Medieval Death: Ritual and RepresentationMedieval Death is an absorbing study of the social, theological, and cultural issues involved in death and dying in Europe from the end of the Roman Empire to the early sixteenth century. Drawing on both archaeological and art historical sources, Paul Binski examines pagan and Christian attitudes towards the dead, the aesthetics of death and the body, burial ritual and mortuary practice. The evidence is accumulated from a wide variety of medieval thinkers and images, including the macabre illustrations of the Dance of Death and other popular themes in art and literature, which reflect the medieval obsession with notions of humility, penitence, and the dangers of bodily corruption. The author discusses the impact of the Black Death on late medieval art and examines the development of the medieval tomb, showing the changing attitudes towards the commemoration of the dead between late antiquity and the late Middle Ages. In the final chapter the progress of the soul after death is studied through the powerful descriptions of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory in Dante and other writers and through portrayals of the Last Judgment and the Apocalypse in sculpture and large-scale painting. |
What people are saying - Write a review
LibraryThing Review
User Review - Meggo - LibraryThingLavishly illustrated and well researched, this book is nonetheless very dry to the point of being almost an academic work. This book was interesting, but it would likely be more interesting to a scholar of the medieval period. Read full review
Contents
Illustration Credits page | 7 |
Ways of Dying and Rituals of Death | 29 |
Death and Representation | 70 |
reproduced by courtesy of the Director and University Librarian 31 MS | 96 |
The Macabre 12 3 | 123 |
Colour Plates between pages 128 and | 129 |
Death and the Afterlife | 164 |
| 215 | |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
Abbey Abbot Suger Abraham's Bosom afterlife altar Arma Christi Augustine Beatific Vision Bishop Black Death bodily division body Book of Hours brass burial buried Canterbury Cathedral chantry character Christ Christian church Cistercian clerical commemoration contemporary corpse cult culture Dance of Death devotional doctrine early Edward effigy epitaph eschatology especially fourteenth century France French funeral Gothic Heaven Hell idea illustration imagery images important individual king laity Last Judgement late-medieval Latin Lazarus macabre Mass medieval art medieval tomb memory metaphor Middle Ages monastic moriendi motif nature notion pagan patrons penitential period person Pope portals practice prayer Psalm Psalter punishment Purgatory relics religious representation represented Resurrection rites rituals Roman royal Saint-Denis saints salvation sarcophagus sense shrines social soul spiritual symbolic texts theme thirteenth century Three Dead Three Living transi tomb twelfth century visual Westminster Westminster Abbey William de Brailes
References to this book
Bibliographic information
| Title | Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation |
| Author | Paul Binski |
| Edition | illustrated |
| Publisher | Cornell University Press, 1996 |
| ISBN | 0801433150, 9780801433153 |
| Length | 224 pages |
| Subjects | › Social Science / General |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |