Last week I took a step away from the researching the manuscripts directly and focused on more scholarly articles with a central focus on the statistics of death in relation to age and or prior condition. This week I would like to return to the main focus on my blog which is the manuscripts and what they tell us about how Medieval society felt about death during and after the Black Death.
This week I want to take a look at just one example of an illustrated manuscript and explain the depiction and what it means in relation to societies feelings about death and dying.
Dance Macabre, in graveyard of the church of St. Magnus at Magdeburg.
The Dance Macabre, in the graveyard of the church of St. Magnus at Magdeburg demonstrates the feeling that death is real and traumatic.
"The trauma of the Black Death gave rise to the most popular artistic channel for the representation of death, the Dance of Death. There are indications that first the dance macabre was performed, then poetized, and finally painted. Before the15th century, the Dance Macabre was traced on walls of churches and charnel houses across Europe, gathering in its train rich and poor and young and old, exemplified by the fresco of Eure-et-Loir. In Europe every victim was danced off to hell no matter what: sudden death was escalated to sudden damnation (Binion, 2004). The dance macabre, based on folk superstition represented by the skeletons themselves, or accompanied with the living had a second social and spiritual lesson, that death is always coupled with the living. In the dance of the death, the corpses often tug or draw the living to death (Cohen, 1982)"
[http://entomology.montana.edu/historybug/YersiniaEssays/Medrano.htm]What does this say about how people felt after the Black Death? I believe that it gave death a "personality." No longer was death being looked at in a religious overtone but rather as more natural, traumatic, and gruesome event. The Black Death had a profound impact on this feeling; in a sense it was almost as if people were literally taken and guided down the path away from life as the image depicts. This is just scratching the surface and their are more images that demonstrate the reactions from society. In my future blogs I will began to look at more of these types of images and try to break them down and understand the theme the artist is trying to come across.
Chris,
ReplyDeleteI agree that this gave death a realistic part of life. I think that this was the time that people began to realize that although there were differences in social class, there were no differences among humans. Death will come to all of us regardless of who were are and what we do. Death is not some supernatural being that looms over our death bed waiting for his or her chance to swipe us. That is how death is often depicted in stories or art, even today. The mid-evil art gave death a face, possibly the first time that society was ready to accept death as real. That small change in the depiction of death made it more of a natural occurrence that no one can escape.
An interesting way to view death, especially with something as widespread and deadly as the bubonic plague. There is a lot of fantastic imagery from that time, which leads many to conclude different things. The realism of the time really lead to a sort of "growing up" for death, in a sense.
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