For Prayers and Pedagogy

Abstract

This short article contextualizes a subset of Northern European cadaver monuments of the lateMedieval/early-Modern era, known as transi imagery. It explores 37 English carved cadaver monuments (ECCMs) dating from between c. 1425 to 1558. By examining vernacular theology, perceptions of purgatory, and understandings of the body post-mortem, it supports current scholarly writing that these ECCMs were pedagogical in nature, prompting prayers from the living to comfort the deceased in purgatory. However, it controversially argues that ECCMs additionally provided a visual reminder to the living that purgatorial suffering was not just spiritual, but also physical during the wet stage of death (the period before the corpse became skeletal). Further, by drawing on fieldwork, this article provides the first comprehensive guide to the carved cadaver monuments that can be found in England.

Death and the erotic woman: the European gendering of mortality in times of major religious change

“…Because during this era there was no clear differentiation between the body and soul that we find in later Cartesian thought (Bynum, 1995, p. 11), the boundaries between the spiritual and the physical/material were blurred. As such, purgatory was a place of severe and painful sufferance, a transitory kind of hell understood in everyday terms to have physical punishments that reflected ones venial (non-mortal) sin for example the greedy would be forced to eat dust, whilst the proud had large stones on their back that ensured they looked only at the ground 12 (Welch, 2013). This punishment was not unwelcomed however, as it resulted in one's (re-)unification with God.…”