Medieval Coffins: Naked Burials

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.

Starvation: the Great Famine and Transi Tombs

Marble fragment from the tomb of Cardinal Jean de La Grange from the apse of the church of the Benedictine College of St. Martial, (c.1388-1402 CE), Musee du Petit Palais, Avignon, France.

Transi tombs first appeared in Europe as a widespread phenomena in the late Medieval period.  They are sculptural depictions of decaying bodies which frequently include other organisms (worms or rats for example) depicted devouring the rotting flesh of the main figure.  The word ‘transi” in Latin literally means “to pass.” These strange monuments fall into the category of cadaver tombs, but they are a distinct category within this larger definition, because tombs depicting skeletons or the likeness of the deceased wrapped in a shroud also fall into the category of “cadaver tombs.” One of the most familiar transi tombs is the tomb of Cardinal Jean de La Grange, from the apse of the church of the Benedictine College of St. Martial in Avignon, France. It was sculpted from about 1388-1402, and represents a classic example of the transi.

There are two major events which shocked the Medieval world in the 1300’s; the Black Death and the Great Famine.  The Black Death is still a morbidly popular, well known and taught topic today in a global world which has a heightened consciousness and fear of epidemics.  But the Great Famine, which occurred just before the spread of the plague, and certainly contributed to weakened immune systems, is rarely talked about.  It had an impressive death toll on it’s own, with conservative estimates stating that the famine caused the death of at least 15% of the Northern European population.

Life for the average Medieval person was rough; the vast majority of every population in Europe were farmers, and the skeletons exhumed from rural Medieval graves display an almost universal affliction of severe osteoarthritis, bone deformation, and eburnation. Most of the day for farmers was spent bent at the waist tending to fields.  Peasants were chronically undernourished, as the total caloric expenditure created by their vigorous life style is equivalent to someone who today is training for the olympic games (for more information on the Great Famine see The Third Horseman, by William Rosen). 

The Great Famine was essentially caused by a massive shift in the normal patterns of warm weather which had occurred between approximately 800 and 1315 CE, usually referred to as the Medieval Warm Period (MWP).  The change in weather caused a shortage of food and created a surplus of excruciating death unlike anything that had ever been seen in those times.  The rain lasted for days without stopping, one English chronicle states that the rain did not stop anywhere in Europe north of the Pyrenees for over 150 days!  Countless writers of the time cite the extreme measures to which people went to acquire food, from marauding to cannibalism.  “Men and women furtively ate their children… (while) jailed thieves… devoured themselves (see the chronicle written in Johannes de Trokelowe’s Annales).”  The Great famine visited death on Medieval people in many forms, aside from starvation, during which the body literally eats itself, dissolving bone and skeletal muscle, causing cellular autophagy, and finally death by suffocation as the lungs shut down, but also lowering the immune system significantly.  Famines cause a spike in diseases such as measles, tuberculosis, amoebic and bacterial dysentery, intestinal parasites, cholera, and herpes, to name but a few.

The familiarity with the slow decay of starvation brought about by the Great Famine is what motivated the nobility’s change in grave monument sculpture. These transi monuments also attest to the widespread effects of the famine in the mentality of late Medieval peoples.  The damage was so extensive that even the highest levels of the social hierarchy were massively affected and made painfully familiar with death. The transi are relegated almost exclusively to the north of Europe; the area most effected by the Great Famine.  The rendering of the decaying flesh suggests not only a familiarity with the dead, but a very close one-on-one observation of the dead by the artist.   

The vast majority of dead in the 1300’s lay in the street for days on end before crews of laborers could pile them onto carts and deposit them in mass graves.  The rate of death turned European burial into a very democratic practice.  Therefore the ability to provide a private burial, and more, to commission a sculptor to create an elaborate monument, was a privilege reserved for only the most wealthy of society.  The transi tomb represents the inescapable infiltration of starvation into the very upper echelon of society.

Here are some other examples of transi tombs:

Marble Tomb of Bishop Richard Fox of Winchester, (c. 1528 CE).

Marble Transi Tomb,”l’homme à moulons” (roughly translated “a cadaver eaten by worms”) in Boussu, Belgium, (c. 1550 CE).
*This illustration was provided by Jean-Pol GRANDMONT

Flesh and Bone: the Two-Faced Rosary

Ivory Beads, German (c.1500-1525 CE). Metropolitan Museum of Art, No. 17.190.306

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (AKA the Met) in New York City is one of the few places that I frequent with any consistency.  Within its overwhelmingly large collections (of over 400,000 items) is a fascinating object. It is from early 1500’s Germany and therefore falls at the very end of the Middle Ages, however, it deserves a place within the category of Medieval art as it provides a wonderful bookend to the complexity of the period.  It has been classified as a rosary in the collections of the Met even though it is over 2 feet long and each individual bead (there are only eight) is approximately 2 inches long by 1 inch wide.

A traditional Catholic rosary is based on ease of counting.  Essentially, in order to do penance for sins (which everyone had to do because every human is guilty of sin) a certain number of prayers would be assigned to the repentant individual and they would have to count them out.  Each section of a rosary has a certain number of beads, usually ten small beads and one large bead. Each bead represented one recitation of a prayer. This object is certainly a string of beads used for meditation and/or prayer; two acts which today have very different meaning but which were essentially the same thing in Medieval Christian Europe. It is doubtful that it was a rosary in any traditional sense.  True, the number of beads on a rosary was not standard by any means in the Middle Ages, but the size and small number of beads in this string throws this idea into doubt.             

Instead, I propose that this is not a rosary but is a commemorative set of beads designed to be a votive offering or memorial object.  The individuality of each figure on the beads is highly unusual for beads depicting generic characters.  These carvings must portray individual likenesses.  But why would a patron commission portraits of individuals for a piece with such a murky function? They must have had a personal tie to the figures depicted, which means that they were most likely family members.  The beads which have a skeleton on the flip side are representative, then, of a beloved family member (or person of equal significance in the patron’s life) who had died.

The scale of each bead is important as well.  They are not small enough to be pushed through the fingers as a prayer is recited and counted off; they are palm sized objects, each unique, and each prompting a different string of thoughts associated with the figure depicted and its feeling in the hand. The ivory would be hard, cool, and smooth to the touch, with a very bodily yet bone-like quality.  Both the imagery depicted and the material conjure thoughts about bodily decay, life, and death.

Regardless of this objects function, it is certainly unique.  And on top of that, it is extraordinarily beautiful.  In looking at it, it is hard not to meditate on life, death, mortality, and the fleeting impermanence of the human body.  Here are a few more images of this set of exquisite ivory carvings for you to stare at:

Ivory Beads, detail, German (c.1500-1525 CE). Metropolitan Museum of Art, No. 17.190.306

Ivory Beads, detail, German (c.1500-1525 CE). Metropolitan Museum of Art, No. 17.190.306

Ivory Beads, German (c.1500-1525 CE). Metropolitan Museum of Art, No. 17.190.306

Ivory Beads, German (c.1500-1525 CE). Metropolitan Museum of Art, No. 17.190.306