like
living relics on a wall of the crossbowmen’s church. The movement crowded
within and toward the exterior of the frame suggests movement in a church.
The crossbowmen would have ended their procession before this painting, and
family members would have grieved lost loved ones while hearing masses be-
fore the panel’s altar. The communal rites of Marian devotion in Leuven posi-
tion the scene’s riot of empathetic motion as an endpoint of transits across the
town, a time when guildmembers would disperse and an occasion to perform
the emotional work of separation.
As in pictorial art, so in literature: grief was a movement among motions.
Christian Kiening describes a growing tendency in courtly literature since the

55 Hammerschmidt, “Beyond Vision,” 201–​18; Mark Trowbridge earlier suggested that the
posing in the Descent may mimic the scenes of models in frozen poses commonly por-
trayed on carts in Flemish processions. Mark Trowbridge, “The Stadtschilder and the
Serment: Rogier van der Weyden’s ‘Deposition’ and the Crossbowmen of Louvain,” Dutch
Crossing 23 (1999), 5–​28, here 12. For the importance of similar theatrical performances
in Ghent for the interpretation of Hugo van der Goes’ Lamentation, see Mark Trowbridge,
“Sin and Redemption in Late-​Medieval Art and Theater: The Magdalen as Role Model
in Hugo van der Goe’s Vienna Diptych,” in Push Me, Pull You: Imaginative and Emotional
Interaction in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art, eds Sarah Blick and Laura D. Gelfand, 2
vols (Leiden: 2011), 1:415–​45.
56 Hammerschmidt, “The Impact,” 214.

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386 Ocker

late 12th century to probe “not only the linguistic, gestural, and situational mo-
dalities of the articulation of grief,” but also to show “the grief of the living as
an uncircumscribed power, whose ‘lethal energy’ is not simply to be divert-
ed step by step to an internal world.”57 It poses a stark contrast with a much-​
discussed “loss of grief” among the moderns. Grief was dynamic. A study
of grief in late medieval French art and literature concluded that, although
mourning had settled into patterned gestures and narrative themes (“among
them the ‘no greater grief’ topos, the grief of Nature, the cloak raised to the
eye, the raised eyebrow, the difficulty of articulating intense emotion”), “the
expression of grief and the representation of mourning are not uniform during
this period. Grief is not conventionalized out of existence. …”58 The sorrow
could be processed by reading and writing. Nadia Margolis sees, in Christine de
Pisan’s Lamentacion sur les maux de la France (1410), the offer of a motivational
strategy:

Throughout this lament, her frequent and continuous references to tears

render the effusion aggressive rather than traditionally passive, as she
strives to move her aristocratic readers towards more effective action,
especially her female ones so prone to feeling helpless because of their
femininity.59

In Christine’s Heures de contemplacion de la Passion de Nostre Seigneur (ca.

1425–​1429), which she may have written in response to the death of her son
Jean de Castel in 1425, the author “immerses” herself in the pain of the Blessed
Virgin’s loss, only to be drawn upward to the figure of Christ suffering on the
cross, not only for the pain of crucifying torture but also for his mother’s grief.60
In short, the evidence of theology and devotion underscores the inher-
ently unstable nature of grief’s motions, downward and touching everyone’s

57 Kiening, “Aspekte,” 34. Armin Nassehi and Georg Weber, Tod, Modernität und Gesellschaft:
Entwurf einer Theorie der Todesverdrängung (Wiesbaden: 1989), 257–​62. Ariès, The Hour
of Our Death, 578–​80. Contra isolation, narrower studies can suggest the opposite, for
example in Britain and Ireland. Sarah Tarlow, Ritual, Belief and the Dead in Early Modern
Britain and Ireland (New York: 2011), 109, 131–​44. Also, Sarah Tarlow, Bereavement and
Commemoration: An Archaeology of Mortality (Oxford: 1999), passim.
58 Leslie Abend Callahan, “Signs of Sorrow: The Expression of Grief and the Representation
of Mourning in Fifteenth-​ Century French Culture,” 2 vols (City University of
New York: PhD dissertation, 1996), 2 vols, 1:283–​4.
59 Nadia Margolis, “Christine de Pizan’s Life in Lament: Love, Death, and Politics,” Laments
for the Lost in Medieval Literature, eds Jane Tomie and M.J. Toswell (Turnhout: 2010), 265–​
81, here 276.
60 Margolis, “Christine de Pizan’s Life in Lament,” 281.

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The Motion of Another’s Death: Grief and Mourning 387

mortality, laterally, severing the bonds of love. Authors found in grief an op-
portunity for emotional experiment, probing the soul that struggles with its
attractions and aversions, the body convulsed by those movements, and the
will trying to cope with them.

3 The Public Trajectory of Grieving

How, then, were these intimate movements governed in public places over time,
and what could public management do to the nature of grief? It could erase
grief no more than it could erase love. Death was, of course, deeply personal.
Ritual consolations, such as the sacrament of holy anointing, and the popular
carnivalesque portrait of late medieval dying, the danse macabre, for example,
bespoke the terror of death.61 The anointing of holy unction was sharply fo-
cussed on the dying victim. It directed their attention to sin and forgiveness at
a crucial transition-​point of a spiritual biography, while the priest whispered,
“through this anointing, may God grant you his holy and most devout mercy,”
in the name of the Holy Trinity, according to the 15th-​century Archbishop An-
thony of Florence in his well-​known Summa confessionalis. The eyes should be
dabbed with oil, in the style of St Ambrose, but secular priests added a hope for
forgiveness for “whatever fault you committed by the eyes.” A more elaborate
and still more intimate rite was also possible, Anthony thought, following guid-
ance from Pope Gregory the Great: anoint the ears, the nose, the closed mouth,
the palms, and the feet, invoking the Trinity each time and modifying the in-
cantation for auditory, odorous, gustatory, tactile, and ambulatory sinning.62
The individual is prepared for the final, perilous separation of living soul from
inert body. In late medieval paintings and block books of the danse macabre, a
badly decomposed corpse led exemplary characters from high and low estates
to their death. The force of this threat was individually felt, precisely because it
was so embarrassingly public and socially indifferent, insensible to privilege or
prestige.63 Death was a great leveller. But a funeral, by contrast, never was. The
distinctions of privilege and wealth were nowhere more apparent than there
and in the memoriae that followed.

61 For the importance of considering the circulation of emotions between individual and
group, Stephanie Trigg, “Introduction: Emotional Histories –​Beyond the Personalization
of the Past and the Abstraction of Affect Theory,” Exemplaria 26 (2014), 3–​15.
62 Anthony added that the secular clergy also anoint the arms. Summa confessionalis domini
Antonini Archiepiscopi Florentini (Venice: 1566), 222r-​223r.
63 Jean-​Claude Schmitt, Les rhythmes au Moyen Âge (Paris: 2016), 615–​27.

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388 Ocker

Mourning –​the performance of grief –​was stereotypical. Determined by lo-

cal custom, its rudiments could nevertheless be observed in most cultures: ges-
tures of complaint (screaming, crying, ringing the hands), auto-​aggression
(pulling out, cutting, or burning hair, striking one’s head, face, or breast, tearing
clothes, etc.), rites associated with laying the body in state, its preparation and
burial, and a continuation of regular remembrances. They were all practices
that should condition the way we judge the normative portraits of grief we
have considered so far.64 Funerary and memorial rites controlled and chan-
nelled the dangerous emotional flux reflected in wailing or self-​harm. The
traditional church established the default position of European mourning.
Grief was meant to follow a spatial-​temporal, ritually measured progression
across scripted activities, through sacraments of confession, the viaticum, and
holy unction, through the office of the dead and other consolations voiced
at a deathbed, through a vigil, a funeral mass, the burial, and the continuing
cycles of prayers, masses, and other remembrances over days and years. For
“the shadow of death loomed over many of the rhythms of religious life at the
end of the Middle Ages: testamentary formulas, the granting of indulgences to
relieve souls in Purgatory, processions of penitents and flagellants, and many
other displays.”65 The flow of affect was to move from the room where one
died, where professional or semi-​professional mourners might help a family
pray the office of the dead, then on to a procession from a house to a church
where a mass was performed, then on again to the place of burial, and some-
times farther still through the circulation of death notices and mortuary rolls
requesting additional suffrages, expanding the spatial and temporal frame of
the fact of an individual’s departure, expanding the fraternity created or rein-
forced by a death into a particular geography of remembrances.66

64 Kiening, “Aspekte,” 36, 38; Anne L. Klinck, “Singing a Song of Sorrow: Tropes of
Lament,” in Laments for the Lost in Medieval Literature, eds Jane Tolmie and M.J.
Toswell (Turnhout: 2010), 1–​ 20, here 8. Romedio Schmitz-​ Esser, Der Leichnam im
Mittelalter: Einbalsamierung, Verbrennung und die kulturelle Konstruktion des toten
Körpers (Ostfildern: 2014), 4–​7 and passim, in great detail, explores points of departure
between norm and practice.
65 Schmitt, Les rhythmes au Moyen Âge, 611.
66 Schmitt, Les rythmes, 417–​28; Lynda Rollason, “Medieval Mortuary Rolls: Prayer for the
Dead and Travel in Medieval England,” Northern History 48 (2011),187–​223. Protestants
sometimes expanded the use of funeral processions to publicize a death apart from
an appeal to suffrages, as in the cases, for example, of Luther’s protector Friedrich the
Wise, which proceeded through 30 kilometres of Electoral Saxony, and Martin Luther
himself, which proceeded from Eisenach to Wittenberg. Natalie Krenz, Ritualwandel
und Deutungshoheit: Die frühe Reformation in der Residenzstadt Wittenberg (1500–​
1533) (Tübingen: 2014), 362. Martin Brecht, Martin Luther, trans. James L. Schaaf, 3 vols

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The Motion of Another’s Death: Grief and Mourning 389

Of course, there was, also before the Reformation, variability within and be-
tween places, within and between different social ranks.67 It can be challeng-
ing to study this variability even in narrow contexts. At French and Burgundian
courts, for example, mourning rituals had differentiated kin groups, degrees of
affinity, and position, but the distinctions were not always observed strictly.68
The opportunity to create occasions, places, and instruments of remembrance
depended on the size and quality of one’s social network, and money. The vari-
ety of remembrances and the gifts and relationships of patronage that accom-
panied them have barely been investigated on an appropriately large scale,
although their importance in European societies is clear, for the entire period
since Carolingian times at least until the 18th century, when a continent-​wide,
Christian orientation toward transcendence in the face of death yielded to a
‘cultural science’ less certain about the afterlife, which favoured more anony-
mous forms of remembrance.69
Yet the variability notwithstanding, rites and customs followed that basic
movement from private to public domains: from individual to internal group to
public space. The flow of grief continued through the Reformation. No amount
of polemic against “papal necromancy”70 could completely erase the need to
reproduce class-​distinction, family history, and social bond in the remem-
brances of the dead, even though the customs by which the dead were separat-
ed from the living now changed along confessional lines: “the same divisions
of hierarchy, sex and age that dominated in life can be seen in the utilisation of

(Minneapolis: 1993), 3:377–​82. Calvin’s funeral included a more modest mid-​day proces-
sion through the city. Max Engammare, “L’inhumation de Calvin et des pasteurs Genevois
de 1540 à 1620,” in Les funérailles à la Renaissance, ed. Jean Balsamo (Geneva: 2002), 271–​
93, here 272.
67 Variety in burial practices is emphasized by Schmitz-​Esser, Der Leichnam im Mittelalter,
19–​114, 337–​404.
68 Kiening, “Aspekte,” 46. Bernhard Jussen, “ ‘Dolor’ und ‘Memoria’: Trauerriten, gemalte
Trauer und soziale Ordnungen im späten Mittelalter,” in Memoria als Kulture, ed. Otto
Gerhard Oexle (Göttingen: 1995), 207–​52, here 212–​18, 251.
69 Wollasch, “Memoria,” 364–​66; Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Memoria und Memorialbild,” in
Memoria: Der geschichtliche Zeugniswert des liturgischen Gedenken im Mittelalter, eds
Karl Schmid ans Joachim Wollash (Munich: 1984), 384–​440, here 429. For the concept
of cultural memory, over against a shorter-​term communicative memory, Jan Assmann,
“Communicative and Cultural Memory,” in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and
Interdisciplinary Handbook (Berlin: 2008), 109–​18.
70 Pierre Viret’s term. See Karine Crousaz, “La mort, les funérailles et l’au-​delà: La rupture de
la Réforme en Suise romande,” in Le Marbre et la poussière: Le patrimoine funéraire de la
Suisse romande –​ XIVe–​X VIIIe siècles (Cahiers d’archéologie romande; no. 143), ed. Dave
Lüthi (Lausanne: Musée cantonal d’archéologie et d’histoire, 2013), 65–​76, here 143.

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390 Ocker

space for burial.”71 Or at least that was the case where and when burial could
regularly occur. In France, for example, Protestants could count on an undis-
turbed interment only after the Edict of Nantes (1598), when they first received
the right openly to maintain cemeteries –​and only for a brief, troubled cen-
tury.72 In iconoclastic Geneva, where that peaceful opportunity did exist, the
burial of pastors –​exemplars of Christian piety and practice –​displayed an
on-​going “attachment of the living with the dead.”73 While details of Calvin’s
own prudent funeral are barely known, we do know that his body was accom-
panied to its final resting place by a large throng of pastors and citizens.74 Grief
still moved across town. In spite of all that the Protestants changed when they
nullified purgatory and the value of pious deeds and endowments for the dead,
how much could they really alter the fundamental motion of mourning from
bedside to public buildings and open air, or the association of grief with the
admission of sin before an assurance of salvation?75 Anxiety over keeping the
performances stipulated by long, Catholic tradition, and the difficulty monks
and nuns had to honour the many anniversary contracts that had accumulated
over time, seems to have contributed to early Protestant disillusionment with
tradition.76 We could think of Protestant rebellion as an attempt to improve
upon the care of the dead and the grieving they left behind. Protestants still

71 Will Coster, “A Microcosm of Community: Burial, Space and Society in Chester, 1598
to 1633,” Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe, eds Will Coster and Andrew Spicer
(New York: 2005), 124–​43. Chris Marsh, “Sacred Space in England, 1560–​1640: The
View from the Pew,” JEH 53 (2002), 286–​311. The same was even true in Geneva, where
at the time of Theodore Beza’s funeral, social rank played an evident role in funerary
rites: Engammare, “L’inhumation de Calvin,” 282–​6.
72 Consider Paul Romane-​ Musculus, “Les anciens cimetières protestants toulousains,”
Annales du Midi 81 (1969), 454–​63, and Engammare, “L’inhumation de Calvin.” The right
was lost during the reign of Louis xiv and only restored after the French Revolution.
73 Engammare, “L’inhumation de Calvin,” 293.
74 Calvin’s contemporary John à Lasco, reformer of Emden but also influential through-
out reformed Protestant Europe, prescribed church interments, funeral preaching,
public prayer and benediction, and the distribution of alms to the poor. Engammare,
“L’inhumation de Calvin,” 277–​8.
75 Consider Karant-​Nunn, The Reformation of Feeling, 196, 203–​204. Emblematic of the most
comprehensive Protestant disassociation of reformed from Catholic mortuary practices
were the six dialogues composed by Pierre Viret on purgatory, the Office of the Dead,
anniversary masses, and hell, whose influence spanned Swiss and French Protestantism.
He tried to reconstruct the similarities between Catholic and ancient pagan-​idolatrous
practices. Pierre Viret, Disputations chrestiennes (Geneva: 1544); Crousaz, “La mort, les
funérailles et l’au-​delà,” 65–​76.
76 Mireille Othenin-​Girard, “ ‘Helfter’ und ‘Gespenster’: Die Toten und der Tauschhandel mit
den Lebenden,” in Kulturelle Reformation: Sinnformationen im Umbruch, 1400–​1600, eds
Bernhard Jussen and Craig Koslofsky (Göttingen: 1999), 159–​91.

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The Motion of Another’s Death: Grief and Mourning 391

took Christ and even Mary as the avatars of proper grief and as instruments of
a consolation concentrated around gospel promises.77 Funerary monuments
had sometimes presented mourners in sculpture “as a constant sign of the
emotional participation of living survivors”; but among Protestants biblical
inscriptions, paintings, and memory books could reiterate the survivors’ com-
mitment, shared with the departed, to evangelical comfort. It was an expres-
sion of love that tied individual to clan and eternity, a fact confirmed by the
achievements of Protestant reform.78 It would be callous to assume that bibli-
cal inscriptions or actual Bibles could not become focal points of affection for
lost loved ones any more than an altarpiece or a prayer offered to a saint. Most
Protestants eschewed neither funeral processions nor funerary monuments in
an evangelically corrected form.79 Grief still moved from household to church
and final resting place. These still comprised a geography of remembrances.

4 Conclusion

For the cumulative evidence scholars have derived from scholastic debate, de-
votional literature and art, popular fictions, and the reflections of humanists
on the body and its feelings portrays grief as a turbulent motion. It is caused

77 Helmut Puff, “Memento Mori, Memento Mei: Albrecht Dürer and the Art of Dying,” in
Enduring Loss in Early Modern Germany: Cross Disciplinary Perspectives, ed. Lynne Tatlock
(Leiden: 2010), 103–​32.
78 Kiening, “Aspekte,” 47. Les Pleurants dans l’Art du Moyen Âge en Europe (Musée des beaux-​
arts de Dijon, Dijon:1971), passim; Callahan, “Signs of Sorrow,” 179–​285; Mia Mochizuki,
The Netherlandish Image after Iconoclasm: Material Religion in the Dutch Golden Age
(Aldershot: 2008); Angela Vanhaelen, The Wake of Iconoclasm: Painting the Church in the
Dutch Republic (University Park, PA: 2012), 9–​10, 159–​178; Claudia Jarzebowski, “Loss and
Emotion in Funeral Works on Children in Seventeenth-​Century Germany,” Enduring Loss
in Early Modern Germany, ed. Lynn Tatlock (Leiden: 2010), 187–​213; Ronald Rittgers, “Grief
and Consolation in Early Modern Lutheran Devotion: The Case of Johannes Christoph
Oelhafen’s Pious Meditations on the Most Sorrowful Bereavement (1619),” Church History 81
(2012), 601–​30; Anna Carrdus, “Thränen-​Tüchlein für christliche Eltern: Consolation Books
for Bereaved Parents in Sixteenth-​and Seventeenth-​Century Germany,” German Life and
Letters 49 (1996), 1–​17; Marie-​Dominique Legrand, “Les Larmes de Philippe Duplessis-​
Mornay,” Albineana, Cahiers d’Aubigné 18 (2006), 243–​63.
79 Jill Bepler, “Enduring Loss and Memorializing Women: The Cultural Role of Dynastic
Widows in Early Modern Germany,” in Enduring Loss in Early Modern Germany: Cross
Disciplinary Perspectives, ed. Lynne Tatlock (Leiden: 2010), 133–​60; Mara R. Wade, “Paper
Monuments and the Creation of Memory: The Personal and Dynastic Mourning of
Princess Magdalena Sibylle of Saxony,” in Enduring Loss in Early Modern Germany: Cross
Disciplinary Perspectives, ed. Lynne Tatlock (Leiden: 2010), 161–​86.

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392 Ocker

by the impact of loss. It extends through the body from the self to its surround-
ings. When grief was felt alone, a living soul could expect its movement to shift
and change into any number of other feelings. Its ebbing and flowing could
be felt in breath, heartbeat, sweat, and tears. But it was not meant to be left
languishing there in the individual, eating away or even destroying human
personality. The rites and customs of mourning tried to manage its flux, until
desire for the dead was redirected to its place among the living.

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 ­c hapter 14

Relics and Saints: Commemoration and

Memorialization of the Holy Dead

Freddy C. Domínguez

The courtyard of the Holy Innocents Church in Paris was an important civic
centre during medieval and early modern times. Sermons could be heard by
thousands of congregants, parishioners could exchange news, scriveners could
copy documents for the illiterate, and occasionally rebellion burst forth.1 This
and much more would happen amid visible, often nauseatingly present vestig-
es of death. A large communal pit would have had a mound of rotting corpses.
Legend had it that putrefaction amid such piles of flesh would take just a day–​
the cemetery of the Holy Innocents was known as the “flesh eater.”2 Around
the perimeter of the ample yard, charnel houses stored bones and more bones,
some of them decoratively displayed as memento mori –​reminders of life’s
transience. A well-​known cycle of frescoes along the south wall depicted the
danse macabre.3 Viewers would see death, in the form of a skeleton, calling
and leading men and women from all levels of society to their inevitable ends.
These images were reminders of material ephemerality, of the body’s unim-
portance and the primacy of the soul. There were, however, exceptions to such
a truism and this chapter will explore how these exceptions –​the holy dead –​
were construed by early modern men and women.
Inside the church, the relationship between life and death was different. The
miracle of the eucharist, the central moment of the mass, would have made
the presence of Christ physical. Past and present were warped, the crucified
and the resurrected united in material form. These moments of high spiritual
drama occurred among permanent remnants of sanctity. Perhaps the most im-
portant among these at the Holy Innocents was, according to a contemporary,

1 Vanessa Harding deals with the Holy Innocents throughout her seminal book: The Dead
and the Living in Paris and London, 1500–​1670 (Cambridge: 2008); Philippe Ariès, The Hour
of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: 1981), 269. Christine Métayer, Au tombeau des
secrets: Les écrivains publics du Paris populaire. Cimetière des Saints-​Innocents XVIe-​X VIIIe
siècle (Paris: 2015).
2 Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, 360.
3 Harding, The Dead and the Living, 102.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004443433_016

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394 Domínguez

“an innocent entirely encased in gold and silver.”4 This was purportedly one of
Herod’s child-​victims as told in the Gospel of Matthew. The bejewelled corpse
of the murdered boy was an exception that proved the rule of bodily inconse-
quence. That such holy figures did not undergo normal death, that they often
resisted human rot, and that they sometimes emitted a sweet odour instead of
a deathly stench, charged them with spiritual energy absent in the decompos-
ing skin and brittle bones outside.
The importance of the holy dead in pre-​modern Christian culture is unques-
tionable. In a recent survey, Charles Freemen unflinchingly states that with the
expansion of medieval Christianity, relics and saints’ cults “were accepted at
every level of life, among rich and poor, king and serf, theologian and illiterate,
without challenge.”5 The yearly feast calendar was defined in part by celebra-
tions of the dead, intercessory prayers were said to saints with specific occupa-
tions and powers, and their physical remains could both protect and punish,
thus eliciting concentrated devotion. Saints were ever-​present. Their physical
remnants abided in bits and pieces, whole corpses, or objects that they had
touched. Christians carried the pilgrim’s staff far to contact holy remains and
share in their spiritual power.
Stories about saints collected in martyrologies, legendaries, and individual
vitae were just as important. They survive in the many thousands from early
Christian times through the age of print. In general, they were to serve as ex-
empla for Christians and as such had transformative powers. As one influential
early modern Jesuit put it, lives of the saints taught man “more through acts
than through words.”6
Although the importance of saints and their relics was well-​established
before the middle ages, their significance was not. As Peter Brown argued,
perceptions of the dead were defined by a blend of theological assumptions
and a series of social circumstances and specific cultural needs.7 This could be
said about any period of Christian history, but there are certain epochs during
which the place of the holy dead elicited greater contemplation and (re)con-
sideration by contemporaries.8 This chapter will explore the place of the holy

4 Robert W. Berger (ed.), Public Access to Art in Paris: A Documentary History from the Middle
Ages to 1800 (Pennsylvania, PA: 1999), 29.
5 Charles Freeman, Holy Bones, Holy Dust: How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval Europe
(New Haven, CT: 2012), xiv.
6 Pedro de Ribadeneyra, Flos sanctorum de las vidas de los santos (Barcelona: 1734), sig. ¶¶ 2v.
7 Peter Brown, Cult of the Saints (Chicago: 1981).
8 For important dynamics and changes over time regarding saints, saints’ lives, and mar-
tyrs see: André Vauchez, La sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Age (1198–​
1431): Recherches sur les mentalités religieuses médiévales (Rome: 2014 [orig. 1981]). Robert

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Relics and Saints 395

dead within the context of such a period marked by intellectual currents of

the Renaissance and the confessional battles resulting from the Reformation.
I will not argue for a ‘light-​switch’ dynamic in which ‘traditional’ medieval
beliefs were destroyed by incipient modernity, but instead will highlight the
force and perseverance of beliefs and practices concerning the holy dead amid
reformist impulses between the 15th and the late 16th centuries. This chapter
will demonstrate ambiguities and tensions over how early modern Catholics
understood the place of saints and their relics in light of efforts to achieve con-
sensus and stability during times of seismic change.9

1 Scholars and Folktales

Humanists were assiduous critics. The term umanista was initially scholarly
slang for teachers of humanistic disciplines in Italy, but with time it became
more capacious to include men (and from our vantage point, women) of differ-
ent backgrounds and professions that, in various contexts, shared disciplinary
interests and a deep passion for classical antiquity in its myriad textual, ma-
terial, and imagined forms. Humanists collected and catalogued (ancient)
objects, carried out thorough philological investigations, and developed tech-
niques of source criticism to ‘revive’ the past. As their intellectual aspirations
grew, so did their egos. Humanists, especially in their earliest guises, had little
patience for their immediate intellectual predecessors whom they often spoke
of in infantilized terms and with barbed criticisms of their ignorance. An old-
er historiography once maintained that, within an Italian milieu where hu-
manism was born, this blend of classical revivalism, exacting scholarship, and
snippy temperaments, led to secularization and the diminishment of spiritual
fervour.10 Such claims have been proven overly simplistic, but there is no doubt
that humanist inclinations influenced a reappraisal of certain kinds of devo-
tional activities in early modern life.11

Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?: Saints and Worshippers from the Mar-
tyrs to the Reformation (Princeton: 2013).
9 Reference to stability is a reference to T.K. Rabb’s classic synthesis: The Struggle for Stabil-
ity in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: 1976).
10 For the classic secularising narrative: Jacob Burckardt, Die Cultur der Renaissance in
Italien: Ein Versuch (Basel: 1860).
11 For a complex assessment of secularizing and religious impulses see Riccardo Fubini,
Humanism and Secularization: From Petrarch to Valla (Durham, NC: 2003). James
Hankins, “Religion and the Modernity of Renaissance Humanism,” in Interpretations of
Renaissance Humanism, ed. Angelo Mazzocco (Leiden: 2006), 137–​53.

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396 Domínguez

The holy dead were ripe for critical treatment because they played such a
crucial role in late medieval society and because the stories linked to them
were thought to be rife with fraudulence and shameful interpolations. That
‘authenticity’ or truth claims made about saints became an issue of pivotal
concern in the early modern period itself marks a hermeneutical shift among
some contemporary scholars. Medieval hagiographers were often interested in
persuading readers of their truthfulness and they were aware that some stories
were merely rumours or vulgar tales. But even among those who were uncom-
fortable with apocrypha, sincere devotion was deemed important, sometimes
even more important, than unvarnished truth. This relative laxity is partly be-
cause hagiographical texts were not considered theological works; rather, they
were pious ones and thus did not garner the most exacting attention. The shift
toward a rhetoric of absolute veracity (among some) resulted, in part, from
the textual activities of humanists who aimed to produce useful, elegant, and
accurate classical books and who had a general interest in ‘pure’, uncontami-
nated texts. With such goals in mind, the unreliable pedigrees of saints’ lives
and the questionable provenance of some relics posed serious problems.
Lorenzo Valla exemplifies humanist concerns. A scholar and statesmen of
the highest order, he is today best remembered for his critique of The Dona-
tion of Constantine, a forged medieval document that was used as evidence
for papal authority. In his famous oration on the subject, Valla unsurprisingly
linked his historico-​philological efforts to a general cleansing of church false-
hoods that were believed by many Christians out of ignorance. Fantastical
tales of talking statues and similar preternatural phenomena were imbibed
unthinkingly and miracle stories were repeated without account of accuracy.
He claimed not to “impugn admiration of the saint nor deny their divine works
… On the contrary, I defend and protect those works, but I refuse to let them be
confused with made-​up stories.”12 He suggested that fallacious narratives must
have been created by “infidels” to mock true faith. In a sense, they had suc-
ceeded since those lies had been largely assimilated, not only by the credulous
masses, but by the Church itself. For Valla, then, the expurgation of myths was
as much the instinct of a rigorous scholar as it was of a good Christian fighting
against heresy.
Erasmus of Rotterdam, an admirer of Valla and perhaps the most famous
scholar of his day, was among the most zealous exponents of this humanist
sensibility. He was keenly interested in distinguishing between historia and

12 Lorenzo Valla, On the Donation of Constantine, trans. G.W. Bowersock (Cambridge, MA:
2007), 128.

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Relics and Saints 397

fabula both in secular and sacred realms.13 As a result, he could be a vicious

critic of false traditions, including devotion rendered to apocryphal saints.
Erasmus’s famed satire, The Praise of Folly, goes further than pointing out tex-
tual inaccuracies and errant beliefs by underlining the dangers of popular ig-
norance and wrong-​headed devotional activities. He sneers at those who

have arrived at the foolish but gratifying belief that if they gaze on a pic-
ture of Polyphemus-​Christopher they will not die that day, or that who-
ever salutes in certain prescribed words an image of Barbara will come
through a battle unharmed.14

Such practices are discussed amid descriptions of how men gullibly fear mon-
sters and goblins and how individuals wrongly assume that they could partake
in various schemes –​last-​ditch prayers, charms, and payments –​to achieve
salvation. Thus, misplaced devotion to spurious objects was akin to popular
beliefs in mythical creatures and noxious ideas about easy salvation. Fervid
belief could not make up for deep ignorance and the consequence of such mis-
taken zeal could be damnation.
Such critiques do not imply total distancing from traditional devotional
practices. Alison Frazier’s ground-​breaking book, Possible Lives, argues that
even early Italian humanists were deeply and variously involved in editing
saints’ lives, often employing philological, antiquarian, and broadly historical
techniques to fix errors of textual transmission.15 To be sure, humanists were
not always comfortable in their hagiographer’s hats. Leon Battista Alberti, for
example, started a large editorial project, but only made it through one vita,
that of the second century martyr St Potitus. To the extent that he persevered,
however, he approached his work with scholarly rigor. As Anthony Grafton has
described, he stayed true to humanist techniques: “the collation of witnesses,
the setting of testimonies into their proper chronological order, the denuncia-
tion (and explaining away) of scribal error, matched those of the most erudite
humanists of the time.”16 His decision to stop at one life may have been due to

13 Peter G. Bietenholz, Historia and Fabula: Myths and Legends in Historical Thought from
Antiquity to the Modern Age (Leiden: 1994), 154–​9.
14 Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, trans. Hoyt Hopewell Thomas (Princeton,
NJ: 2015), 55–​7.
15 Alison Knowles Frazier, Possible Lives: Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy
(New York: 2005). For the German context along these lines see David J. Collins, Reforming
Saints: Saints’ Lives and Their Authors in Germany, 1470–​1530 (Oxford: 2008).
16 Anthony Grafton, Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers
(Ann Arbor, MI: 1997), 63.

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398 Domínguez

the fact that his efforts could only go so far, given the paucity of sources sur-
viving for any given saint. He may have also been wary of the values espoused
by martyrological literature. As Guido Guarino argued decades ago, stories of
Christian submission and disengagement from the world may have seemed
unworthy to humanists increasingly interested in civic engagement and clas-
sical values such as glory.17 Still, as Frazier has shown, other humanists could
very easily “use” hagiographical texts to underline classical interests and val-
ues. For example, when Valla wrote about the 4th century Forty Martyrs of Se-
baste, he ably matched religious fervour with more classically tinted ideals of
“group-​oriented fidelity and active fortitude that constitute military virtue.”18
Humanist devotion to saints emphasized holy figures in their image. Eras-
mus could pelt those who believed in made-​up saints and made fools of them-
selves at spurious shrines, but he was undoubtedly devoted to the life and
works of St Jerome, the biblical translator and church father. For much of his
career, he undertook the “Herculean” task of editing all of Jerome’s works. The
first volume of this project contained Erasmus’s life of the saint, in which he
promised to follow the most exacting scholarly standards. He distinguished
himself from old authors who:

esteemed it dutiful and proper to make use of appropriate fictitious nar-

ratives for the public good, to encourage them to embark on an upright
and pious way of life, or to excite their minds towards the study of hon-
ourable things, or to stiffen the sinews against any feebleness, or to fright-
en the impious.19

Erasmus, however, thought it best to “describe saints in just such a way as they
actually were.”20 He does not reject the goals of traditional vitae –​ spiritual
instruction and motivation toward piety remained central –​but these ideals
should be the effects of truthful narration. That said, Erasmus’s textual effort
was not devoid of personal interest. As Lisa Jardine has suggested, Erasmus’s
biography focuses less on Jerome’s miraculous relationship with God and more
on the miraculous nature of his work as a result of scholarly rigor, making him

17 Guido A. Garino, “Leon Battista Alberti’s ‘Vita S. Potiti’,” Renaissance News 8 (1955), 86–​9.
18 Frazier, Possible Lives, 63. Mariarosa Cortesi, “ ‘Sanctissimum militum exemplum’: I Martiri
di Sebastia e Lorenzo Valla,” Bollettino della badia Greca di Grottaferrata 54 (2000), 319–​36.
19 Quoted in Lisa Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in
Print (Princeton, NJ: 1993), 60; Erasmus, Eximii Doctoris Hieronymi Stridonensis vita
(Basel: 1519), 3–​4.
20 Erasmus, Eximii Doctoris Hieronymi Stridonensis vita, 3–​4.

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Relics and Saints 399

out to be a scholar-​saint, a paradigm of eloquence and a master exegete. In

Jerome, humanists thus had one of their own. As Eugene Rice has shown, the
Renaissance image of the church father mutated from that of a penitent out
in the wilds, to that of an author. Erasmus, as good a publicist as there has
ever been, made sure that he himself was taken as both the saint’s emulator
and his restorer.21 But even more than this, as Jardine suggests, by emphasizing
Jerome’s erudition, the saint (and Erasmus) modelled piety based on attentive
reading and study.
If humanists might try to co-​opt and occasionally make hagiography con-
form to humanist interests, they lived within a culture of hagiography and
relics which fundamentally structured their way of thinking. Not only did hu-
manists believe in the powers of saints and their remains (be they textual or
physical), but their own intellectual activities were influenced by the culture
of sanctity in which they lived. This topic is still fresh and open for further
inquiry, but Hester Schadee has pointed out the resonances between early hu-
manist textual activities and contemporary religious practices. She has shown
that humanists believed classical authors were “present” in their texts and that
the codices that carried these texts were thought of and spoken of in “corpo-
ral” terms, indeed as relics. Like the holy relic, manuscripts “had the power
to transmit; together text and codex formed a medium that allowed dead au-
thors to speak to the living, and enabled humanist readers to hear the voices of
antiquity.”22 Schadee insists humanists did not transform secular figures into
divine ones, but she emphasizes “concepts, practices, and discursive traditions
of contemporary Christianity as framing the ambitions and expressions of the
early humanists.”23
Devotion to the holy dead no doubt created an imaginative space for en-
gagement with the secular past, even among the most hard-​nosed humanists
and statesman like Niccolò Machiavelli. In a famous letter to his friend Fran-
cesco Vettori, he tells him of an intriguing evening ritual after cavorting with
locals during a period of rustic exile. When Machiavelli returned home, he en-
tered his study:

on the threshold I take off my work clothes, covered with mud and dirt,
and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately,

21 Eugene F. Rice, Saint Jerome in the Renaissance (Baltimore, MD: 1985).

22 Hester Schadee, “Ancient Texts and Holy Bodies: Humanist Hermeneutics and the
Language of Relics,” in For the Sake of Learning: Essays in honor of Anthony Grafton vol. 1,
eds. A. Blair and A. Goeing (Leiden: 2016), 675–​91 on 685.
23 Schadee, “Ancient Texts and Holy Bodies,” 686.

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400 Domínguez

I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously re-
ceived by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine … where
I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about
the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness,
answer me.24

While Machiavelli is clearly talking about his communion with pagan author-
ities, his language evokes a level of interaction that had deep roots in forms of
reading usually associated with devotional texts. As readers would search for
exempla in the lives of the saints, so Machiavelli seeks the lessons of ancient
wisdom. Just as saints’ lives were meant to be a source of spiritual nourish-
ment, so Roman historians and philosophers such as Machiavelli. More broad-
ly, of course, just as reading and devotion to saints implied a kind of time trav-
el, the transcendence of divinity, so too the men of antiquity came alive for
present needs, disregarding traditional temporal limits.
Books were not the only physical remnants of antiquity. Much of the pe-
riod’s intellectual electricity depended on the collection, transcription, and
identification of objects undertaken with antiquarian zeal. Thus, when Valla
attacked The Donation of Constantine, part of the historical evidence depend-
ed on numismatics. He dwells on the incongruence between the document’s
claims of imperial authority and the nonexistence of imperial coins bearing
a papal image.25 Alberti tried his hand at proto-​marine archaeology when
he attempted to dredge up an ancient shipwreck –​two of Caligula’s pleasure
barges –​in Lake Nemi. There were also prodigious collectors like the merchant
Cyriac of Ancona, who left behind precious notebooks of inscriptions he cop-
ied along the Mediterranean.26 Few were greater seekers (by proxy) of ancient
material culture than Pope Nicholas v (r.1447–​1455), who, according to the
humanist Biondo Flavio, was interested in the “mastery of all learning, of the
whole of antiquity, of universal history and of the greatness of Italy.”27
Just as churchmen became avid collectors of non-​Christian antiquities,
so humanists were at the forefront of Christian archaeology.28 For example,

24 Machiavelli to Vettori, Florence, 10 December 1513. James B. Atkinson and David Sices
(eds), Machiavelli and his Friends: Their Personal Correspondence (Dekalb, IL: 1996), 264.
25 Valla, On the Donation, 53.
26 Marina Belozerskaya, To Wake the Dead: A Renaissance Merchant and the Birth of
Archaeology (New York: 2009); Cyriac of Ancona, Life and Early Travels, eds Charles
Mitchell, Edward Bodnar, and Clive Foss (Cambridge, MA: 2015).
27 Biondo Flavio, Italy Illuminated, ed. Jeffrey A. White (Cambridge, MA: 2005), vol. 1, 5–​7.
28 William Stenhouse, “Visitors, Display, and Reception in the Antiquity Collections of Late-​
Renaissance Rome,” Renaissance Quarterly 58 (2005), 397–​434.

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Relics and Saints 401

15th-​century members of the Roman Academy led by Pompeo Leto had a deep
interest in Christian sites and monuments. Aesthetic delight was an import-
ant motivator for their efforts, and they were just as likely to admire religious
objects for their antiquity as for their ancient beauty. When members of the
academy went to explore the catacombs –​early Christian burial grounds –​the
irreverent graffiti left behind by these scavengers also suggest that they were
not moved by solemn piety alone. Pompeo Leto, for example, signed his name
and somewhat scandalously gave himself the title of “Supreme Pontiff.” And
yet, one important member of the Academy, Bartolommeo Platina, insisted
that that his interest in these sacred grounds was also due to a desire to be near
the bodies of ancient martyrs.29
Saints and their relics thus existed within a secular and spiritual continu-
um of knowledge production. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park have noted
that medieval collectors wanted to amass “wonderful” objects, primarily relics,
which belonged to a divine order, but these holy items were physically and, to
a point, thematically tied to a range of natural specimens. A cathedral might
be chock-​full of saintly odds and ends, but it also displayed ostrich eggs and
alligators, all part of a complex program to show off wealth through ownership
and a symbolic effort to inspire awe in the viewer and remind him or her of
God’s marvellous nature.30 In the early modern period, partly as a result of
humanist practices together with developments in the field of medicine and
incipient ‘scientific’ culture, cabinets of curiosity and early museums became
important intellectual spaces bringing naturalia and man-​made artefacts to-
gether, articulating a growing sense of man’s ability to ‘possess’ nature. Saints
were an important part of the visual rhetoric in such spaces, but their signifi-
cance could be multi-​faceted especially outside an ecclesiastical environment.
As Alexandra Walsham has pointed out, “It is often impossible to disentangle
the mixture of motives that has inspired their collectors and the sensual, aes-
thetic, religious, and scientific elements of visitor experience.”31
Saintly images could play complex roles inframing early modern collections
themselves. A 16th-​century treatise on proto-​museums by Dutch scholar Sam-
uel Quiccheberg reveals that sacred images, “both painted and sculpted, or pro-
duced by some other craft” held a place of prime importance at the entrance

29 Richard J. Palermino, “The Roman Academy, the Catacombs, and the Conspiracy of 1468,”
Archivum Historiae Pontificae 18 (1980), 117–​55.
30 Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (New York: 1998),
esp. 68–​88.
31 Alexandra Walsham, “Introduction: Relics and Remains,” in Relics and Remains, ed.
Alexandra Walsham (Oxford: 2010), 32.

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402 Domínguez

to the ideal learned area.32 Among these numbered, not relics themselves, but
depictions of “the saints, male and female.”33 Their presence played a variety of
roles. These images had a quasi-​genealogical function as they were of a piece
with the portraits of family members. While family history was meant to tell
of the earthly origins of the museum in question, holy images alluded to a sa-
cred history, to the origins of humanity and everything else. Moreover, having
such images would ensure “that the gods favour the entrance to the theatre or
collection.”34
Such an integral role in knowledge production ensured that saints contin-
ued to be part of a repertory of political authority. Rulers had long been among
the most avid hoarders of relics and the trend did not diminish in the early
modern period. By 1509 Frederick iii, elector of Saxony (r. 1486–​1525), who
would be Martin Luther’s defender, had over 5000 relics as advertised in a rich-
ly illustrated book with woodcuts depicting reliquaries by Lucas Cranach.35
The book fits generically into a tradition of describing relic holdings and loca-
tions for pilgrims, and as such had several public functions. Frederick’s relics
were objects of private devotion, but they were also meant for display, both in
situ and via print. Prefatory material to the reliquary guide, especially a strik-
ing image of Frederick in trance-​like prayer and another prominent picture of
Frederick’s recently built church-​cum-​university in Wittenburg, suggest that
he wanted to convey something both about his piety and his authority. These
preciosities were being advertised at a moment when Frederick wanted to un-
derline his strength, the worthiness of his still fledgling institution, and the
seat of his power. Indeed, he wanted to put Wittenberg on the Christian map.
Moreover, the ownership of thousands of relics –​he would have more than
18,000 by the end of his life –​was meant to awe.
There was no more important collector of sacred objects than Philip ii of
Spain (r.1556–​1598), whose relics numbered well over 7000. As with Freder-
ick, Philip’s avidity had much to do with the king’s personal piety. He believed
in the efficacy of saintly remains as evinced most strikingly in his decision to
place the whole body of St Diego of Alcalá next to his ailing son, Charles, during
a period of serious illness. As the Hieronymite monk José de Sigüenza put it,

32 Mark A. Meadows and Bruce Robertson (eds), The First Treatise on Museums: Samuel
Quiccheberg’s Inscriptiones 1565 (Los Angeles, CA: 2013), 62.
33 Meadows and Robertson (eds), The First Treatise on Museums, 86.
34 Meadows and Robertson (eds), The First Treatise on Museums, 78.
35 Dye zaigung des hochlobwidigen hailigthums der Stifftkirchen aller hailigen zu Wittenburg
(Wittenberg: 1510).

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Relics and Saints 403

the king was moved by “a saintly zeal and by a pious and holy desire.”36 But, as
Guy Lazure argued in a path-​breaking article, Philip’s collection of relics must
be placed within broader frameworks and contexts.37 Relics were objects of
devotion, but they were also tools of political authority. For example, Philip’s
collection included relics related to local saints within his vast empire and thus
created, symbolically, a union between himself and his territories. More prac-
tically, relics could be used as important currency within a gift-​giving culture
to establish bonds with localities. Such possessions were also part and parcel
of the king’s ambitions to sacralize and biblicize his kingship.38 While he paid
for extensive research by scholars to uncover the biblical origins of Spain, he
also wanted to establish his proximity to the holy in ‘real time’. Moreover, relics
reveal the king’s possessiveness. They were brought together in the same way
that other natural objects, art, books, maps, and surveys of his realms across
the globe attempted to satisfy a monarchy who embraced a covetous mot-
to: “the world is not enough.”
The hegemony of learned practices suggested here helped re-​orient the tra-
ditional historico-​theological activities of those firmly within the Church. The
great exemplar of this is Cesare Baronio, a member of the Congregation of the
Oratory, a cardinal, and most famously an ecclesiastical historian. He would
be charged with writing a history of the Church (from a Catholic perspective)
and was also chosen in the mid-​16th century to re-​write Rome’s official mar-
tyrological calendar. He approached the latter project with as much reformist
zeal as Erasmus would have and, indeed, the enterprise was the continuation
of earlier humanist efforts under papal employ. As Baronio noted in a prefa-
tory letter to Pope Sixtus v, the martyrology was based on the highest schol-
arly standards, the deep study of the church fathers, and ecclesiastical history
for maximum accuracy.39 Another prefatory note by the Bishop of Roermond
(Netherlands) insists that the project is devoid of inaccuracies and supersti-
tions.40 Such claims of accuracy, or at least the aspiration to it, were based on
techniques of collection (documents and objects), assiduous source criticism,
and philological acuity that were just as much the result of current secular

36 José de Sigüenza, Historia de la orden de san Jerónimo, ed. Juan Catalina García (Madrid:
1907), vol. 2, book 3, 423.
37 Guy Lazure, “Possessing the Sacred: Monarchy and Identity in Philip II’s Relic Collection
at the Escorial,” Renaissance Quarterly 60 (2007), 58–​93.
38 Adam Beaver, “A Holy Land for the Catholic Monarchy: Palestine in the Making of Modern
Spain, 1469–​1598” (Harvard University: PhD diss., 2008).
39 Cesare Baronio, Martyrologium Romanum (Rome: 1598), sig.* 3r-​v.
40 Baronio, Martyrologium Romanum, n.f.

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404 Domínguez

modes of scholarship as they were the intellectual traditions within the church
going back to antiquity itself with scholars such as Origen and Eusebius.41
Scholarship on church history in the 16th century required awesome inter-
national efforts that sharpened critical skills and galvanized intellectual forces
on a large scale.42 Because the stakes were so high in getting the narratives
‘right’ about the Christian past and its significance, Christian scholars used the
most advanced tools at their disposal. So much so, as Anthony Grafton has
argued in a provocative essay, that the flourishing of ‘scientific’ culture during
the period was deeply influenced by the practices of ecclesiastical historians.43
Just as the 16th century witnessed a deepened interest of textual and histor-
ical reconstruction among clerics, there were also renewed efforts to ‘uncover’
the physical remnants of a Christian past, which early humanists pioneered.
As Grafton explains, “Roman scholars dedicated themselves to the Christian
past with the same sense of mission that had inspired their classicist prede-
cessors a century before. They sought to reconstruct the experience of liturgi-
cal life, the saintly lives, and terrible deaths of early Christians.”44 Filipo Neri,
founder of the Roman Oratory to which Baronio belonged, was among the avid
who led tours into ancient cemeteries and churches. Others, like the Domini-
can antiquary Alonso Chacón, sketched Christian antiquities with special zeal.
After the (re)discovery of the Catacombs of the Giordani in 1578, archaeolog-
ical studies flourished further and culminated in one of the great antiquari-
an books of the early modern period, Roma sotteranea, which posthumously
published the work of the Hieronymite monk, Antonio Bosio. As a prefatory
note to this book makes clear, his efforts meant to “represent in real life the
early church” and to show that though many sacred bodies had over time been
moved to churches, there are plenty that remain underground: the “viscera” of
Rome hide roads “sanctified with the blood of martyrs, with the sighs and tears
of the faithful.”45
The desire to assert the proper origins of the Church was not (only) the di-
rect result of a humanistic penchant for accuracy or new-​fangled intellectual

41 Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the
Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea (Cambridge, MA: 2008).
42 Gregory B. Lyon, “Badouin, Flacius, and the Plan for the Magdeburg Centuries,” Journal of
the History of Ideas 64 (2003), 253–​72.
43 Anthony Grafton, “Where was Solomon’s House? Ecclesiastical History and the
Intellectual Origins of Bacon’s New Atlantis,” in Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and
Community in the Modern West, ed. Antony Grafton (Cambridge, MA: 2009), 98–​113.
44 Anthony Grafton, Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture (New Haven,
CT: 1993), 115.
45 Antonio Bosio, Roma sotteranea (Rome, 1623), no pagination.

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Relics and Saints 405

practices. Scholarly activities were put at the service of the church, or various
churches, in the wake of Latin Christendom’s fracturing resulting from the Ref-
ormation. Indeed, when Martin Luther split the ground of Latin Christendom,
the holy dead could not escape unscathed. Although it is dangerous to talk in
absolutes about a phenomenon –​the Reformation –​of such varied charac-
ter, it is safe to say that Protestant theologies undermined the traditional role
and representations of saints. Within the context of strict scripturalism and
solafidianism, saints would no longer be promoted as intercessory figures and,
especially among hardliners, sacred images, including relics and depictions of
saints, would become emblematic of Catholic idolatry inspired by demonic
forces. In the most extreme situations –​which Luther himself found discom-
fiting –​acts of iconoclasm, the destruction of reliquaries and other sacred ob-
jects, was deemed a necessary act of purification by some reformers. These
challenges to Catholic tradition did not lead to rejection or neglect of the holy
dead, but a renewed emphasis on them. While the Council of Trent insisted
that abuses should be eliminated, it stated

that the saints, who reign together with Christ, offer up their own prayers
to God for men; that it is good and useful suppliantly to invoke them, and
to have recourse to their prayers, aid, and help for obtaining benefits from
God, through His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, who is our alone Redeemer
and Saviour.

Further, on relics:

the holy bodies of holy martyrs, and of others now living with Christ,
which bodies were the living members of Christ, and the temple of the
Holy Ghost, and which are by Him to be raised unto eternal life, and to
be glorified,-​are to be venerated by the faithful; through which (bodies)
many benefits are bestowed by God on men.46

If ‘Renaissance culture’ or, more specifically, humanistic impulses can be said

to have caused any shift in Catholic engagement with the holy dead, it has
more to do with textual sensibilities than core beliefs. Circumspection about
hagiographical narratives and relics were quite often discussed and assessed
through the intellectual lenses of the time, but ultimately the victims of these

46 H.J. Schroeder, (ed.), The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (Charlotte, NC:
2011), 218.

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406 Domínguez

inclinations were not saints, but texts that became antiquated and (some-
times) popular traditions that did not meet the more exacting expectations of
the period. One book can serve as emblematic of the phenomenon. Jacobus de
Voraigne’s Golden Legend was largely a collection of saints’ lives that became
one of the most read texts of the late Middle ages: a thousand manuscripts
survive.47 In the age of print, the book fared less well. Aside from the end of
the 15th century when the book saw a good number of incunabula editions, by
the 16th century it fell into relative obscurity. To be sure, it did not fade away
altogether and it had its adherents, but more often than not it came to the
forefront of theological discussion because it was being attacked by learned
theologians.48 Amid efforts to make clearer, ‘truer’ narratives of saints, the (in
retrospect) suspect elements of Jacobus’s book would simply not do.

2 The Counter-​Reformation and the Recent Dead

The searing critiques by Protestants and the onslaught of religious violence

in the 16th century required a response from the Catholic Church. As noted
above, the Council of Trent through its decrees re-​affirmed Catholic theology
while insisting that errors of faith or belief should be properly fixed. This re-
quired the vigilance of bishops and would depend on many of the scholarly
interventions established by humanistic studies. But if the ‘purification’ of old
traditions was a matter of concern, the Church was not only involved in anti-
quarian pursuits. Indeed, it had to figure out how to adjudicate and streamline
decisions about the propriety of devotional activities and, more importantly
for our purposes, to establish processes for recognizing sanctity itself.
Rome dealt with these challenges by expanding on late medieval trends
and institutional developments. Ultimately, episcopal and inquisitorial bodies
would watch for heresy and gross devotional misconduct. As far as sanctity was
concerned, however, Rome insisted on papal authority over the matter and,
unlike the medieval church, established a bureaucratic body –​The Congrega-
tion of Faith –​to process claims from throughout Catholic Christendom. These
efforts became more important within the context of religious strife, both be-
cause Protestants questioned the role of saints and their relics and because

47 Jacobus de Voraigne, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger
Ryan (Princeton, NJ: 1993); Jacques Le Goff, In Search of Sacred Time: Jacobus de Voraigne
and The Golden Legend, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, NJ: 2014).
48 Sherry L. Reames, The Legenda aurea: A Reexamination of Its Paradoxical History
(Madison, WI: 1985), 27–​43.

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Relics and Saints 407

contemporary contexts of religious violence provided new Christian heroes.

Post-​Reformation Catholicism witnessed renewed missionary zeal, hundreds
of new martyrs, and a slew of famous spiritual reformers. If the place of long-​
established saints was (more or less) secure, moving forward, how would new
saints and their bodies be aggregated to extant canonical tradition? As André
Vauchez has pointed out, from the late Middle Ages onward, the process of
making such decisions was necessarily a negotiation between local devotions
and an expanding bureaucratic centre.49
The problem with dead saints might be illuminated by living individuals
with claims to special spiritual acuity. The ‘living saint’ was not a new devel-
opment in Counter-​Reformation Christianity, but some contemporaries mar-
velled at the spike in the number of individuals –​predominantly women –​
who claimed to have ecstatic visions and direct communications with God.50
These mystical experiences were accompanied by miracles, including signs of
the stigmata, prophetic visions, and healing powers. Were such miracles the
result of fraud or were these genuine reflections of divine grace? Important
Catholic thinkers could and did take radically different positions on the topic.
For example, the Dominican friar, Luis de Granada –​one of the best-​selling
authors of the 16th century –​promoted ecstatic figures and argued that one
must take seriously outward signs of sanctity even if it might lead to error. His
friend, the very influential Jesuit Pedro de Ribadeneyra, had little patience for
modern mystics and urged caution since it is impossible to look into the souls
of men and women.
One example of such a contentious figure will suffice. Toward the end of the
16th century, Luis de Granada became a promoter of a Portuguese nun, Maria
da Visitaçao who became Mother Superior at the Convent of the Anunciada in
Lisbon. She bore the stigmata, communed with Christ and various saints, had
revelatory visions, and performed miracles. Such was her fame, that people
sought handkerchiefs daubed in the blood from her holy wounds. Even the rich
and powerful sought her blessing –​the Duke of Medina Sidonia, commander
of the 1588 Armada, went to see her before setting sail against England. News
of her and her purported sanctity spread across Europe through printed texts
and epistolary networks to much acclaim and admiration. Within her own
convent, however, some nuns had their doubts and after an inquisitorial pro-
cess she confessed to have fabricated her stigmata, was deemed a fraud, and
was ultimately imprisoned in a convent outside Lisbon.

49 André Vauchez, La sainteté en Occident.

50 Gabriella Zarri, Le sante vive: Cultura e religiosità femminile nella prima età moderna
(Turin: 1990).

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408 Domínguez

Her story is instructive because it is a reminder of the tensions between

those who believed saints walked among them and ecclesiastical (not to men-
tion political) leaders that wanted to dampen such claims. As I have suggested
elsewhere, it is no coincidence that efforts to promote Maria came during a
time of relative diffidence in Rome.51 Between 1525 and 1588 the pope canon-
ized no saints. This in no way impinged on the vitality of already-​recognized
saints, but many faithful felt the need of a more immediate presence of sanc-
tity. Thus, when Granada and others tried to ‘sell’ Maria, they were aware that
her story had important implications for the state of the present church. Aside
from the prodigal aspects of her life, her Dominican supporters reminded oth-
er Catholics that God was on their side and defied Protestants who claimed
that Rome had never had divine sanction. Among other things, Antonio de la
Cerda, an important Dominican friar in Lisbon, claimed Maria showed that
“[m]‌iracles have always existed in the Catholic Church.”52 Moreover, in part
because Maria claimed communion with saints and because she both vener-
ated and produced holy objects (the aforementioned handkerchiefs), her story
also spoke of how “it is necessary to revere and honour saintly images” and
that “male and female saints in paradise are intercessors and our advocates.”
It was in living flesh, then, that God imprinted his message of support for the
true church. These lived and visible experiences in turn confirmed the role of
the holy dead.53
Circumstances had conspired to make the 16th century an era of martyr-
dom not unlike the early Church that witnessed the massacre of Christians
under Roman authorities. During an age of religious warfare, Protestants and
Catholics alike celebrated those who died in defence of the true faith as they
saw it. The period is thus filled with accounts of these victims in print and
manuscript. The most famous works of martyrological literature of this period
were produced by Protestants, in England John Foxe’s Booke of Martyrs (1563)
and in Geneva Jean Crespin’s Le Livre des martyrs (1554). The Catholic world
produced less iconic collections, but libraries and archives are teeming with
accounts of men and women who died beneath the cross in Protestant lands
and on global missions. There were no more active or passionate promoters
of modern martyrs than English Catholics who suffered, especially under the

51 Freddy Domínguez, “From Saint to Sinner: Sixteenth -​Century Perceptions of La Monja de

Lisboa,” in A New Companion to Hispanic Mysticism, ed. Hilaire Kallendorf (Leiden: 2010),
297–​322.
52 Cipriano de Valera, Tratado para confirmar los pobres cativos de Berveria (London: 1594), 121.
53 Cipriano de Valera, Tratado para confirmar los pobres cativos de Berveria (London: 1594), 121.

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Relics and Saints 409

reign of Elizabeth i. Their efforts to highlight current victims of state wrath are
revelatory of how the recent dead were utilized by the faithful.
The Elizabethan regime killed nearly 200 Catholics. The reasons for the scale
of execution are debatable. Elizabeth’s government claimed they punished
traitors who were plotting against the monarchy often with the help of foreign
powers, especially the pope. English Catholics, on the other hand, would claim
that the executions occurred for reasons of conscience. Those who would not
bend to the will of the queen and those who promoted the lives of their mar-
tyrs embraced a culture of supreme sacrifice for a faith they believed to be
true. Catholics (and Protestants) surely believed themselves, as Brad Gregory
has put it, “participants in a historical community of the unjustly persecuted,
rooted in scripture and exemplified in their saviour’s crucifixion.”54 That the
victims themselves and their devotees were moved by faith is undoubtable, but
both the martyrs and their promoters were well aware that they were taking
part in a war of words and perceptions both against the confessional enemies
and within their own confessions. English Catholics became among the most
vocal, most aggressive propagandists for their martyrs across Europe.55
Many contemporaries of the 16th and 17th centuries would have thought of
the ancient martyrs in tight connection with more recent exemplars. English
Catholic propagandists promoted their own holy dead with an eye to using
them as evidence of historical continuity which both underlined the stability
of the True Church and emphasized the holy nature of recent victims. Even
before the full onslaught of Elizabethan justice against Catholics took force the
Catholic priest and exile, Nicholas Sander, made the point in his heavy theo-
logical tome, De visibili monarchia.56 Among other things, the book provides
an exhaustive chronological table of heresies from the origins of the church
up to modern times together with refutations by Doctors of the Church. This
timeline is broken up by commentary telling of Catholic martyrs through the
early 1570s when the book was first published. Though the book does not deal
with English martyrdom exclusively, by the end the great examples of Catho-
lic fortitude are all English, emphasizing how English suffering was part of a

54 Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe

(Cambridge, MA: 1999), 28.
55 Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–​1603,
2nd ed. (New York: 2016). Thomas McCoog, “Constructing Martyrdom in the English
Catholic Community, 1582–​1602,” in Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’: Religious Politics
and Identity in Early Modern England, ed. Ethan Shagan (Manchester: 2005), 95–​127.
56 Nicholas Sander, De visibili monarchia libri octo (Louvain: 1571).

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410 Domínguez

historical continuum and implicitly how the English served as exemplars for
modern Catholics.
New circumstances, echoing as they did ancient times when Christians
were forced to live in hiding, fundamentally re-​charged the meaning of the
martyr and the symbolic potency of the holy dead. No longer was the vener-
ated martyr intended to speak to the general suffering of man on earth as it
had been in late medieval times (during a time of Christendom’s hegemony
in the Latin West), but the holy dead carried a more visceral message during a
period of renewed bloodshed. Not everyone was worthy of dying for the faith,
but death seemed like a worthy goal to many. The English colleges that sprung
up after the 1560s across Western Europe were in essence schools for martyrs.
Unsurprisingly, during refectory these students would be read stories of cruel
martyrdom and in the Roman College at least, they were often confronted with
graphic images of martyrs from ancient times through to the present as a way
to inspire pity for the faithful as well as a combination of rage and resolution
to imitate that sacrifice should they be called to it.
In some ways, modern martyrs had potential to supersede the ancient ones,
at least in terms of didactic potential. Thus, the influential Jesuit Robert Per-
sons (1548–​1611) expatiated on the greatness of recent English victims by un-
derlining the important role they played in fortifying the faith within present
turbulent times. In 1590, Persons compiled a short martyrology for Spanish
readers, the Relacion de algunos martyrios, que de nuevo han hecho los hereges
de Inglaterra (Relation of Some Martyrdoms Once Again Committed by En-
glish Heretics).57 Broadly, the collection provided the faithful with, as Persons
put it, a mirror where “we can see ourselves and fix ourselves, and reform our
lives.” The glorious dead reminded readers that recusants, especially those who
fled from England and ended up in various colleges, were worthy guides. Mar-
tyrs had long been placed before the faithful but reading about holy men and
women of the past was less effective than news about contemporaries. “Pres-
ent things are very moving and that which we see is much more of a stimulus
than those things that we read or hear about.”58 English martyrs allowed for
the participation in a kind of holiness that otherwise required a sophisticated
historical imagination. Now martyrdom became more communicable. Their
deaths also had immediate significance.59

57 Robert Persons, Relacion de algunos martyrios, que de nuevo han hecho los ereges de
Inglaterra (Madrid: 1590).
58 Persons, Relacion de algunos martyrios, 1r.
59 Persons, Relacion de algunos martyrios, 2v-​2r.

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Relics and Saints 411

This message of English suffering was intended as a warning for others as

well. In pamphlet after pamphlet, the evils of the Elizabethan regime were
highlighted to remind Catholics of the existential threat posed by heretics. No-
where was this message more important than in France at the end of the 16th
century, as it had descended into religious war with no end in sight.60 As the
rebellious Catholic League gained traction in and around Paris in 1587, more
than 20 percent of their propaganda output centred on British themes.61 There
is no doubt that the League tried to magnify English horrors to fan flames
against French Calvinists and the threats they posed. For example, in June 1587
at the cemetery of Saint-​Séverin, League leaders enabled the public display of
engravings by English exile Richard Verstegan depicting English martyrdoms.
Many onlookers were also given copies of Verstegan’s Briefve description des
diverse cruautez que les Catholiques endurent en Angleterre pour la foy. One
contemporary anti-​Catholic account speaks of the throngs –​at least 5000 peo-
ple a day –​and sneered that “some English knave priest … points with a rod,”
describing the macabre images and insisting on their accuracy:

Others aposted purposefully for the matter show then how likely Catho-
lics are to grow to that point in France if they have a king a heretic, and
that they are next door to it, which is indeed the chief intent that the
things set there to animate and mutiny the people.62

If English Catholics were interested in promoting Christian fortitude in gen-

eral, they also tried to solicit aid from Catholic powers to maintain them and
their cause against English heresy. This could take on many forms. In German
lands, the tack tended to be subtle with messages emphasizing the links be-
tween English and Germanic Catholicism. In prefatory material for a polemi-
cal book by Jesuit John Gibbons printed in Trier, author and printer underline
the connected histories of England and Germany in matters both “sacred and
profane.”63 Catholic publishers in Germany underscored how the tales of the
martyrs could nourish German Catholicism in the way that so many English
missionaries had done in antiquity.64 The point, then, was not simply to tell

60 Katy Gibbons, English Catholic Exiles in Late Sixteenth-​Century Paris (Woodbridge: 2011).
61 Alexander Wilkinson, Mary Queen of Scots and French Public Opinion, 1542–​ 1600
(New York: 2004).
62 Quoted in Stuart Carroll, Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of
Europe (Oxford: 2009), 266–​7.
63 [John Gibbons, SJ], Concertatio Ecclesiae Catholicae in Anglia Adversus Calvinopapistas
and Puritanos (Trier: 1583), 7.
64 Robert Persons, De persecutione Anglicana commentariolus (Ingolstadt: 1592), 2.

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412 Domínguez

a gruesome tales of evil monarchs and holy martyrs, but to ensure that these
stories fleshed out a history of communal suffering, and perhaps just as impor-
tantly, of ancient debt owed to the English who now suffered and sought aid
from abroad.65
The message could be more aggressive when pitched to those who might
most actively intervene in English affairs. Especially, though not exclusively, in
Spanish Habsburg territories and Rome where some of the most ardent English
exiles took refuge, stories of recent martyrs took on an air of special pleading.
In order to fight back against English heresy, English Catholics had to convince
a range of people –​supporters and benefactors –​that English Catholics like
themselves were involved in a fight to save Christendom and thus worthy of
continued support. When English Catholics tried to establish a seminary in
Valladolid in the 16th century, one of the first things they did was to publish
a list of martyrs emanating from other such establishments across Europe as
a way to garner support. A broadside by Juan López Mançano (the new rec-
tor) listed martyrs from English seminaries across the Continent, a preview of
what would come for some of the young men in his care.66 Joseph Creswell, an
English Jesuit, was forthright about this imperative as he prepared a short mar-
tyrology about Robert Walpole and several other priests who were executed in
England in 1595. Clearly, their stories were meant to edify, but as he told Pope
Clement viii, they were stories that were particularly worthy of the pope be-
cause he was “Father and Protector of this holy enterprise [against England].”67
The book was sent directly to the Spanish king with the same intention and,
at least according to Creswell, it had worked very well.68 Other times, though,
it did not. William Allen, de facto head of English exiles on the continent and
founder of the first two English colleges there (Douai and Rome), lamented
more than once that the English cause was neglected despite “so many books
written about the persecution, the martyrs, the institution of the colleges and
the sending of priests … from so much bloodshed before the whole world, from

65 This and some of what follows is discussed more fully in Freddy Cristóbal Dominguez,
Radicals in Exile: English Catholic Books during the Reign of Philip II (College Park,
PA: 2020).
66 London, Archivum Britannicum Societatis Iesu, Anglia A I, fol. 53. Breve catalogo de los
martyres que han sido de los colegios y seminarios ingleses que residen en Roma y en la
ciudad de Rhemis (Valladolid: 1590).
67 Creswell to Clement viii 24 February 1596. Vatican City, Archivio Segreto Vaticano,
Borghese iii, 124 g. 2, 89v.
68 Creswell to Aldobrandino, Madrid 24 Feb 1596. Vatican City, Archivio Segreto Vaticano,
Borghese iii, 124 g. 2, 89r.

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Relics and Saints 413

so many and such cruel writings and public laws published against our and
your efforts.”69
Especially within a Habsburg sphere, the stories of martyrs took on a mili-
tant tone. As I have argued elsewhere, the stories of English martyrs were pro-
moted in Spain and ultimately absorbed within the context of arguments for
Spanish military intervention against the Elizabethan regime. There were no
more exemplary lives than those recently executed by the Elizabethan regime,
most notably the Jesuit Edmund Campion and others involved in the 1580/​
81 mission to England. Could Campion’s end help illuminate other lives? The
Spanish Jesuit and fervid English Catholic ally Pedro de Ribadeneyra hoped so.
Through righteous death he overcame “all the miseries of this fragile and mor-
tal body” and enjoyed “the triumphant crown of his fortunate confession.”70
More specific to the current times, Ribadeneyra emphasized that God allowed
tyrants to thrive so that there would be no lack of martyrs.71 Slain English Cath-
olics epitomized a holiness on par with (if not greater than) “our ancient and
fortunate martyrs,” and as such would reap divine benefits in heaven. On earth
they would serve as examples for the faithful and for heretics “who often con-
vert and die of the same faith [as the martyrs] because they saw Catholics die
with such fortitude and meekness.”72 Ribadeneyra asked Spanish readers to
consider English suffering when they lamented their own plight. Those who
faced poverty should cast an eye toward the rich and noble in England who
were stripped of everything they once had. The ill should consider the torture
and suffering faced by women and priests. When readers tired of working and
felt the pangs of hunger, they too should think of English persecutions to make
it through the day. English suffering was a gift to help “confirm our faith, awak-
en our hope, inflame our charity, teach us of divine grace, fortify our patience,
awaken our devotion, condemn the gift of our flesh, feel shame of our weak-
ness, and finally to confound our negligence.”73 This was all uttered on the eve
of the Spanish Armada of 1588.
Promoters of English martyrs wanted to emphasize their utility to the living.
There was a general sense that the dead imparted some of their sanctity to
teachers and supporters. After Allen was raised to the cardinalate it was said

69 Allen to Agazzari, Rheims, June 12, 1585. P. Renold (ed.), Letters of Allen and Barrett
(London: 1967), 155.
70 Pedro de Ribadeneyra, Historia ecclesiastica del scisma de Inglaterra (Madrid: 1588)
294v-​295r.
71 Ribadeneyra, Historia ecclesiastica, 177v.
72 Ribadeneyra, Historia ecclesiastica, 161v-​152r.
73 Ribadeneyra, Historia ecclesiastica, 176r-​v.

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414 Domínguez

of him that the scarlet of his cap “is tinctured with the blood of the martyrs
he has instructed.”74 Such language only served to enhance his authority as
a church leader and as the future leader for a renewed Catholic England. He
embodied, or at least carried on him the blood of all those whom he released to
the English dogs. In Spain, Persons was intent on highlighting how the Spanish
king, Philip ii, “sustained, protected, and favoured these servants of God.” In
return for royal protection, the English had given their blood, and “there in
heaven we should believe that they [martyrs] intercede particularly for those
who have favoured them here on earth.”75 The Iberian connection with English
Catholics provided a way to imbricate the English with the Spanish empire. Af-
ter Philip ii’s death, English and Spanish Catholics would hearken back to the
king’s kindness to inspire his son.76 Indeed, some would suggest that support
for English Catholics had become a defining feature of Habsburg rule. Diego de
Yepes, Philip ii’s confessor, argued that Philip iii, through his father’s efforts,
held a stake in English martyrdom. The martyrs themselves had become some-
thing like “an inheritance and legitimate patrimony.”77
It would be too simple to say that these martyrological discourses fit seam-
lessly within a Counter-​Reformation spirit. The lives of recent martyrs could
be used for polemical purposes within the English Catholic community. As
Peter Lake and Michael Questier have shown, the lives of martyrs could be
polemical tools within a Catholic community in disagreement about the
definition of a good Christian.78 Because English Catholics could not free-
ly exercise their faith and because doing so often went against Elizabethan
law, the English Catholic community adopted different models of worship
and practice that encompassed different degrees of accommodation to the
regime. Fierce polemics emerged among those who fundamentally disagreed
on this –​those who could abide nothing but open resistance fought against
those who argued for various forms of compromise. In these circumstances,
the lives of martyrs could be held up as exempla of ultimate resistance. Lake
and Questier show how the vita written by secular priest Robert Mush of Mar-
garet Clitherow, a Catholic woman crushed to death for her intransigence,

74 Cardinal of Caraffa, “La causas donde importa much el servicio de dios y causa de la reli-
gion de Inglaterra” (1587?). Madrid, Biblioteca Francisco de Zabálburu, Altamira, 248,
GD.30, fol. 219v.
75 “A la señora Infante de España Doña Ysabel” in Parsons, Relacion de algunos martyrios, n.f.
76 Algunos motivos y razones, que ay para favorecer los Seminarios Ingleses (n.p., n.d.), fol.
1. Valladolid, Archivo Colegio de San Albano, Series 2, Legajo 1.
77 Diego de Yepes, Historia particular de la persecución de Inglaterra (Madrid: 1599), sig. ❡5v.
78 Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom
and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (London: 2011).

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Relics and Saints 415

reveal fissures within the Catholic community as some pushed her in one way
or another to conform. The book speaks forthrightly about all the insults her
holiness inspired, not only among Protestants “but also for her virtue by some
one or other emulous Catholic.”79 More importantly, it intended to reject that
sort of Catholic compromise as wrong-​headed. By insisting on the valour of
those who ultimately gave their lives for the faith, authors were criticizing
those who were unwilling to take a strong stance against the Elizabethan
regime.
Because there was a range of English Catholic experiences and postures, the
attempt to promote a maximalist ‘recusant’ stance by those martyr propagan-
dists might rub some the wrong way. Luisa de Carvajal, a Spanish noblewoman
and ascetic who chose to live in England, noticed an ambivalence among some
English Catholics. She claims that English Catholics could not see themselves
in the stories of martyrs and even went as far as questioning their veracity.
Many were said to have asked, according to Carvajal “[w]‌hy do they write such
lies in these books?”80 We should not take Luisa too literally as she was trying
to reinforce the negative image of ‘bad’ Catholics. Nevertheless, her claim sug-
gests that the debate of propriety and impropriety among English Catholics
was profoundly influenced by the idea of martyrdom.
Other forms of established sanctity did not cease to matter. When Teresa of
Ávila died in 1588, despite some uncomfortable moments with the Inquisition
during life, many were certain of her sanctity. Indeed, as soon as she died, her
body was said to emit a sweet scent and the people thronged to her, even bit-
ing off bits of her flesh to take home. The ‘people’ were making her their own
and defining her sanctity even before Rome could say a word. The vitality of
her story, the embedded memory of her life and death, were no doubt import-
ant reasons why the Spanish Habsburgs pushed her canonization in Rome and
why she was (rather quickly) deemed a saint in 1622, just three decades after
her death. The power of this Counter-​Reformation image was of such impor-
tance that Spanish elements wanted to raise her up to the status of patron
saint along with the more traditionally accepted Santiago, a matter that, as
Erin Rowe has shown, led to great debates.81 The ensuing disagreements are
not as important here as the fact that Teresa’s vitality rested in large part on her

79 “Mr. John Mush’s Life of Margaret Clitherow” in The Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers
Related by Themselves, ed. John Morris (London: 1877), vol. 3, 404.
80 Luisa de Carvajal to Joseph Creswell. Jesús González Marañon and Camilo María Abad
(eds), Epistolario y poesias (Madrid: 1965), 333.
81 Erin Rowe, Saint and Nation: Santiago and Teresa of Avila, and Plural Identities in Early
Modern Spain (Pittsburg, PA: 2011).

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416 Domínguez

currency and in this particular case how that value pushed against the embed-
ded traditions going back centuries.
The long-​dead also remained vital. Priests, historians, and antiquarians across
Europe explored deep into their pasts not only to confirm broadly held assump-
tions of sanctity, but to push local saints that had long-​been neglected. Simon
Ditchfield, in his ground-​breaking book about Pietro Maria Campi, a small-​town
priest and antiquary, showed the intellectual tools used by one man to try to save
and promote the spiritual particularities of a town by promoting a local saint.82
Indeed, this was part of a trend identified by Ditchfield: “when early modern
Roman Catholics wanted to express their collective identity or articulate their
collective memory, more often than not they did so in terms of their devotion to
their local churches whose holy custodians were the saints.”83 Sometimes such
devotions were promoted by forms of deceit and deception as was the case in
late-​16th-​century Granada when the bodies of saints were found along with fab-
ricated lead tablets attesting to the permanence of Christianity in Spain even
after Muslim invasions. These objects allowed for the construction of Granada’s
identity as a “Christian republic” as overseen by its patron saint, Cecilio, who
helped maintain Christianity even during Muslim centuries. Such fabrications
were carried out under the veneer of scholarly rigor, an instantiation of what
some scholars have shown to be the origins of criticism through fraud.84
The point here is simple. Post-​Reformation Catholicism continued to find
ways to promote the holy dead. But contextual realities –​religious warfare,
theological disputes –​sparked an urgency that inspired the use of established
tools of evidentiary analysis and required them to look into the recent past, the
wonders of their own time, to find inspiration and to forge ahead against the
religious challenges of the times.

3 Conclusion

As presented here, this chapter falls somewhat into a trap of discussing the holy
dead in two different, hermetically sealed cultural contexts –​the Renaissance and

82 Simon Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy: Pietro Maria Campi and
the Preservation of the Particular (Cambridge: 2002).
83 Simon Ditchfield, “Thinking with Saints: Sanctity and Society in the Early Modern World,”
in Saints: Faith without Borders, eds François Meltzer and Jas Elsner (Chicago, IL: 2011),
157–​90, on 177.
84 Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship
(Princeton, NJ: 1990, this version 2019).

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Relics and Saints 417

Reformation. Things, of course, are not that simple. On the one hand, the meth-
ods, techniques, and aspirations that had once been something like humanist in-
novations were so prevalent that they could not but colour how people thought
about the holy dead, especially in their historical guises. The philological and
historical tools developed over the course of more than a century were not cast
aside amid new waves of religious fervour. Moreover, aside from techniques of
historical reconstruction, the new space for discussing and promoting the holy
dead was fundamentally a product of a rhetorical culture that did much to create
public for a for politico-​religious debate –​a realm of polemical warfare almost as
consequential as the gallows or the battlefield.
And yet, something crucial happened in the aftermath of 1517, which would not
allow for the unchallenged primacy of reformist efforts against old legends with-
in a bookish or antiquarian mould. The explosion of religious wars caused the
bloodied bodies of men and women to mean something special. As far as many
Catholics were concerned, the contemporary situation was a reminder of ancient
wounds, divinely ordained both to inspire reform within the church and to prove
in blood the merit of the True Church. This dynamic only served to re-​inscribe a
tension between the church as an aspiring centralized bureaucracy and the pullu-
lating spiritual worlds experienced far away from Rome. The presumed sanctity of
martyrs did not mean that they would be recognized officially as such, and indeed
it would not be until the Victorian era that their cases would be taken up fiercely
by Catholic revivalists in England. The case of martyrs was only a particularly ex-
posed example of the tense dynamics of centre and periphery, but men of letters,
proto-​archaeologists, and local historians also looked to the deep past to establish
local piety and Christian bona fides based on history and the long dead whose
energies resounded and whose significance did not wane in the period discussed
here or for centuries to come.
As with so much to do with the (holy) dead, these dynamics are all a testa-
ment to the persistent efforts to tie loose ends, to close caesuras dividing past
and present. The holy dead were, as soon as they took their last breaths, history.
But their import, their consequence, was spelled out in their aftermath. With-
in the Catholic tradition especially, their importance did not accrue because
of the marmoreal tincture of their narratives, but because descriptions of the
holy dead (not to mention physical permanence and pictorial representations
of the holy dead) all spoke to their presence, a level of sempiternity imbued by
sanctity.

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 ­c hapter 15

The Undead: Ghosts and Revenants

Polina Ignatova

In the period between 1300 and 1700 Western society witnessed a number of
commotions and changes, from the ravaging of the Black Death, to Renais-
sance and Reformation. This chapter, however, will be concerned not with the
affairs of the living but with the life of the (un)dead, whose activities were
described in many contemporary sources. It will consider the literary sources
about ghosts and walking dead, created between 1300 and 1700, arguing that
the development of late medieval and early modern narratives about revenants
was dominated by a great deal of continuity and adherence to long-​established
patterns, some of which existed already in Antiquity.1 This analysis will high-
light the importance of tradition and established plot patterns for medieval
and early modern narrators and demonstrate how new ideas were incorporat-
ed within the old frameworks of ghost stories.2
The chapter will commence by defining the difference between ghosts and
walking dead in the texts from the period we are concerned with, and the roles
these two types of revenants occupied in the narratives. It will be argued that
that the Black Death and the Reformation –​two major watersheds in the his-
toriography of the period –​did not affect the way ghost stories were composed.

1 An analysis of the transmission of ideas in literary sources, this chapter does not study psy-
chological reasons for the existence of ghosts in medieval imagination. Such an attempt
was made by Aline G. Hornaday, “Visitors from Another Space: The Medieval Revenant as
Foreigner,” Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages, ed. A. Classen (London: 2002), 71–​95 –​a
work which should be treated with great caution. Hornaday’s comparison between medie-
val ghosts and alien invaders in modern popular culture is questionable, and her argument
relies on the misreading of primary sources. The incident in Buckinghamshire, described by
William of Newburgh (see below in the present chapter) involved one walking corpse, and
not multiple ghosts, as Hornaday has claimed (Hornaday, “Visitors,” 82).
2 For an overview of narratives about revenants see S.G. Bruce, The Penguin Book of the Un-
dead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters (New York: 2016); R.C. Finucane,
Ghosts: Appearances of the Dead and Cultural Transformation (New York: 1996). See N. Cacio­
la, Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: 2016) for the argument
about the pagan origins of the undead narratives; P. Marshall, Invisible Worlds: Death, Religion
And The Supernatural In England, 1500–​1700 (London: 2017); J.-​C. Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle
Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. T.L. Fagan (Chicago: 1998) for the
discussion of medieval revenants in the framework of contemporary culture and society.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004443433_017

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The Undead: Ghosts and Revenants 419

Finally, this chapter will highlight the changes that narratives about revenants
underwent throughout the centuries, showing how these developments were
accommodated within plot patterns which had been firmly established in the
Middle Ages. Because this chapter aims to highlight the continuity of ideas,
primary sources will be discussed in thematic strands, rather than in strict
chronological order.

1 Restless Corpses and Ghosts: The Question of Corporeity

It is reasonable to start this chapter by introducing its main protagonists.

Ghosts are conventionally understood to be the souls of deceased individu-
als. They are incorporeal entities made of air, and can act independently of
their bodies, regardless of the latter’s condition or location. Walking dead are
partially re-​animated cadavers with or without a soul inside. The distinction
between the two was clear in classical texts, as in many cases authors stated
explicitly which type of a revenant they were writing about.3
In the Middle Ages approaches towards ghosts and walking dead started to
differ depending on the region. In Continental Europe the narrators often did
not explain whether they were writing about ghosts or about the walking dead,
which implies that they found this information unimportant for their audi-
ence.4 There is no Latin word for a walking corpse, as instead the narrators de-
scribed how a dead person’s cadaver climbed out of their grave and wandered
around. The walking dead can be recognised in a text because protagonists in
these cases are often shown either to destroy them physically, or move them
to another location, something which cannot be done to a ghost. A number
of revenants described by Continental narrators possess corporeal features, or

3 For classical ghosts see Pliny the Younger, Letters, ed. W.M.L. Hutchinson, trans. W. Melmoth,
vol. 2 (London: 1961), lib. 7, xxii, 68–​72; Lucian of Samosata, “The Lover of Lies, or the Doubt-
er,” in Lucian, ed. T.E. Page, trans. A.M. Harmon, vol. 3 (London: 1961), 319–​82; Herodotus,
The Histories, ed. C. Scarre, trans. H. Cary (London: 1992), book 5, ch. 92, 341. For classical
restless corpses see Pliny the Elder, C. Plini Secundi Naturalis Historiae Libri XXXVII, ed.
C. Mayhoff, vol. 2 (Leipzig: 1875), lib. 7, c. 52, 44–​5; M.A. Lucanus, Pharsalia, ed. C.E. Haskins
(New York: 1971), 209–​26; L. Apuleius, Metamorphoseon Libri XI, ed. R. Helm (Leipzig: 1955),
lib. 2, c. 28–​30 and lib. 9, c. 30, at 48–​50 and 225–​6.
4 For European revenants of ambiguous nature before 1300 see Gregory of Tours, Liber in glo-
ria confessorum, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SS. rer. Merov., vol. i, pt. 2, 2nd ed. (Berlin: 1969),
294–​370, c. 72 at 340–​1; Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon, ed. R. Holtzmann, MGHSRG Nova
Series, vol. 9 (Berlin: 1935), lib. 1, c. 11–​13, 16–​20; Caesarius von Heisterbach, Dialogus miracu-
lorum, eds. and trans. N. Nösges and H. Schneider, vol. 5 (Turnhout: 2009), lib. 12, c. 18, 2214–​6,
c. 20, 2218–​20.

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420 Ignatova

appear in cemeteries, which could make it possible for a modern scholar to

view them as restless cadavers. However, since European narrators were not as
explicit as the classical authors, it is not clear whether they ever intended to
describe their revenants as walking corpses.
For example, Thietmar of Merseburg wrote in his Chronicon (1012–​1018)
how the priest of a church in Deventer saw the dead making offerings in
the cemetery and inside the church. The priest reported these events to the
bishop Baldric of Utrecht and the latter ordered him to sleep in the church.
On the first night the dead threw the priest out together with his bed. On the
second night the priest stayed awake because of fear and indeed, when the
dead arrived, they carried the priest to the altar and burned him to ashes.
We do not know if these undead were spirits or walking corpses. Thietmar
refers to them as “mortui” and “defuncti” and does not explicitly say that the
revenants climbed out of their graves. Their ability to carry the priest does
not indicate their corporeity since medieval and early modern ghosts were
also able to move objects. These revenants are also not described as malig-
nant –​their hostility towards the living priest is caused by his trespassing on
their territory.5
Latin sources produced in medieval England differ from their Continental
counterparts, as English narrators ascribed different tasks to different types of
revenants and hence in most cases they stated explicitly whether they were
writing about ghosts or walking corpses.6 The benign undead who appeared to
manifest their departure, to ask for help politely, or to warn the living about the
afterlife were ghosts. The dangerous revenants, whose purpose was to terrify
the reader, were restless corpses. Almost all medieval English walking dead
were former sinners, and even in the rare cases when they managed to ask the
living for help, their main aim in a narrative was to incite horror and disgust.7

5 Thietmar, Chronicon, vol. 9, lib. 1, c. 12, 16–​18.

6 For medieval English ghosts before 1300 see Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English Peo-
ple, ed. B. Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors, vol. 1 (Oxford: 1969), lib. 4, c. 3, 344, c. 9, 360, c. 23,
412; William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, ed. and trans. R.A.B. Mynors, R.M.
Thomson, and M. Winterbottom, Oxford Medieval Texts, vol. 1 (Oxford: 1998–​9), lib. 3,
c. 237, 440–​4; J. Stephenson (ed.) Chronicon de Lanercost 1201–​1346. E codice Cottoniano
nunc primum typis mandatum (Edinburgh: 1839), 125–​6, 136–​7. For examples of medieval
English walking dead before 1300 see R.C. Love, (ed. and trans.), Three Eleventh-​Century
Anglo-​Latin Saints’ Lives, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: 1996), 50–​72; Herman the Arch-
deacon and Goscelin of Saint-​Bertin, Miracles of St Edmund, ed. and trans. T. Licence with
the assistance of L. Lockyer, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: 2014), 10–​14 and 142–​4.
7 For benign restless corpses see A. Wilmart (ed.), “La légende de Ste Edithe en prose et
en vers par le moine Goscelin,” AB 56 (1938), 34–​101 and 265–​302, on 281–​3; William of
Malmesbury, Gesta regum, vol. 1, lib. 1, c. 124, 194–​196; Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium,

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The Undead: Ghosts and Revenants 421

Some of the restless corpses were shown to be controlled by the devil, meaning
that these revenants were not connected with the soul of the deceased individ-
ual, being the product of diabolic activity.8
The division of labour between ghosts and walking dead in English sources
also had a practical reason. In contrast to the ‘good’ undead, the ‘bad’ undead
needed to be defeated to conclude the story. The idea that something mate-
rial is necessary to exorcise an evil revenant can be traced back to ancient
Mesopotamia, where the connection between a soul and a body was believed
to stay after death, as evidenced by some of the exorcism rituals.9 During the
Neo-​Assyrian period in order to put a ghost to rest one was supposed to make
a figurine of it and bury it with funerary rites. It is probable that the figu-
rine was treated as a substitute for the corpse, if the latter was missing. The
Greeks also used to bind or bury figurines in order to protect themselves from
ghosts –​the ritual was likely to have been borrowed from Mesopotamia.10
English sources followed similar logic –​for the narrative to resolve the living
protagonists had to be able to chop off the heads of the evil revenants, strike
them with weapons, or burn them to ashes, hence the revenants had to be
corporeal.
Understanding whether the revenant in a certain narrative is a ghost
or a restless corpse provides us with a better vision of how medieval au-
thors imagined the (un)dead and allows to learn more about the origins
and purposes of a given source. The Byland Collection, discussed in a follow-
ing section, has attracted scholarly attention due its featuring tangible, or
“corporeal” ghosts. While some scholars have assumed that the “corporeity”
of Byland ghosts indicates their folklore origin, the following section will
demonstrate that the nature of this work is more complicated than it ini-
tially appears.11

ed. and trans. M.R. James, C.N.L. Brooke and R.A.B. Mynors, Oxford Medieval Texts (Ox-
ford: 1983), dist. ii, c. 30, p. 206.
8 See Geoffrey of Burton, Life and Miracles of St Modwenna, ed. and trans. R. Bartlett, Oxford
Medieval Texts (Oxford: 2002), c. 47, 190–​8; Map, De Nugis, dist. ii, c. 27, pp. 202–​204; Wil-
liam of Newburgh, Historia rerum Anglicarum, ed. Richard Howlett, Chronicles of the reigns
of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, Rolls Series 82, vol. 2 (London: 1884), lib. 5, c. 23–​24,
pp. 476–​82.
9 J.R. Porter, “Ghosts in the Old Testament and the Ancient Near East,” The Folklore of
Ghosts, ed. H.R.E. Davidson and W.M.S. Russell (Cambridge: 1981), 215–​38, on 216.
10 C.A. Faraone, “Binding and Burying the Forces of Evil: The Defensive Use of ‘Voodoo
Dolls’ in Ancient Greece,” Classical Antiquity 10.2 (1991), 165–​205, 207–​20.
11 Schmitt, Ghosts, 147; J. Simpson, “Repentant Soul or Walking Corpse? Debatable
Apparitions in Medieval England,” Folklore 114 (2003), 389–​402, on 395–​400.

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422 Ignatova

2 ‘Corporeal’ Ghosts of the Byland Collection

The so-​called Byland Collection, inserted by an anonymous monk of Byland

Abbey, North Yorkshire, onto the blank pages of a book containing works of
Cicero and the Elucidarium, constitutes a good example of the continuity in
the narratives about revenants. The book was originally made in the late 12th
or early 13th century, but the stories date from around 1400.12 The case study
of the Byland Collection reveals the links between late medieval sources and
earlier texts, demonstrating that the latter determined the way stories about
revenants were composed in the period studied here. The study also establish-
es the methodology applied in this chapter.
The Byland Collection has traditionally been assumed to reflect contempo-
rary beliefs and superstitions for the following reasons.13 The second story in
the collection, according to the narrator, happened in the reign of Richard ii (r.
1377–​1399), and so the author is referring to the events from his recent past.14
A few times the author is reluctant to state the names or the particular sins
of the ghosts he describes, possibly because it could annoy the still-​living rel-
atives and friends of the deceased person.15 In most of the tales the action is
set in the villages neighbouring Byland Abbey, such as “Ampliforth,” “Gillyng,”
“Killeburne,” “Kereby,” “Boltebi,” and “Heslerton.”16 The narrator references “the
old” as his sources.17 The text is written in very heavy cursive; the stories are
inconsistent and tend to end abruptly. Occasionally the narrator concludes a
story and then adds the details he has forgotten to mention earlier.18
The Byland Collection stands out among medieval English sources, as in its
stories the line between corporeal and incorporeal revenants is uncharacter-
istically blurred. Thus, the fifth story tells of a woman who caught a spirit and
brought it inside the house so people could see her hands sinking into the “spir-
it’s flesh” (carne spiritus), as if it was putrid, and “not solid, but supernatural”
(non solida sed fantastica).19 The sixth tale features an undead Newburgh can-
on, who could not find peace after stealing a few silver spoons and attacked a

12 M.R. James, “Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories,” EHR 37 (1922), 413–​22, on 414.
13 See S. Gordon, “Medical Condition, Demon or Undead Corpse? Sleep Paralysis and
the Nightmare in Medieval Europe,” Social History of Medicine 28/​3 (2015), 425–​44, on
438 n. 89.
14 James, “Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories,” § 2, 415.
15 James, “Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories,” § 2, 415, n 4, § 3, 418.
16 James, “Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories,” § 2, 415, §3, 418, § 4, 418, § 8, 419, § 12, 422.
17 “senioribus,” James, “Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories,” §4, 418.
18 James, “Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories,” § 3, 418, § 5, 418–​19, and § 9, 420.
19 James, “Twelve Medieval Ghost stories,” § 5, 418–​19.

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The Undead: Ghosts and Revenants 423

living man tearing apart his clothes.20 In the twelfth story of the collection, the
nature of the revenant is not obvious. The story describes the sister of Adam
de Lond, who gave her brother certain property charters due to a discord with
her husband, thus disinheriting the latter together with their sons. After the
woman’s death, Adam expelled her family from their home and seized all their
property. Consequently, the dead woman could not find rest and haunted the
neighbourhood seeking justice. Although the narrator does not state explicitly
that she is a corporeal revenant, it is possible that he had a restless cadaver in
mind. He does not use the word “spirit” referring to Adam’s sister, and the first
sentence says: “It should be stated that the aforesaid woman was buried in the
cemetery of Ampleford and after a short time was caught by William Trower
Senior.”21 The fact that the narrator mentioned her having been buried before
being caught indicates that he could be writing about a walking corpse.
At the first glance we can assume that the corporeal nature of the Byland
ghosts can be explained by the inconsistencies in the narrative structure of the
collection and the folkloric origin of the stories. Indeed, if the Byland monk
picked these stories from local lore, it is unlikely that medieval villagers con-
cerned themselves with the consistency of their tales. Yet a detailed analysis
shows that the Byland Collection still attempts to distinguish between walk-
ing dead and ghosts, as the narrator makes it clear when he writes about rest-
less corpses by stating that the revenants climbed out of their graves. In the
third story he writes: “the aforesaid Robert the younger died and was buried
in a cemetery but used to exit his grave at night.”22 The fourth story relates
that: “someone named James Tankerlay was buried near the chapter of Byland
and used to go out of his grave as far as Kereby.”23 However, in Robert’s story the
narrator creates confusion by entitling it “Concerning the spirit of Robert the
son of Robert de Boltebi of Killeburne caught in a cemetery.”24
Furthermore, a more careful examination of the text reveals that it bears a
number of similarities with earlier sources. For instance, the second story of
the Byland Collection describes how a tailor named Snawball was attacked and

20 James, “Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories,” § 6, 419.

21 “Memorandum quod predicta mulier in cimiterio de Ampilford sepeliebatur et infra
breve post mortem comprehendebatur per Willelmum Trower seniorem,” James, “Twelve
Medieval Ghost Stories,” § 12, 422.
22 “predictus Robertus iunior moriebatur et sepeliebatur in cymiterio sed solebat egredi de
sepulcro in noctibus,” James, “Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories,” § 3, 418.
23 “quidam nomine Iacobus Tankerlay […] sepeliebatur coram capitulo Bellelande et sole-
bat egredi in noctibus usque kereby,” James, “Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories,” § 4, 418.
24 “De spiritu Roberti filii Roberti de Boltebi de Killeburne comprehenso in cimiterio,”
James, “Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories,” § 3, 418.

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424 Ignatova

wounded by a ghost. Attempting to fight back, he kept striking the spirit with
a sword, but realised he was unable to damage the spirit and it felt like he was
striking a pile of turf.25 A similar motif appears in Caesarius of Heisterbach’s
Dialogus Miraculorum, as Caesarius describes a revenant, which, when struck
with a sword, was not injured, but emitted a sound of a soft bed being hit.26
Another source which most probably influenced the Byland monk was Wil-
liam of Newburgh’s Historia rerum Anglicarum as it contains four stories about
walking corpses, which showed up in Buckinghamshire, Berwick, Melrose, and
the castle of Anantis.27 The aforesaid James Tankerlay, the rector of Kereby, was
described to exit his grave near the chapter of Byland at night and walk back
to Kereby where his concubine lived, on one occasion blowing out her eye.
Eventually, the coffin containing his body was dumped in the lake Gormyr.28
Two of William’s restless corpses also haunted the women they were associ-
ated with during their lifetimes: the walking cadaver from Buckinghamshire
climbed into his wife’s bed, while his counterpart from Melrose haunted the
lady whom he served as chaplain while alive.
Furthermore, in Snawball’s story the spirit requested that the tailor gets an
absolution for him. Having acquired the letter of absolution, Snawball buried
it in the dead man’s grave.29 William of Newburgh’s Buckinghamshire corpse
was laid to rest exactly in the same manner: the letter of absolution, written
by Bishop Hugh of Lincoln himself, was placed inside his grave.30 In this story,
as well as in the case of the Anantis revenant, the clergymen held a council
in order to decide what should be done with a restless cadaver.31 The same
occurs in Snawball’s tale: when the tailor approached the priest and told him
his story, the latter was first reluctant to absolve the ghost and consulted other

25 “Tandem resurgens et constans in fide pugnavit cum eo cum gladio suo quousque fuerat
lassus, et videbatur sibi quasi percuteret t[er]ricidiu[m]‌more,” James, “Twelve Medieval
Ghost Stories,” § 2, 415.
26 “Gladio saepe caedebatur, sed non poterat vulnerari; talem ex se sonum emittens, ac si
mollis lectus percuteretur,” Caesarius, Dialogus, vol. 5, lib. 12, c. 15, 2210.
27 William of Newburgh, Historia, vol. 2, lib. 5, c. 22–​24, 474–​482. Joseph Stephenson iden-
tifies the Anantis castle as Annan or Annand in Dumfriesshire, and Stephen Gordon
as Alnwick in Northumbria. See The History of William of Newburgh, ed. and trans.
J. Stephenson (London: 1996), 660, n. 1.; S. Gordon, “Social Monsters and Walking Dead
in William of Newburgh’s Historia rerum Anglicarum,” Journal of Medieval History, 41/​4
(2015), 446–​465, on 454.
28 James “Twelve Medieval Ghost stories,” § 4, 418.
29 William of Newburgh, Historia, vol. 2, lib. 5, c. 22, 475.
30 James “Twelve Medieval Ghost stories,” § 2, 416.
31 The location of “Anantis” is unsure. William of Newburgh, Historia, vol. 2, lib. 5, c. 24, 481.

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The Undead: Ghosts and Revenants 425

clergymen.32 After the second encounter with the spirit, Snawball met two
more ghosts haunting the same area. One of them was a former cleric, who
appeared in the shape of a hunter with a horn.33 The cleric from Melrose, de-
scribed by William, was punished by restlessness for his secular lifestyle, par-
ticularly his love of hunting.34
The aforesaid Robert of Killeburne was described to wander around after
death pursued by packs of dogs. He often stopped by the houses, lurking by
doors and windows and listening to the living. Eventually, the brave young men
of the village agreed to go to the cemetery and capture the revenant, but upon
seeing the walking corpse almost all of them ran away in fear. The remaining
two caught the dead man at the cemetery and summoned the priest, who asked
the revenant about his cause. The latter confessed his sins, which included be-
ing an accessory to a murder. Having been absolved by the priest, Robert rested
in peace.35 Packs of barking dogs also followed William of Newburgh’s restless
dead from Berwick and Anantis. Like Robert, the Anantis restless corpse also
wandered around the houses of the living. In Berwick and Anantis the restless
cadavers were similarly captured by young men.36 Some linguistic correlations
can also be traced. William of Newburgh uses the words “egrediebatur,” “egre-
dientia,” “egrediens,” when talking about corpses exiting their graves, while the
Byland monk employs the cognate verb “egredi” in his walking-​dead stories.37
Both narrators use the word “lues,” William of Newburgh for “plague,” and the
Byland monk, most likely, for “misfortunes,” as well as the word “exanimis” for
“dead.”38 The possibility of direct borrowing is likely as both Newburgh priory
and Byland monastery are in Yorkshire.
The corporeity of the Byland ghosts, therefore, occurs due to the influence
of earlier sources rather than to the local lore. As Caesarius’s Dialogus had
clearly influenced our narrator it is not surprising his stories resemble a con-
tinental type of a ghost-​story, without a sharp distinction between ghosts and
walking dead. Furthermore, the Byland monk endowed his undead with fea-
tures borrowed from William of Newburgh’s walking-​dead stories. The Byland

32 James “Twelve Medieval Ghost stories,” § 2, 416.

33 James, “Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories,” § 2, 416–​17.
34 William of Newburgh, Historia, vol. 2, lib. 5, c. 24, 478.
35 James, “Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories,” § 4, 418.
36 William of Newburgh, Historia, vol. 2, lib. 5, c. 23 and 24, at 476 and 480–​2.
37 William of Newburgh, Historia, vol. 2, lib. 5, c. 23, 476, c. 24, 477 and 480; James, “Twelve
Medieval Ghost Stories,” §§ 3 and 4, 418.
38 For “lues”: William of Newburgh, Historia, vol. 2, lib. 5, c. 23, 477; James, “Twelve Medieval
Ghost Stories,” § 2, 417. For “exanimis”: William of Newburgh, Historia, vol. 2, lib. 5, c. 23,
476, c. 24, 481; James, “Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories,” § 2, 415.

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426 Ignatova

ghosts do not reflect any changes in the way the English imagined the afterlife
or shifts within contemporary religious thought. Instead, the peculiarity of the
collection is determined by its author’s sources.

3 Pestilential Revenants and Continuity in Ghost Stories

The case of the Byland Collection highlights a trait common in many ghost sto-
ries: they are mainly based on earlier texts. The motif of ghosts being soft, for ex-
ample, carried on into the early modern period: Noёl Taillepied, a 16th-​century
Franciscan theologian from France in his work A Treatise of Ghosts (1587/​88)
advised not to try and fight with a revenant, for many who did achieved noth-
ing as they felt as if they were beating a soft feathery substance.39
The Compendium Maleficarum, composed in the early 17th century by an
Italian monk, Francesco Maria Guazzo, also drew substantively on old ghost
tales.40 While Guazzo references some of his sources, he also rewrites a few
stories in a different context without referencing the original. For example, he
narrates the following miracle, which happened Correto (a town not far from
Pavia) in 1601. A notary died and while the funeral rites were performed in
the church, the dead man suddenly rose up in the coffin and related that he
had kept in secret a certain document, and now was doomed to be punished
in hell. To amend the situation one of the notary’s relatives was requested to
find the document in the notary’s house and restore it to the rightful owner.41
A very similar story appeared in Caesarius’s Dialogus. A man from Strasbourg
revived on his funeral bier in order to warn his wife to dispose of all the ill-​
gotten property, and died again in three days.42
The tradition of building a narrative upon earlier sources reduced the pos-
sibility for ghost stories to reflect contemporary events, for each new plot con-
stituted a mixture of ideas borrowed from previous texts. In his influential
work on restless corpses P. Barber has connected medieval and early modern
stories about the undead with the outbreaks of plagues, arguing that without

39 N. Taillepied, A Treatise of Ghosts, trans. M. Summers (London: 1971), 169. See also Timothy
Chesters, Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France: Walking by Night (Oxford: 2011), 21 –​
63. See also E. Tingle, “Ghost Stories: Noёl de Taillepied’s Psichologie ou apparition de
esprits (1587) and the Rehabilitation of Purgatory in Late Sixteenth-​Century France,” in
Dying, Death, Burial and Commemoration in Reformation Europe, eds E. Tingle and J. Willis
(London: 2016), 175–​96.
40 F. M. Guazzo, Compendium Maleficarum (Milan: 1608).
41 Guazzo, Compendium Maleficarum, lib. 1, c. 18, 121.
42 Caesarius, Dialogus, lib. 11, c. 37, 2128.

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The Undead: Ghosts and Revenants 427

understanding the nature of infection people blamed the first victim of the
outbreak, assuming that that individual turned into a revenant and contin-
ued spreading infection after death.43 A few medieval sources created before
1300 contain stories about spirits and walking dead spreading infection.44 It
is indeed tempting to interpret wandering cadavers as diseased individuals
suggesting that dangerous infections led to their carriers being perceived as
walking corpses –​just like lepers were referred to as “living dead.”45 Following
this logic, one would expect a proliferation of stories about pestilential undead
around the time of the Black Death. The latter, however, did not change the
way stories about revenants were composed.
The Black Death arrived in Constantinople in 1347, brought by the Gen-
oese fleeing from Caffa, and reached Italy the same year. By 1348 the plague
reached the Holy Roman Empire, France, England, and the Iberian Peninsula.
The plague seemed to have receded by the end of 1349, but returned in a small-
er wave to England in 1361, and outbreaks continued in the 15th and the 16th
centuries.46 However, this period did not see the proliferation of ghost stories,
let alone stories about pestilential undead. The only walking-​dead story ap-
pearing in England in the 14th century is an account from Polychronicon, com-
posed in the 1320s, i.e. before the Black Death, describing how Richard, Duke
of Normandy, entered a church at night to pray and was attacked by a cadaver
which was lying there. Richard defeated the revenant by cutting it in two with
his sword.47 This story is modelled upon a tale included by Thomas of Cantim-
pré in his Bonum universal de apibus, created in the mid-​13th century. A virgin
kept coming to a church every early morning in order to pray. On one occasion
there was a corpse of a dead man left inside the church resting on a bier. The
virgin nevertheless proceeded with her routine as usual. Seeing this, the devil
entered the body of the dead man and attacked the maiden. Eventually she
smashed the head of the corpse with the staff topped with a cross, causing the
devil to flee.48
Pestilential dead re-​appeared in England only in the 15th century in the
Byland Collection. The restless spirit wounded the tailor Snawball in order to

43 P. Barber, Vampires, Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality (New Haven, CT, 1988), 96.
44 Geoffrey of Burton, Life and Miracles of St Modwenna, c. 47, 190–​98; Map, De Nugis, dist. ii,
c. 27, 202–​4; William of Newburgh, Historia Rerum, vol. 2, lib. 5, c. 23–​24, 476–​82.
45 R. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society (Malden, MA: 2007), 54–​6.
46 Rosemary Horrox, The Black Death (Manchester: 1994), 9–​12.
47 Ranulph Higden, Polychronicon, vol. 6 (London: 1876), lib. 6, c. 7, 446–​448. For the dating
see J. Taylor, The Universal Chronicle of Ranulf Higden (Oxford: 1966), 2.
48 Thomas de Cantimpré, Bonum universal de apibus, ed. George Colveneer (Brabant:
1627), 541–​2.

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428 Ignatova

secure an absolution from him –​if the tailor fulfilled the task, the ghost would
tell him how to be cured, but otherwise his flesh would rot and his skin would
fall off and he would decay on the inside.49 In addition to the curse the tailor
fell ill after each encounter with the spirit. The man who wrestled with the
ghost of a Newburgh canon also fell ill afterwards.50 As in both cases the illness
afflicted only one person, the narrator clearly did not have the Black Death
in mind.
Byland’s pestilential ghosts further demonstrate a debt to the earlier sourc-
es. Orderic Vitalis’s Ecclesiastical History (1141) contains a story about the priest
Walchelin, who witnessed a procession of ghosts and afterwards got ill. The
use of words suggests that the Byland monk could be familiar with the text of
the Ecclesiastical History, as while Orderic wrote “graviter egrotavit,” the Byland
monk put “graviter egrotabat” (“was seriously ill”).51 The idea that a contact
with the supernatural makes one sick is also prominent in Caesarius’s Dialo-
gus –​one story described two youths who fell ill after seeing a demon.52
After the final meeting between Snawball and the spirit the latter warned
Snawball not to look at fire at least for one night.53 This idea was also prob-
ably borrowed from Caesarius, as in one of his stories a monk, who saw a
demon and then looked at fire, was ill for several days. Caesarius explained
that this happened because fire produced light, while the devil produced
darkness, and the monk fell sick after seeing two opposing elements in close
consequence.54
In addition, Caesarius described two creatures of vague origin, inflicting
illnesses upon the living. The first appeared from the site of the cemetery in
a shape of a pale woman dressed in white –​a shroud, it could be implied. By
gazing over the lands belonging to two families the creature caused deaths
from illness in both households.55 Another incident took place in Bonn: after
vespers the scholars saw a creature of human shape coming out of one of the
graves and entering into another. After a while a canon died and was buried in
the same tomb where the monster had entered.56 Although the nature of these

49 James, “Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories,” § 2, 416.

50 James, “Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories,” § 2, 416, § 6, 419.
51 Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History, ed. and tr. Marjorie Chibnall, Oxford Medieval
Texts, vol. 4. (Oxford: 1973), lib. 8, c. 17, 248; James, “Twelve Medieval Ghost stories,”
§ 2, 418.
52 Caesarius, Dialogus, vol. 3, dist. 5, c. 30, 1064–​66.
53 James “Twelve Medieval Ghost stories,” § 2, 418.
54 Caesarius, Dialogus, vol. 3, dist. 5, c. 28, 1052–​54.
55 Caesarius, Dialogus, vol. 5, dist. 11, c. 63, 2170–​72.
56 Caesarius, Dialogus, vol. 5, dist. 11, c. 64, 2172–​74.

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The Undead: Ghosts and Revenants 429

creatures is not clear, their appearance at the cemetery, as well as the woman’s
resemblance of a corpse, could lead the readers of the Dialogus to assume that
Caesarius had a pestilential revenant in mind, and to reproduce the connec-
tion between seeing the undead and falling sick in their own writings.
The available textual evidence thus demonstrates that stories about pesti-
lential undead created between 1300 and 1700 echo earlier sources rather than
reflect contemporary events. The idea of a ghost spreading pestilence contin-
ued to be recycled well after the Black Death. Taillepied wrote that spirits can
inflict pestilence upon the living, causing their lips to crack and swell, and
their faces to bloat.57 John Aubrey, an English antiquary and writer, included
an account of a malicious revenant in his Brief Lives, which he wrote in the
second half of the 17th century. A certain man called Francis Fry was haunted
by the ghost of Mrs Furze, the second wife of his former master. Mrs Furze kept
beating up poor Fry making him gravely ill.58 Aubrey’s contemporary, English
theologian Richard Baxter, described a child, who, when tortured by an evil
spirit, lost the power of speech, barking like a dog and, clucking like a hen.59
While it is tempting to rationalise these examples by suggesting that it was
the contemporaries’ way of explaining causes for illness and insanity, early-​
modern ghost stories included sickness following the tradition established in
the Middle Ages.

4 The Reformation and Old Stories in New Contexts

The medieval tradition of creating narratives about revenants using a certain

set of patterns was not undermined by the Reformation, although the latter
was followed by a wave of treatises denying the existence of revenants. In 1569
a Swiss reformer, Ludwig Lavater in his work De Spectris, translated into En-
glish in 1572 as Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght, and of Strange Noyses,
Crackes, and Sundry Forewarnynges, rejected the existence of ghosts, explain-
ing them as devilish tricks, drunkenness, or general inclination towards fear,
particularly typical of women.60 Thomas Nashe in the essay entitled The Ter-
rors of the Night, or, a Discourse of Apparitions argued that what people mistake

57 Taillepied, A Treatise of Ghosts, 78–​9, 107.

58 John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. O.L. Dick (Harmondsworth: 1982), 269–​72.
59 Richard Baxter, The Certainty of the World of Spirits (London: 1834), 143.
60 L. Lavater, De Spectri Lemuribus et Magnis (Geneva: 1580). See also L. Lavater, Of Ghostes
and Spirites Walking by Nyght, and of Strange Noyses, Crackes, and Sundry Forewarnynges,
trans. Robert Harrison (London: 1596).

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430 Ignatova

for ghosts is the result of diabolical activities.61 Even King James i and vi him-
self reasoned that the devil is the source of all apparitions, either assuming the
shape of a deceased person, or entering and moving dead bodies.62
Scepticism towards ghosts was by no means new, as the ability of the dead to
interact with the living had been denied already by St Augustine of Hippo.63 Even
before the spread of Christianity there were authors like Lucian of Samosata, who
mocked people believing in ghosts, and the tradition of confusing ghosts with
devils in a narrative stretches back to ancient Mesopotamia, where spirits of the
dead appeared most often in exorcist texts, lumped together with evil creatures of
non-​human origin.64
Medieval writers, such as Walter Map and Caesarius of Heisterbach, also ar-
gued that not all the apparitions claiming to be ghosts of the dead should be treat-
ed as such. Map described a knight, who perceiving the re-​animated corpse of
his father, feared it was a diabolical trick.65 Map also reasoned that occasionally
devils, with God’s permission, can create illusions, which he referred to as “fantas-
ma.”66 Caesarius wrote about a dead girl, who returned as a ghost to do her pen-
ance for whispering in the church choir. One living girl saw her and reported the
apparition to the abbess. The abbess first assumed that it was a diabolical trick,
and suggested that the next time the ghost appears, the living girl should bid it
by saying “Benedicite,” and if it was really the soul of the dead girl the apparition
should reply “Dominus.”67 Another example of scepticism comes from William of
Auvergne, who argued that the dead in the afterlife have neither will nor time to
return as revenants and kill the living.68
In 1595 Catholic Nicholas Rémy, the provost of Nancy and a witch prose-
cutor, published his treatise known as Daemonolatreiae Libri Tres arguing
that evil spirits often linger around cemeteries, attracted by the foulness of

61 T. Nashe, “The Terrors of the Night, Or A Discourse of Apparitions. Post Tenebras Dies,” in
The Complete Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. A.B. Grosart, vol. 3 (London: 1883), 219–​82.
62 King James i and iv, Daemonologie, ed. G. B. Harrison (Edinburgh: 1966), book 3, 56–​81.
63 Augustine of Hippo, De cura pro mortuis gerenda, ed. J. Zych, CSEL 41, sect. 5, pt. 3
(Leipzig: 1900), 619–​60. For the translation see Augustine of Hippo, Treatises on Marriage
and Other Subjects, trans. C.T. Wilcox, C.T. Huegelmeyer et al., in Writings of Saint
Augustine, ed. R.J. Deferrari, vol. 15, The Fathers of the Church 27 (Washington, DC: 1955),
351–​84.
64 Lucian of Samosata, “The Lover of Lies, or the Doubter,,” 364–​9.
65 Map, De Nugis, dist. 2, c. 30, 206.
66 Map, De Nugis, dist. 2, c. 13, 160.
67 Caesarius, Dialogus, vol. 5, dist. 12, c. 36, 2262–​66.
68 William of Auvergne, “De Universo,” in Guilielmi Alverni Opera Omnia, vol. 1 (Frankfurt-​
on-​Main: 1963), pars 3, c. 24, p. 1069.

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The Undead: Ghosts and Revenants 431

decomposing bodies, and it is “silly” to mistake them for ghosts of the dea.69
Scepticism regarding the ability of the dead to appear to the living therefore
was not invented by Protestants and was not always connected to Protestant
ideas, as they were not the only group questioning the nature of ghostly appa-
ritions. While the Reformation spurred proliferation of treatises discouraging
the belief in ghosts, similar scepticism existed in textual sources long before
Protestant thinkers put their pens to paper.
The sceptics’ efforts did not prevent ghost stories from being composed and
the latter continued to follow the established plot lines observed throughout
the Middle Ages. Thus, revenants still returned to seek justice. Aubrey narrat-
ed a story about a certain William Barwick, who killed his pregnant wife and
hid her body. The crime was manifested by the ghost of the murdered woman
appearing by the pond where she was drowned.70 In the 17th century natural
philosopher George Sinclair described a ghost of a murdered woman appear-
ing in a terrifying form, covered in blood and with five wounds on the head, to
a certain miller in order to tell her story.71 Compare this to the account found
in the 13th-​century Liber Exemplorum ad usum praedicantium, where a man
sought to marry a noble widow, but was rejected for his low status. To acquire
wealth, he killed a rich merchant, taking all that he found on the corpse. He
then returned to the lady proposing the marriage again, but, as she demanded
to know the source of his wealth, he confessed the truth. The lady then asked
him to go and keep a night vigil by the place where the merchant’s body was ly-
ing, and as he did, he saw the dead man sitting down with his hands stretched
to Heaven, praying to God for justice.72
Some ghosts still appeared to foretell an individual’s death. Natural philos-
opher and geologist John Beaumont (d. 1731) wrote about a maiden visited by
the ghost of her mother, who predicted the girl’s own death in a few hours.73
The same narrative model appears, for example, in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History.
Eorcengota, the daughter of Eadbald, the king of Kent, had a vision foretelling
her death: men dressed in white entered the monastery where she was a nun
saying they had come to collect a golden coin which had arrived from Kent.74

69 Nicolas Rémy, Daemonolatreiae Libri Tres (Frankfurt: 1597), lib. 2, c. 1, 178–​9.

70 Edition used for this chapter: John Aubrey, Miscellanies upon Various Subjects (London:
1784), 134–​45.
71 G. Sinclair, Satan’s Invisible World Discovered (London: 1814), 13–​15.
72 Liber Exemplorum ad usum praedicantium saeculo xiii compositus a quodam Fratre Minore
Anglico de Provincia Hiberniae, ed. A.G. Little (Aberdeen: 1908), 65–​7.
73 J. Beaumont, An Historical, Physiological and Theological Treatise of Spirits (London: 1705),
398–​400.
74 Bede, Ecclesiastical History, vol. 1, lib. 3, c. 8, 236–​8.

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432 Ignatova

Like in medieval sources, early modern ghosts kept returning to fulfil their
death pacts. Usually such stories commence with two friends or relatives
agreeing that the one who dies first appears to the survivor within a certain
number of days after the death to prove the existence of the afterlife.75 One
early modern version of this motif was narrated by Sinclair: a dead major ap-
peared to his friend, a captain, urging him to amend his ways, since God does
exist. The ghost also rebuked the captain for not keeping the sword which used
to belong to the dead man in proper condition. Sinclair completely adhered to
the medieval plot pattern: like in earlier sources, the major failed to make it to
the arranged date, for the world of spirits is busy, and appeared when his living
companion had already lost hope of seeing the major again.76
The medieval idea of ghosts returning to amend the mistakes they made
while alive or at least to confess their sins also carried into the early modern
period practically unchanged, with Protestant writers utilising it to describe
ghosts as trying to sort out inheritance issues. Anglican cleric Joseph Glanvill
(d. 1680) narrated a story resembling the case of Adam de Lond’s sister. One
man stated that if he died without heirs, his land should pass to his brother. Af-
ter his death his widow realised that she was pregnant. The brother, however,
refused to return the land to her, calling the woman “a whore.” A few years after
the son had been born, on a summer night the widow was undressing him in
her yard, when she beheld the ghost of her late husband bidding her to go to
his brother and demand the land back. She did accordingly, but the brother re-
fused to return the land yet again, changing his mind only after he had seen the
apparition himself.77 Sometimes it is not the heirs but the poor who have been
wronged. Another story by Glanvill features the ghost of a late Mrs Bretton,
who appeared to her maid, asking for her help in order to restore a part of her
lands to the poor, as these lands had been seized unjustly by her father.78 Com-
pare this story to an episode from Orderic Vitalis’s account: one of the dead
knights encountered by Walchelin was William of Glos, who begged the priest
to help him return the mill, which he had gained through usury, to the poor.79
Meanwhile, Catholics employed the plot pattern of a ghost confessing its
sins to defame Protestants. For example, Taillepied wrote about the wife of
the Provost of the city of Orleans, who died and was buried in the Franciscan
church, by the tombs of her ancestors. The following night her ghost appeared

75 William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, vol. 1, lib. 3, c. 237, 440–​4.

76 Sinclair, Satan’s Invisible World, 28–​31.
77 J. Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus (London: 1700), 351–​2.
78 Glanvill, Saducismus, 352–​4.
79 Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History, lib. 8, c. 17, 244.

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The Undead: Ghosts and Revenants 433

with lamentable outcries and confessed that she had secretly joined the Lu-
therans and now her body needed to be cast out of the church and buried in
the unconsecrated ground.80
Still, despite the general adherence to medieval patterns, Protestant rheto-
ric brought certain changes to the way English ghost stories were composed.
As the Reformation declared that all apparitions of the dead were to be under-
stood as the result of diabolic activity, English ghosts were forced to leave their
niche of representing the ‘good’ dead. In the early modern period, therefore,
stories about poltergeists, a particular type of ghost, haunting a house and tor-
turing its inhabitants, became prominent not only in Continental, but also in
English sources.

5 Poltergeists and Communication Challenges

The idea of a ghost bringing harm was not created after the Reformation and
is not connected to Protestant doctrine. Evidence for similar beliefs appeared
already in ancient Mesopotamian texts, which blamed ghosts of the dead for
bringing storms and pestilence.81 In the classical period the dead were per-
ceived as having to be pacified, and special festivals were observed for this pur-
pose.82 Stories of haunted houses were created already in the classical period,
the most prominent example recorded by Pliny the Younger and repeated by
Lucian of Samosata.83 Poltergeist-​like ghosts, invisible and particularly keen
on throwing objects, also appeared in medieval sources. Gervase of Tilbury
described the spirit of a late husband killing his widow with a salt mortar for
remarrying to his mortal enemy. The witnesses could not see the ghost, but
everyone beheld a mortar lifted in the air.84
In the early modern period the number of troublesome ghosts significantly
increased. Taillepied wrote about ghosts who made a mess in the house by
drawing blankets and linen off the beds, smashing crockery and pots, breaking

80 Tallepied, A Treatise, 76–​7.

81 R.C. Thompson, ed., The devils and evil spirits of Babylonia: being Babylonian and Assyrian
incantations against the demons, ghouls, vampires, hobgoblins, ghosts, and kindred evil
spirits, which attack mankind, translated from the original Cuneiform texts, with transliter-
ations, vocabulary, notes, etc, vol. 1 (London: 1903), xxiv.
82 Finucane, Ghosts, 11.
83 Pliny the Younger, Letters, vol. 2, lib. 7, xxii, 68–​72; Lucian of Samosata, “The Lover of
Lies,” 364–​9.
84 Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia: Recreation for an Emperor, eds. and trans. S.E. Banks
and W. Binns, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: 2002), lib. 3, c. 99, 752–​754.

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434 Ignatova

doors off the hinges, throwing stones, and making noise at night by moving
kitchen utensils and furniture.85 Similar symptoms were exhibited by an En-
glish poltergeist described in the 17th century by Glanvill. Members of the
unfortunate household haunted by the evil spirit saw shoes flying across the
room, bed linen being torn off the beds, and the chairs walking as if alive.
Sometimes the family heard panting, purring, or scratching, as if an animal
was around. The children were afflicted particularly badly and eventually had
to be removed from the house. Horses suffered too, one of them was found
on the floor of the stables, with a hind leg stuck in its mouth so firmly that
several men had to remove it with a lever, and the same poltergeist snipped
a pair of pincers at the nose of a local blacksmith. The absurdity of these in-
teractions makes one wonder if Glanvill’s account was not meant to amuse.86
Baxter described objects thrown and furniture dancing in the house haunted
by an evil spirit, which eventually showed itself in the form of a “blackamoor
child,” clearly the continuation of the medieval tradition of describing demons
appearing in the shape of Ethiopians.87 Another vivid story about a poltergeist
is the abovementioned account of Mrs Furze’s post-​mortem activity provided
by Aubrey. A barrel full of salt marched between rooms, an andiron laid itself
over a pan of milk which was being warmed up on the fire, and two flitches
of bacon came down from the chimney where they were hung and landed on
top of the andiron. Periwigs, clothes, and gloves were torn to pieces. Mrs Furze
herself appeared in various forms: her own, as a horse, and as a dog breathing
fire. The latter shape clearly corresponds with the image of a demon, described
by Gervase of Tilbury.88
The proliferation of poltergeists went hand in hand with another trait–​over
the centuries the number of stories featuring revenants which cannot commu-
nicate to the living directly has significantly increased. While classical ghosts
appeared to the living in a visible form and usually explained their cause, me-
dieval revenants often needed to be first addressed by the living, for otherwise
they had no power to speak.89 In a number of stories ghosts performed certain
services, or, on the contrary, appeared frightening and dangerous, in order to

85 Taillepied, A Treatise of Ghosts, 78–​9, 106.

86 Glanvill, Saducismus, 270–​85.
87 Baxter, The Certainty, 144. For medieval examples see Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical
History, lib. 8, c. 17, 238; William of Newburgh, Historia rerum Anglicarum, ed. Richard
Howlett, Chronicles of the reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, Rolls Series 82, vol. 1
(London: 1884), lib. 2, c. 21, 151.
88 Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, lib. 3, c. 70, 692–​4.
89 See n. 2 above.

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The Undead: Ghosts and Revenants 435

get the attention of a living person. The spirit from the first story of the Byland
Collection helped the living man to carry a sack of beans, in exchange for an
absolution. Before doing it the ghost captured the attention of the living man
by appearing first in the form of a horse, standing on its rear legs, and later as
a whirling heap of hay with light in the middle.90 The spirit in story number
eight also sought help, following a certain William of Bradeforth crying “how
how how” in a horrible voice, and appearing to him later in the shape of a
pallid horse, apparently, a common animal for ghosts to turn into. Not being
too sympathetic, William bid the spirit in the name of God and in the virtue of
the blood of Jesus Christ to leave him alone. Hearing this, the ghost withdrew
and assumed the appearance of a four-​angled rotating piece of canvass. “From
which he [William] understood that it was a spirit wanting greatly to be in-
voked and efficiently helped,” concluded the Byland monk.91
As shown in the previous section, the early modern period still has examples
of ghosts able to speak, though the number of stories about ghosts who had
trouble interacting with the living significantly increased. Throwing objects
and causing havoc, these restless spirits completely lacked the skills of com-
munication, often staying invisible and conveying their messages by knocking.
This was the main way of communicating employed by the ghost of a dead
nun Alis, described first in 1528 by Adrian Montalambert, and later included
by Nicolas Lenglet-​Dufresnoy in his collection of ghost stories.92 Aubrey in his
Miscellanies dedicated a chapter to how inexplicable knocks were omens of
someone’s approaching death.93 Compare these uncertain timid signs to much
more prominent medieval ones: Thietmar of Merseburg described death being
foreshadowed by the dead grunting or conversing loudly.94
Glanvill’s poltergeist also negotiated with the living only by means of knock-
ing. Adhering to the Protestant doctrine, Glanvill explained that his evil spirit
was the devil. Therefore, the latter has also become more modest in his ap-
pearances to the living, abandoning his favourite medieval activity of moving
around dead bodies and making them speak. Divine manifestations were also
occasionally reduced to weird sounds. Sir Thomas Tresham, a leading Catholic
loyalist in Elizabethan England, reveals in one of his letters how, while one

90 James, “Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories,” § 1, 414.

91 “Ex quo colligitur quod fuit spiritus desiderans magnaliter coniurari et efficaciter adiu-
vari,” James, “Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories,” § 8, 419.
92 N. Lenglet-​Dufresnoy, Recueil de Dissertations Sur les Apparitions, les Visions et les Songes,
vol. 1, part 1 (Paris: 1751), ch.5, 15–​28.
93 Aubrey, Miscellanies, 117–​18.
94 Thietmar, Chronicon, vol. 9, lib. 1, c. 13, 18–​20.

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436 Ignatova

of his servants was reading the Christian Resolution out loud for him, God in-
dicated His approval by three loud knocks “as yf yt hade been with ane yron
hanmer.”95

6 Bodies of the Walking Dead and the Loss of Control

The image of walking cadavers in written narratives underwent a similar trans-

formation. In classical sources souls of the dead that returned to their dead
bodies could use them exactly in the same way as when they were alive. In fact,
classical restless dead were described as undistinguishable from the living.
Medieval narrators started to touch upon the issue of putrefaction. William
of Newburgh wrote that the Berwick and the Anantis cadavers were decom-
posing and hence spread pestilence in the area. The 13th-​century Cambridge
Dominican Collection described a walking corpse with a swarm of huge flies
whirling around his neck, a detail which could also point at putrefaction. In
the Icelandic Grettir’s Saga (ca. 1325) the corpse of Glam, a grumpy shepherd
killed in mysterious circumstances and turned into a revenant, was blue and
swollen to the size of an ox.96
Furthermore, authors in the Middle Ages started to describe the dead body
of a revenant not as an aid for the soul to communicate with the living, but
as a burden. Medieval restless corpses were less talkative than their classical
and early-​Christian counterparts, often they just groaned and murmured.97
For example, walking dead in the later Middle Ages did not use their tongues
to speak. Consider how the Byland monk described the undead Robert of Kil-
leburne: “he spoke from inside of his bowels and not with his tongue but as if
from an empty barrel.”98 Probably the narrator imagined the soul was sitting
inside the corpse as if inside an empty barrel, which caused the voice to echo.
Unable to explain themselves, late medieval and early modern walking dead
did bizarre things instead. In a story from a collection of sermon manuscripts
in medieval French, created in Brittany in the early 15th century, a dead baker
returned to help his family knead the bread. His efforts were not appreciated,
and the living chased him and broke his legs in order to stop his wanderings.99

95 HMC Report on MSS in Various Collections, vol. 3 (London: 1904), 92.

96 Grettir’s Saga, eds D. Fox and H. Pálsson (Toronto: 1974), ch. 32, 72.
97 William of Newburgh, Historia, vol. 2, lib. 5, c. 24, 478–​9.
98 “loquebatur in interioribus visceribus et non cum lingua sed quasi in vacuo dolio,” James,
“Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories,” § 3, 418.
99 Hervé Martin “A la recherche de la culture populaire bretonne à travers les manuscrits du
bas Moyen Age,” Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’Ouest 86/​4 (1979), 631–​3.

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The Undead: Ghosts and Revenants 437

In addition, walking dead resorted to one common activity, which has been
overlooked by previous scholarship: they returned to spend a night with a living
person. Indeed, Phlegon of Tralles’s story of Philinnion, a maiden who after her
death left her grave for a love affair with her parents’ guest, clearly gave inspira-
tion to a number of narrators.100 In medieval England the motif was repeated by
William of Newburgh in his story about the restless corpse from Buckinghamshire
(see above). In the early 16th century Alessandro Alessandri, a notary from Naples
wrote a somehow similar story about a man, who had buried his friend but was
visited by him at night as he was lodging in an inn on his way back from the funer-
al. The corpse said nothing, but undressed and got in the bed, embracing his living
friend. The latter, seized by fear, kicked the dead man, thus warding him away.101
Another version of this trope was retold in the late 1220s by Jean de Mailly
in his work Abrégé des Gestes et Miracles des Saints. On the feast of St Mary
Magdalene, Peter’s stepfather ordered him to plough the land. Being angry at
having to work, Peter cursed his oxen and the plough, and, as a result, was
punished by divine justice, as one of his legs was suddenly seized by fire. Af-
ter numerous prayers and a trip to the church of the Virgin Mary, Peter was
granted a new leg, and, in order to show his gratitude, decided to lock himself
in a monastic cell and to live for God alone. Annoyed at Peter’s virtues, the
devil started coming to his cell every night in the shape of a naked woman,
and the more vigorously Peter resisted, the more shamelessly the devil laid
upon him. One night certain knights saw through the window of the cell Peter
struggling with the woman. Being strengthened by their presence, Peter asked
the knights to bring him a priest’s stole, which he put around the woman’s neck
strangling her. The cell immediately got filled with stench, which made every-
one present conclude that Peter had been troubled by the corpse of a dead
woman possessed by the devil. This theory was further proven by the discovery
of a torn and putrid shroud lying on the window of the latrine through which
the woman had been entering the cell.102
A story in a similar vein to Jean de Mailly’s was retold in the late 16th century
by Rémy: there was a certain man called Aulicus, whose deceased wife visited
him the first night after her burial. They carried on living together for a while
until an exorcist drew away the demon which was possessing the dead wom-
an’s corpse.103 The same tale, also strikingly similar to de Mailly’s, reappeared

100 Phlegon of Tralles, Book of Marvels, ed. and trans. W. Hansen (Exeter: 1996), 25–​8.
101 Alexandri ab Alexandro, Genialium Dierum Libri Sex, ed. A. Teraqueau, vol. 1
(Leiden: 1673), 324–​6.
102 Jean de Mailly, Abrégé des gestes et miracles des saints, ed. A. Dondaine (Paris: 1947), 322–​4.
103 Rémy, Daemonolatreiae Libri Tres, lib. 2, c. 1, 180–​181.

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438 Ignatova

in the early 17th century in one of the letters of an English theologian, Daniel
Featley. A French advocate was seduced by the devil who assumed the shape
of a beautiful lady. In the morning a dead woman was discovered in his bed. It
turned out that the body belonged to a woman who had recently been execut-
ed, and her neck bore the trace of a rope.104 As these examples demonstrate,
the image of an early modern walking corpse, just like an early modern ghost,
was largely based on earlier sources. Just like ghosts, over the centuries walking
dead became less capable of conveying their messages, with their activities
described as more and more difficult to interpret.

7 Conclusion

Narratives about revenants created between 1300 and 1700 bear a number of
traits which indicate borrowings from earlier sources. These stories are based
on a long trail of previous accounts stretching back to Classical Antiquity. This
adherence to tradition makes ghost stories impermeable to social changes,
and, as a result, they cannot be viewed as specific for a given period of time.
There is no evidence for the influence of the Black Death upon the develop-
ment of a ghost-​story narrative, and while the Reformation had brought a few
novelties, stories were still composed within the framework of a medieval plot
structure. It is true that the images of a ghost and a walking corpse changed
over the centuries, with both being described as less and less powerful when it
came to communicating with the living. However, the onsets of these changes
can be noticed before 1300, meaning that the developments we have noticed
between 1300 and 1700 constituted a continuation of processes which had
started long before. Thus, while the world of the living underwent numerous
trials and tribulations, the world of the dead remained surprisingly consistent,
reflecting tradition and continuity, rather than contemporary events.
104 A.A. Wood, Athenae Oxoniense:. An Exact History of All the Writers and Bishops Who Have
Had Their Education in the University of Oxford, ed. P. Bliss, vol. 3 (London: 1817), cols.
166–​168.

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Index

A Disputacioun betwyx þe Body and Austria 290

Wormes 287–​288 autopsies 114
Abbot, Robert 316 Auxon, Perrin d’ 255
Aberconwy (Caernarfonshire), Cistercian Avicenna 370n8, 372, 372n12, 374
abbey 120 Avignon (France) 61, 183, 190
Abū-​ʿAlī al-​Ḥusayn ibn-​ʿAbdallāh Ibn-​
Sīnā, see Avicenna Baillie, Robert 308, 317
achievements 150–​152 Balsamon, Theodore 205
Adam and Eve 1, 276, 282–​284, 286, 292 Baltic 276
Aelred of Rievaulx 377 Bardsey Island (Wales), burial on 122
afterlife 272, 274, 277–​278, 282, 290–​292, Baronius, Cesare 343n11, 403
297–​299 Barrow, Henry 308, 317
agape (memorial meal) 201, 208 Basque country 170
Agen, diocese of 194 Bawdrem, Marged 122
Alberti, Leon Battista 340, 346, 397, 400 Baxter, Richard 48, 429, 433
Albi (France), cathedral 41 beadsmen 126
Aleksei Mikhailovich, Tsar 244 Beaumont, John 431
Alessandri, Alessandro 437 Bede 431
Alexios iii, emperor of Trebizond 211–​214 Bedell, William 301
Aljubarrota (Portugal), battlefield 123 Bedford, Francis, earl of 312
Allen, William 412 Beham, Hans Sebald 283–​284
Ambassadors, The 272 Death and the Innocent Pair 284
anatomy (anatomical) 272, 279–​280 Death and the Sleeping Woman 284
anatomy, study of 114 Death and Three Nude Women 283
Anger, Melchoir 327, 336–​337 Belarus 248
Annals of the Four Masters 194–​197 Beleth, Jean 256, 258
anniversary 183, 193 Bellarmine, Robert, SJ 177, 194
anti-​Catholic 295 bells 126, 183, 194
apocalypse 34 Berkshire (England) 307
Apostolic Constitutions 202 Bernard of Clairvaux 374, 380, 383
Cathedral of Archangel (Russia) 230, 232 Bernardino of Siena 74, 104
Ariès, Philippe 4, 75, 92, 103, 127, 290 Berne (Switzerland) 166
Aristotle 353n33, 370 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 339, 353, 354
Arles (France), Roman cemetery 119 Bewley, Mary 314
armour 147–​148, 152 Beza (de Bèze), Theodore 37
armour, burial with 116–​117 Bèze, Eudes de 265
ars moriendi 28, 35, 60, 75, 83, 87, 100, 102, biers 125
104, 106, 108, 157, 167, 175–​176, 231, parish 125
291–​292, 298 rites 293
art, artists, artistic, artworks 272–​275, 277, Black Death 7, 119 see also plague
280, 283–​284, 290, 297–​299 Blaisy, Jean de 264, 266, 267
Arthur, Tudor 303 Blanche of Navarre 114
Athanasios i, patriarch 217 Boccaccio, Giovanni
Athos, Mount (Greece) 244 The Decameron 296
Aubrey, John 429, 431, 433, 435 body 20

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Index 501

preparation for burial 111 of excommunicates 123

lead, wrapped in 115 of sovereigns 132, 204–​205
washing 107, 111, 118 of suicides 123
Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, The 277 of thieves 123
Bolton, Robert 315–​316 of those killed jousting 123
Boniface viii, pope 113–​114 of unbaptised 123–​124
Book of Common Prayer 160 see also armour
Books of Hours 108, 110–​111, 115, 118, 125, 275, separate burial of viscera 113
289–​290 shafts 119
Bordeaux (France) Merovingian vaults 119
cemetery 119 with crosses 116
Boris Godunov, Tsar, monk Bogolep 230 burning as punishment 123
Borromeo, Charles, archbishop of Milan 119 Butter Saturday 237
Bosio, Antonio 404 Byland Collection 422, 427–​428, 434, 436
bosom of Abraham 77–​78 Byzantium 225, 238–​239
Bossuet, Jacques-​Bénigne, bishop of
Meaux 57 Caesarius of Heisterbach 423, 426, 428, 430
Bouts, Dirk 364 Cagots 173
Bozhi dom, mass grave 234 Calvin, Jean 36, 42, 45, 53, 159–​160, 164, 169,
Brachet de la Milletière, Théophile 70 310–​311, 336, 375, 380, 389
Branković, Mara 219–​222 Calvinist(s) 300, 304, 308, 310
Brettergh, Katherine 312–​313 Cambridge (England) 305
Brinton, Thomas 304 Cambridge Dominican Collection 436
brotherhoods, Orthodox 246–​247 Camus, Jean-​Pierre, bishop of Belley 67, 185
Bucer, Martin 305 candles 125–​127
Bugenhagen, Johannes 319 Canisius, Peter, SJ 38, 177–​178
Bulgaria 239 Canterbury 315
Bullinger, Heinrich 37, 47, 53 diocese of 109
Bunyan, John 46, 48–​49 St Augustine’s Abbey 107
burial Caoineadh 170
ad sanctos 227, 230 Capetian dynasty 143
aisles 165 Cartwright, Thomas 311
at battlefields 123 catechism 55, 67, 177
by/​for non-​Orthodox 205 Catherine of Genoa 79
chancels 119 Catholicism 11, 227, 231–​232, 242, 247, 273,
childbirth, those dying in 124 278–​279, 282, 290–​291, 298
clothing 115–​116 Catrin wife of William Glynllifon 122
heart 113–​114 Caxton, William 303
in churchyards 119 cemeteries 23
in friaries 114, 120 extra-​mural 119
in hair shirts 116 plague 119
in monastic habits 107, 116 cerecloth 115, 117
inside church 119, 205, 222 Chantemilan, Philippe de 124
intra-​mural 161–​164 chantry, chantries 120–​121, 192–​193
location (general) 119 mortuary chapels 26
location for women 122 Chariton 210–​211
of adulterers 123 charity 35, 67, 70, 126, 130, 183, 185, 187,
of criminals 123 227, 234

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502 Index

Charonne, Jean 259 Rosary 182–​183, 187

Chaucer, Geoffrey 272, 296 Trépassés 61, 68
The Canterbury Tales 296 see also guilds
The Merchant’s Tale 296 congregation of faith 406
The Pardoner’s Tale 296 consolation 323, 325, 329, 336–​337
Cheze, Etienne de la 257 Constantinople 226, 244
Chiffoleau, Jacques 106 loss of importance 211
Chilandar (Serbia), monastery of 220–​221 restoration of 206–​209
christianization, process of 229 Coppo Stefani, Marchione di 123
church fathers 200–​201 Coret, Jacques 179
Church of Holy Innocents, Paris Coronach 170
(France) 393 Cosin, John 313
church orders 322–​324, 326, 334 Cossack state 227
churchification 247 Council of Florence 39
Circignani, Niccolò 356–​358 Council of Lyons 39
Clarke, Samuel 305–​306 Council of Trent 39, 63–​64, 162n20, 176, 181,
Clement x, pope 69 279, 282, 343, 404, 406
clergy Cranach, Lucas 402
additional, at funerals 126 Cranbrook (England) 307, 316
advice manuals 106, 108 Creidius, Hartmann 323
attendance at deathbed 108–​109 Creswell, Joseph 412
marriage 306, 313–​314, 318 Cyriac of Ancona 400
Clichetove, Josse 177 Cyrillic script 225
Clitherow, Margaret 398
cloths of gold 144–​145 Dafydd ab Edmwnd 117
Cockayne, William 319 Dafydd ab Ieuan of Llwydiarth
coffins 115–​117, 125 (Montgomeryshire) 117
locked chests, burial in 117 Dance of Death (Danse Macabre) 275,
plank 117 284–​285, 298
stone 117, 119 German Totentanz 276
collective foundation of churches 215 Spanish Dança 285
Cologne (Germany) 177 Daniil, metropolitan of Moscow 230
Comedia de Calisto y Melibea 295 Dante, Alighieri 40, 51
commemoration Divine Comedy 289, 298
days after death 235 De Dinteville, Jean 272
monuments 24–​25 De Lisle Psalter 273
liturgical 225, 227, 233, 237, 239 dead, the 272–​273, 275, 277–​280, 282, 285,
commendation of the soul 108, 110 288–​290, 292–​293, 297–​299
communion 143 death and identity 157, 170
Compendium Maleficarum 426 Death and the Maiden 284
confession 39, 182, 185, 187, 194, 196 death 272, 300–​301, 303, 306–​308, 310
confessional identity 326, 333, 337 gender of Death 272, 283, 298
confraternity, confraternities 61–​62, 68–​69, gender of Death as female 275, 285–​286
92, 98, 125–​126, 179, 181–​187, 197 gender of Death as male 283–​286
agonisants 183, 185–​186 ungendered Death 275, 283, 298
Bonne Mort, see agonisants see also Grim Reaper
Guardian Angel 179, 182 deathbed
Holy Sacrament 182–​183 crucifix at 108

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Index 503

rituals 107–​108 Edward ii, king of England 146

tonsure 230 Edward iii, king of England 136, 139, 140,
death lament 232 143, 147, 149, 151, 154
Decensus controversy 42 Edward vi, king of England 303
dechristianization 248 Edward, the black prince 304
decomposition 436 effigy 146
deeds 236, 240 Elckerlijc see Everyman
Delumeau, Jean 79, 103 Eleanor de Montfort 120
demons 428, 430 Elizabeth i, queen of England 408
Denmark 163 embalming 113–​115, 135–​136
Dennison, Stephen 313, 317 emotions 28, 79, 90, 92, 97, 99, 103–​104, 127,
Deschamps, Eustache 323, 336
Lay de la fragilité humaine 279 displays of 319, 321, 323
Desprez, Josquin 368–​369 fear of death 231
Detestande feritatis 113–​114 history of 157
Deutsch, Nicholas Manuel 275, 284–​285 pre-​modern theories of, see Passions
Dance of Death mural 275, 284 see also, consolation, grief, hope, sorrow
devil 420, 427, 429–​430, 435 Encyclopédie de Diderot 58
Devon (England) 308 England 12, 160–​161, 168, 172, 277, 291, 293,
Dialogue between Life and Death 231 300–​301, 307–​310, 312, 314, 317–​318
Dionysios, monastery of (Greece) 211–​214 English 275, 288–​289, 296
Dionysiou, monastery of (Greece) 211–​214 Erasmus, Desiderius 52, 63, 92, 99, 177,
diptychs 239 396, 398
Dirige, Domine, Deus meus 118 eros 274
dismemberment 123 Essex, Walter, earl of 312
dissection 114 Estonia 163, 170
dissent 319 Estouteville, Nicolas d’ 26, 269
Dmitrii Donskoi, grand prince 237 Estwick, Nicholas 308, 315
Dmitrovskaia subbota (general memorial eucharist 176, 179, 182, 185–​187, 198
day) 237 display of holy sacrament 183
donation books 236, 242 see also communion and holy sacrament
donations 227, 232, 236 Everyman 74–​75, 89, 91–​92, 96
Donne, John 313, 319 eviscerated/​evisceration 273, 280
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions 295 executions 98
Love’s Alchemy 295 Extravagantes communis 114
Draft Ecclesiastical Ordinances 159–​160 extreme unction 108
Drelincourt, Charles 48, 54
Drogheda, synod of 195 face cloths 112
Dublin (Ireland) 315 Fairford, Oxon (England) 41
Dunsterville, Edward 315 Fall from paradise 276, 278, 282, 284,
Durand, Guillaume 256, 258, 264 286–​287, 297
Dürer, Albrecht 283, 285 Fayrey family of Dunstable (England) 125
Young Woman Attacked by Death or The Feast of the Our Lady of Sorrows 384
Ravisher 283 Featley, Daniel 437
Field, John 311
Eastern Europe 16–​17 figurants 126
Edinburgh (Scotland) 164 Fisher, John 305
Edward i, king of England 136–​137 Flamel, Nicholas 275, 279

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504 Index

Flavin, Melchior de, ofm 64 Grand Komnenoi 205–​206, 211–​214

Florence, plague burials in 123 graves, grave goods 127, 137
Forty Hours devotion 69, 186 ash in 127
Forty Martyrs of Sebaste 397 chalices, replica, in 116
Fourth Crusade 203 chalk in 127
France 170, 172, 277, 284 charcoal in 127
Frankfurt (Germany) 160 gravel in 115, 117, 127
Frederick iii, elector of Saxony 323, 402 hyssop, in 127
sermons for 334–​337 lime, in 127
Freiburg im Bresgau (Germany) 119 jewellery, bodies buried with 116
French 279, 293 keys, burial with 117
Anglo-​Norman French 273 padlocks, burial with 117
funeral/​funerals 35, 125, 183, 187, 190–​191, papal bullae, burial with 116
300–​301, 303–​304, 307–​308, 310, patens, replica, clergy buried with 116
315–​318, 388–​389 plants, in graves 127
acolytes 126 standards, burial with 116–​117
clergy, additional at 126 vestments, clergy buried in 116
crucifers at 126 war graves 123
feasts 130 weapons, burial with 116–​117
holy water at 127 graveyards 232
of the poor 125 Greece 170
rites 14–​16 Greek-​Catholic church 227, 246–​247
sermons 157, 160, 166 Gregory of Nazianzus 200
torchbearers at 126 Gregory of Nyssa 355–​356
torches 126–​127 Grettir’s Saga 436
Grey, Arthur 312
Gaignières, François-​Roger 257 grief 127, 168, 368–​370, 380–​381, 383–​387
Galen 294, 370, 372 children, grief for 129–​130
Gallonio, Antonio 348 Grien, Hans Baldung 283
Gardiner, Stephen 303 Grim Reaper 282
Gataker, Thomas 313 Gruffudd ap Cynan ab Owain Gwynedd 120
gender 14, 316, 318 Gruffudd Carreg of Carreg,
Geneva (Switzerland) 159–​160, 163–​164, 173, Caernarfonshire 122
310–​311 Guernsey 163
Georgia 239 Guerra, Giovanni 348
Germany 288, 293, 301 guilds 125–​126, 130
Gerson, Jean 176 Guto’r Glyn 127–​129
Gervase of Tilbury 433 Guy, Nicholas 314
ghosts 124–​125, 288, 291–​293, 298, 418 Guyenne, Louis de 260, 263
Gibbons, John 411 Gwenhwyfar, wife of Hywel ap Tudur ap
Giglio, Giovanni Andrea 348 Gruffudd of Coeden (Anglesey) 117
Glanvill, Joseph 432–​433, 435 Gwilym ap Sefnyn 129–​130
Gloddaith, Denbighshire (Wales) 122
Golenina, Mariia, princess 240 Hagia Sophia of Trebizond (Turkey) 205–​206
Gordon, Lady Katherine 122 Hamilton, Patrick 157
Gosse, Alexander 308 Han, Philipp 166
Gouge, Elizabeth 314 Harcourt, Simon 315
Gouge, William 314 Harrison, William 312

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hearse, hearses 127, 137, 139 Ireland 36–​37, 47, 163, 170, 172, 277,
heaven 34, 39–​42, 44–​50, 228, 303, 307–​308, 300–​302, 315
315–​316 Irish 287
Hebden, family of Howell 121 Isidore of Seville 256, 259
hell 34, 39–​42, 50–​58, 303, 308, 319 Italian 285
Henry v, king of England 136, 139, 143–​146, Italy 12, 114
149–​154 Ivan iii Vasil’evich, grand prince of
Henry vii, king of England 305 Moscow 229
Henry viii, king of England 303 Ivan iv Vasil’evich, grand prince and
Henry, Philip 319 Tsar 226, 230, 236, 245
Hereford (England) 124
Herodotus 343 James i, vi, king 429
heteronormativity 283 Jansenism 57, 70, 180
Heywood, Oliver 308, 316 Jean de Mailly 437
historiography 1, 3–​7, 13–​14, 18–​20 Jeremiah i, patriarch 222
demographic histories 3 Jesuits see Society of Jesus
histoire des mentalités 4–​5 Job, Book of, readings in Office of the
Holbein, Hans (the younger) 272 Dead 118
Hooper, John 310 John Chrysostom 228
hope 319, 337 see also consolation John iii Vatatzes, Nicaea of Nicaea 205
Horace 347 John of Kitros 205
Horenbout, Gerard 289–​290 Jonas, bishop of Orléans 126
horses 147, 149–​150, 152 Jonson, Ben 54
Howell, Lincolnshire (England) 121 Jouy (France), abbey 259n25
Hugh Johns of Bristol 130 jubilee 185
Humanism/​Humanists 395–​399 Julian of Norwich
humours 373 Showings 108
Hundred Chapters church council (Stoglav) justification 321, 330–​333, 337
1551 233, 237, 242 Juxon, John 317
Huw ap Dafydd ap Llywelyn ap
Madog 116–​117 Katherine of Valois, queen of
Hywel ab Owain of Llanbryn-​mair 127–​129 England 144–​146
Kelway, Robert 312
Icelandic 288 Kempis, Thomas à 52
Ihesu! for thy holy name 109 Kent (England) 307, 315
indulgences 60, 62, 69, 181, 183, 185–​188, 194, Kiev (Ukraine) 226–​227, 246
197, 321 Kievan Caves monastery (Ukraine) 228, 234,
letters of 232 239, 244
see also pardons Kievan Rus’ 225–​227, 238
Innokentij, monk, disciple of Pafnutii of kinship bonds 243
Borovsk 229 Kirik, priest at Novgorod (Russia) 235
Institutes of the Christian Religion 169 Kirillo-​Belozerskii monastery
intercession 160–​162, 168–​169, 321–​322, 324, (Russia) 242, 244
329, 334 Knewstub, John 315
Iolo Goch 112, 127 Knights Hospitallers, burial of
Iosif Sanin, abbot 240 criminals by 123
Iosifo-​Volokolamskii monastery, Russia 232, Knox, John 156–​157, 160, 164, 167, 310
234, 240, 243 Korm (festive meal) 235, 241

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506 Index

Kormovaia kniga (anniversary book) 241 Lucifer –​see Satan

Koutloumousiou, monastery of (Greece) 210 Luis de Granada 407–​408
Luther, Martin 37, 42, 53, 63, 161–​162, 166–​167,
L’viv (Ukraine) 226, 246 304, 327–​328, 375, 377, 402
La Ferté, abbey (France) 257 death of 319
Lancashire (England) 312 on death 323–​324
Lanfranc of Milan 295 on funeral sermons 319, 329
last judgement 34–​39, 41–​42, 51, 228, 235 on purgatory 321
last rites 194 Lutheran, Lutheranism 158, 163, 166, 168,
see also viaticum 170, 301, 304
Lauds of the Dead 118 Lydgate, John 275
Lauretano, Michele 356 Lykova, Agrafena Semenova, princess 236
Lavater, Ludwig 429 Lynne, Walter 304
Leigh, William 312 Lyonnais (France) 63
Leipzig (Germany) 177
Lenglet-​Dufresnoy, Nicolas 435 Maastricht (the Netherlands) 315
Leo x, pope 62 Mab Clochyddyn 117
Lesbos (Greece) 222 Machiavelli, Niccolò 399
Lestringant, Frank 342 Major, Georg 329
Leto, Pompeo 400 Mâle, Émile 339
Liber Exemplorum 431 Mancini, Giulio 358
Liber Regie Capelle 134, 139, 142–​143, 147, Maria da Visitaçao 407–​408
150, 152 Marlow, Christopher 54
Libri vitae 242 Marshall, Stephen 317
Lilleshall (England) 302 martyrs 156, 400, 408–​410, 412–​415, 417
limbo 39, 41, 76–​77 Mary Magdalene 380, 382–​383
Lincoln (England) mass, masses 35, 61, 63–​64, 67–​68, 183, 190–​192
Guild of the Resurrection 126–​127 requiem mass 127
Lincolnshire (England) 307 Master Polikarp 286
lips 208–​209 materiality 23
Lithuania 244 Matins of the Dead 118, 127
Little Masters 283–​284 Medina, Pedro de 47
Little Waldingfield (England) 315 Mehmed ii, sultan 219–​220
liturgy 18 melancholy 368–​369, 375
see also Lauds of the Dead, Matins of the Melanchthon, Philip 331, 372–​373n14
Dead, Office of the Dead, Vespers of memento mori 272–​274, 276
the Dead memoriae/​mnemosyna (commemoration)
Llanfaes, Anglesey (Wales) 120 227, 369, 387
Llywelyn ab Iorwerth 120 Mesopotamia 421, 430, 433
Llywelyn ab y Moel 119 Michael viii, emperor 206
Llywelyn ap Gruffudd 120 Middle-​English 287, 289, 296
London (England) 304, 315, 317 Milton, John 54–​55, 286
friaries 120 De Doctrina Christiana 286
Longue durée 248 Paradise Lost 286, 292
Loyola, St Ignatius, SJ 56 Mirk, John 74, 88–​89, 102–​103, 123–​124,
Lübeck (Germany) 230 302–​303, 308
Lublin, Union of 227 Mitford, Richard, bishop of Salisbury 130
Lucerne (Switzerland) 276 Molanus, Johannes 348

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monasteries, monasticism 238, 247 Office of the Dead 107–​108, 110, 118, 127, 290
burial in 119–​120 Olearius, Adam 245
burial in chancels 119 Orderic Vitalis 428, 432
deathbed rituals 107 Orthodox Church 226–​227
Office of the Dead in 118–​119 Osiander, Andreas 330
Mondeville, Henri de 115, 135 on funeral sermon 330
Mongols 226 on purgatory 330–​331
Montalambert, Adrian 435 theology of 331
Montrose (Scotland) 310 ossuaries 163, 165, 174
Moray, earl of 310 Owain ap Maredudd ap Tomos 115
mortuary fee 144
mos teutonicus 113–​114 Pafnut’ev-​Borovskii monastery (Russia) 229
Moscow (Russia) 226, 230 Pafnutii of Borovsk, abbot 229
Mount Athos (Greece) 210–​214, 220–​222 Pagolo Morelli, Giovanni d i 109
mourning 127 Palaiologan dynasty 206
see also emotions Palaiologina, Theodora 208
Mstislavskii, Russian princely family 245 Palatinate 322
mummy (mumia) 293–​295, 298 reformation of 334, 336
Munich (Germany) 119 Paleotti, Gabriele 349, 355
Muscovy 16–​17, 225, 227, 232, 238, 244, 248 palls
Mush, Robert 414 funeral 115, 125
music 127 parish 125
Myln, Walter 156 Palma Cayet, Pierre Victor 66
Myrelaion, palace, Constantinople 204 papal body, preparation for burial 113, 115
Paracelsus 295
Nancy (France) 183 paradise 77–​78
Nantes (France) 35, 61–​62, 67, 69, 186, 191 Parce domine, parce servo tuo 110
diocese of 61, 68–​69, 182, 186, 193 Paris (France) 34, 38, 56, 60, 67, 172, 177,
Nanteuil, Jean de 259 190–​191, 193, 275, 279, 285–​286
Narva (Estonia) 245 parish churches
Nashe, Thomas 429 burial in 120
necrology 242 endowment of chantries in 120–​121
Neri, Filipo 404 Parker, Matthew 305
Netherlands 163 Parsons, Robert 316
Nicaea (Turkey) 205 partible burial 113–​114
Nicholas v, pope 400, 404 Pascal, Blaise 347
Nieremberg, Juan Eusebio, SJ 56 passions 370
Nifont, bishop of Novgorod 235 Pedro de Ribadeneyra 407, 413
Nogent-​l’Artaud, Aisne (France) 114 Pembridge, Isabel de 121
Nördlingen (Germany) 166 penance 39, 182, 185, 194
Northamptonshire (England) 315 Penry, John 311
Norway 163, 166, 170 Persons, Robert 410, 413
Novel of Patriarch Athanasios i 217 pestilence 426–​429, 436, 438
Novgorod (Russia) 226 Peter the Great, Tsar 248
Nuremberg (Germany) 119 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) 285
Trionfo della moerte 285
Obikhodnik, special monastic rule 240 Pfinzing, Christoph 322, 325, 332
offerings 144, 147 Philip ii, king of Spain 398, 413

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508 Index

Philip iii, king of Spain 197 purgatory 11, 34, 36–​39, 42–​44, 52, 59–​70,
Phillips, Thomas, of Monmouthshire 108 72, 75–​80, 106, 137–​138, 162, 176, 181, 183,
Phlegon of Tralles 437 185, 192, 194, 197, 203, 228, 278–​279, 282,
Piers, John 312 288–​293, 298, 300, 307–​308, 310–​311,
Pietro Maria Campi 416 319, 321, 330
piety 305–​306, 313, 315, 318–​319 Puritanism 37, 306, 312–​313
pilgrimage, pilgrim 187 Pym, John 317
pilgrim badges, burial with 116 Pyramus and Thisbe 368
Pisa (Italy) 119
Placebo domino in regione vivorum 118 Quiccheberg, Samuel 401
plague 296 Quintilian, Marcus Fabius 353
plague, burial during 115, 119, 123
plaintes funèbres 129 Rabanus Maurus 256
Plympton, St Mary (England) 308 Radunitsa 237
Poland 284 Raulin, Jean 177
Poland-​Lithuania 16–​17, 225–​227, 242, 244, Reformation 10–​11, 27, 275, 282, 292,
247–​248 369–​370, 389, 429, 438
Polish 286 in Eastern Europe 247
Pollanus 160 relics 113–​114, 394, 399, 401, 402, 406
Polotsk (Belarus) 246 Rémy, Nicholas 430, 437
poltergeists 433 Rennes (France), diocese of 182–​183,
Polychronicon 427 186–​187, 191
Pomiannik (memorial book) 239, 242, 247 Reugney, Perrin de 261
Portugal 290 Revelation of Purgatory 288, 298
Possevino, Antonio 349, 253 revenant 288, 292–​293, 298
post–​mortem foundations, see chantry Reynolds, Edward 314
post-​mortem sentience 288–​289, 293, 298 Richard ii, king of England 140–​141, 154
see also sentience Richeome, Louis 345–​346
Poussin, Nicolas 364 Riurikovichi, dynasty 226
Povsednevnyi spisok 241, 243 Rochester, John earl of 316
prayer 80, 82, 86, 91–​92, 94, 96–​97, 102–​103, Rogers, Francis 315
307–​308, 310–​311 Rogers, William 316
prayer for the dead 126, 130, 160 Rogier van der Weyden 381–​384
preachers 302–​303, 305, 308, 311, 313, Roman Academy 400
315–​317, 319 Romanos i 204
preaching 300–​304, 307–​311, 315, 317–​318 Rome (Italy) 183, 185–​186
predestination 37, 71 Rosário, Sor Mariana do 46, 56
Presbyterianism 37 rosary 67, 183, 185, 187
Prik of Conscience 289–​298 altar 183
privileged altar 69, 185–​186 beads, burial with 116
procession, funerary 125–​127, 137, 139, 144, see also confraternity, Rosary
384, 388–​389 Rothschild Prayer-​book 290
Proficiscere anima christiana 111 Russia 170, 248
Protestant, Protestantism 159–​161, 163, Ruthenia 225, 227, 231–​232, 238, 242, 246–​248
165–​169, 172, 242, 247, 273, 282, 291, 298
Proud, William 315–​316 sacred horror 339
Pskov Caves Monastery (Russia) 234 Saint-​Malo, diocese of (France) 182
Psychikon 201, 217 Saint-​Pol-​de-​Léon, diocese of (France) 188

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saints 394, 396, 398, 399, 400, 401, 406, 416 sin, sinfulness 274, 276, 278–​279, 282–​284,
saints’ bodies 113 286–​291, 297–​298, 321–​322, 326, 329–​330,
Saint-​Seine, abbey (France) 261, 264–​267 332, 337
Salbri, Syr Rhoser, of Lleweni 116–​117 Sinai monastery (Egypt) 244
Salisbury, bishop of 130 Sinclair, George 431–​432
Salisbury, Matthew Cheung 110 Sinodik opal’nykh 245
Salmon, William Sinodik pravoslaviia (Synodicon of the
Pharmacopoeia Londinensis 295 Orthodoxy) 239–​240, 245
Saltry, Henry of 41, 61 Sinodik, memorial book (diptychs) 235,
Salutati, Coluccio 127 239–​241, 244–​246
salvation 326, 336 Siwan (Joan), daughter of king John of
Sámi 170 England 120
Sanctuaires de répit 124 Sixtus v, pope 356
Sanctuaries of Grace 124 skeleton, skeletal 273–​276, 280–​284, 298
Sander, Nicholas 409 Skudel’nitsa, mass grave 234
sarcophagi 119 sleep 284, 292, 298
Satan 51, 53–​54, 286, 292 social death 296
Scandinavia 273 socially/​socio-​religiously bad
Schechsius, Johann 334–​337 death 293, 298
Scotland 156–​157, 160, 162–​163, 165–​166, 168, socially/​socio-​religiously good
170, 172–​173, 290, 310, 317–​318 death 292–​293
Semik 234 Society of Jesus 185, 197
sentience 288, 293 Sofiia Paleolog, wife of Grand Prince Ivan
see also post-​mortem sentience iii 229
sepulchral culture 233, 234, 242 Sorokoust 235–​236
Serbia 239 sorrow 368
Sergii of Radonezh, abbot 237–​238 Sosandra 205
sermon 19–​20, 54–​56, 60, 185 Spain 3, 12, 170, 284
see also preachers, preaching Spanheim, Lucretia 337
seven corporal acts of mercy 126, 279, 288 Spanish 295
seven deadly sins 279, 288–​289 Spenser, Edmund 292, 295
Shakespeare, William 291–​293, 295, 298 The Faerie Queene 292, 295
Hamlet 291–​293 Spiridon monastery near Volokolamsk
Henry iv(Part i) 293, 295 (Russia) 234
Macbeth 291, 293, 295 St Andrews (Scotland) 156–​157
Measure for Measure 292 St Augustine 37, 50, 130, 256, 259
Merry Wives of Windsor 293 St Beuno 122
Midsummer Night’s Dream 292 St Jerome 398
Othello 293 St John of the Cross 47, 65
Rape of Lucrece 292 St John Prodromos, Serres (Greece) 222
Richard iii 293 St Michael 35
Romeo & Juliet 292 St Michael’s on Mount Auxentios
Titus Andronicus 291 (Turkey) 207–​208
Shropshire (England) 302 St Patrick’s Purgatory, Co Donegal
shrouds 111–​112, 115–​116 (Ireland) 41, 61
shrouding the body 111, 118 St Paul, monastery of (Greece) 220–​221
Sicard of Cremona 256 St Teilo 122
Sidney, Henry 312 St Teresa of Avila 47, 56

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510 Index

St Thomas Aquinas 40, 47, 51, 252, 260, 347 inside churches 119
St. Christopher 109 semi-​effigial 115
Strasbourg (Germany) 159–​160 Tong, Shropshire (England) 121
Strata Marcella, Montgomeryshire Tossanus, Daniel 166, 323, 327, 334–​335
(Scotland) 119 Towton, Yorkshire (England) 123
Stratford-​on-​Avon (England) 125, 130 transi 277–​279, 287, 298
Suarez, Jacques, ofm 41 Trebizond (Turkey) 205–​206, 211–​214
Subbotnik 239 Tresham, Sir Thomas 435
superstition 159–​160, 163, 169 Trevor, Syr Dafydd 115
Surius, Laurentius 348n21 tricenarius 235
Sussex (England) 315 Tridentine catechism 64
Sviazhsk (Russia) 236 Trigault, Nicolas 360
Sweden 170 Troitse–​Sergiev monastery (Russia) 242, 244
Swiss 275 Troyes (France) 259
syncretism 229, 232, 237 Tudur Fychan 112, 127
Turkey 170
Taillepied, Noël de, ofm 65, 426, 429, Tver’ (Russia) 236
432, 433
Tale about the Death of Pafnutii of Ukraine 248
Borovsk 229, 237 universalism 57
Tale about the Quarrel between Life and Ussher, James, archbishop of Armagh 36
Death 231
Tale of the Illness and the Death of Vasilii Valla, Lorenzo 396, 397, 400
IvanovichC8.P15, C8.P31 Valmont, abbey (France) 268, 269
Tallents, Francis 319 Valverde, Juan de 359
Tallinn (Estonia) 276 Van Gennep, Arnold 106
Taylor, Thomas 313 vanitas 282
Tempesta, Antonio 348 Vannes, diocese of (France) 61, 67, 69, 183,
ten commandments 178 186–​188, 191, 193
Tenby, Pembrokeshire (Wales) 112 Vasilii iii Ivanovich, grand prince 230
Teresa of Ávila 415 Vazelon, monastery of (Turkey) 215–​217
Tertullian 343 Vega, Lope de 47
Testa, Pietro 350 Venice (Italy) 290
testaments 230–​231, 235–​236 verism 272, 279
See also will, wills, will-​making Vernon family, lords of Tong 121
thanatos 274 Verstegan, Richard 360–​364, 411
Theodoret of Cyrus 345 Vesalius, Andreas 280, 281, 298, 359
Thietmar of Merseburg 420, 435 De humani corporis fabrica libri septem 280
Thomas of Cantimpré 427 Vespers of the Dead 118, 127
Thomas of Woodstock, duke of viaticum 108, 183, 187, 194
Gloucester 148 Vienne (France)
Three Ages of Woman and Death 283 archdiocese of 195
Three Living and Three Dead 273, 298 miracles at 124
Tintern Abbey (Scotland) 108 Vienne, Guillaume de 267
toads 279, 293 Viret, Pierre 163, 169, 389n70, 389n75
tombs Virgin Mary 35, 60, 82–​83, 92, 100, 102–​103,
clerical 116 190, 194, 198, 380–​383
depiction of mourning on 127 Marian devotions 178, 182

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Index 511

vital spirit 372–​373 White, John (Tenby, Wales) 112

Vladimir, (Russia) on the river Kliaz’ma 226 White, Thomas (Tenby, Wales) 112
Vladimir, grand prince of Kiev 225 Whitelock, Bulstrode 49
Vladimirovich, Yaroslav, grand prince of Whitgift, John 309, 311
Kiev 228n5 Wied, Hermann von 304
Vladislav i Vlaicu, of Wallachia 211 Wilcox, Thomas 311
voluptas 282, 284, 285, 298 will, wills, will-​making 37–​38, 61, 88, 92,
Voragine, Jacob de 51, 60, 405 95, 106, 114, 126, 130, 139–​140, 153–​154,
votive activity 139–​140, 142–​144, 153 188–​190, 197
William iii, king of England 301
Wales 272, 302, 311, 317–​318 William of Auvergne 430
walking dead 418 William of Newburgh 424–​425, 437
Wallachia 211 Windsor (England) 303
Walter Map 430 Wittenberg (Germany) 328
waqf/​vakıf 221–​222 woodcuts 106, 108–​109, 322
Warwick, Anne countess of 312 Worcester, Clothiers’ Guild 125
Watkinson, Peter 302 worms 279, 287–​288
wax 137, 140–​141
weeping 168 Yaroslavna, Marija 229
Welsh commemorative poetry 106, 112, Yoakhim, Patriarch of Antiochia 247
115–​117, 119, 122, 127–​130
Whanne mine eyhnen misten 110 Zurich (Switzerland) 37, 163, 166,
Wharton, Lady Mary 302 168–​169, 173
Whit Saturday 237, 245 Zwickau (Germany) 119
White Sea 238 Zwingli, Huldrych 164, 168

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