The treatment of the dead is a sacred matter, especially in the Medieval period. But who were these death rituals physically sacred to? The answer to this question is complicated. Nearly all religions contain stringent stipulations regarding the treatment of the body, during life and after death. Despite this, throughout time, people have been buried without ceremony, with little or no adornment and ritual blessing. In a previous Sight+Signs article on Transi Tombs I discussed the expression of the reality of suffering and death during the Great Famine and the recurrent Black Death as seen in the exterior surfaces of carved imagery on these eponymous tombs. It is clear that knowledge of suffering had reached all the way up through the social hierarchy to the consciousness of even the most elite Medieval peoples. The number of individuals who could afford to pay for stone carving as elaborate as that required of a Transi tomb was very small; what happened to the rest of the Medieval corpus upon death?
As in life, social class is markedly stratified in death. Incorporating a tomb into religious architecture for worship was reserved for saints and kings, lesser nobles and upper class could afford stone sarcophagi, coffins of varying material were the most common form of bodily encasement (which would express social class as well, depending on types of wood and make of the coffin box), and finally the poor were resigned to naked burial. To be buried without encasing is perhaps the greatest signifier of poverty that there is. Naked burial, truly naked burial, is frequently recorded among graves of the poor in the medieval period. For example, the recently released details of the archeological investigations at Old Divinity School in Cambridge, England, reveals a shockingly large number of remains which appear to have been buried without any adornment at all. These are the remains of what is clearly one of the largest Medieval Hospital cemeteries, belonging to St. John the Evangelical Hospital (which stood nearby until CE. 1511) as it contains approximately 1,300 burials. Looking at this phenomena in the reverse, we can see that sarcophagi, and even coffins, were rare status objects, not just normal paraphernalia. To solidify this point, I offer the high rate of incidence of communal coffins; that is, coffins in which a body was allowed to decompose, and out of which the remaining bones were then dumped into a charnel house and the coffin was re-used (for more information on this phenomena see this article debunking myths surrounding Medieval English burial). These coffins were precious objects, not frequently used for the poor, and certainly reused when need required it.
There is no object to be highlighted in this post. Rather, I would like to propose that a lack of objects and visual remains is just as significant as their presence in understanding past visual culture in a more democratic way. Absence of object does not equate an absence of significance.
Sight+Signs 