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ASHBY KINCH , Missoula, MT Affirmative Negation: The Affective Economy of Late Medieval Illustrations of the Office of the Dead

The Office of the Dead is a liturgical rite with a profound cultural function: it enacts in ritual form an implicit promise embedded in human culture to continue to care for the dead. The text of the Office of the Dead extends the Christian cult of the dead, located in churches and cemeteries, well beyond its local confines, making of it a portable, verbal altar of the blessed dead (Ottosen 1993, 29-49; Amiet 1993). The inclusion of the Office in the first prayer books commissioned and used by secular owners began with the Psalter-Hours of the 13 th century and rapidly evolved into the Books of Hours that came to dominate secular devotional practices in the late medieval era, becoming what scholars often refer to as a "bestseller" in the late medieval book trade (Arné 1981, 128; Wieck 1997, 9). The Office of the Dead has a special prominence in Books of Hours due to a unique characteristic: while other prayers in the Books of Hours are digest versions of the canonical hours, the Office of the Dead duplicates the Church ritual verbatim, reflecting the localized differences that distinguish the various "uses" of regional churches (Delaisse 1974; Wieck 1988, 124). Books of Hours also reflect a practical function for their owners, largely prominent aristocratic families who commissioned them for use in private prayer, and thus employed them as instru- ments in the expression of their cultural identity: through prominent display of herald- ry, but also through their patronage of sophisticated works of art with an abundance of narrative material that goes well beyond the literal text of the Book of Hours itself. These manuscripts thus produce relationships between text and image that complicate any simple notion of literal illustration, mediating the reader's textual engagement with images, ideas, and narratives drawn from secular literature, devotional meditation, and political discourse, as in the 14 th century Taymouth Hours , where romance narratives are threaded into bas-de-page images that link devotional prayer to family lineage (Smith 2012, 77-99). The growth of the Book of Hours as a tool for cultivating social identity also pro- moted the advance of new decorative programs in the early 15 th century, particularly in Paris (Meiss 1974; Châtelet 2000). All aspects of the illustration and decoration of the book might highlight aspects of a patron's unique cultural identity (Smith 2003). While the text of the Office of the Dead remains stable, the iconography varied dra- matically in this period, and, indeed, the Office is the most iconographically diverse of all of the standard components of the late medieval Book of Hours (Arné 1981, 130; Leroquais 1927, lxi-lxii). The iconographic diversity of the Office of the Dead stems in part from the socio-economic competition of the book trade, but predominately, I would argue, from the way the Office itself stimulates a complex range of affective states during a period in which there was a widespread shift in the lay culture of death corresponding to the increased attention to its devotional function. In the early 15 th century, new forms of art put breathtaking new visual interpretations of death in front of viewers. The late 14 th and early 15 th centuries saw the first cadaver tombs, which depict rotting corpses on conventional funeral slabs (Chihaia 1988; Cohen 1973); the first appearance of the Danse Macabre in Paris (1424) and in its first vernacular trans-

Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 25.1 (March 2014): 15-27.

lation, John Lydgate's "Dance of Death" (late 1420s) (Chaganti 2012; Gertsman 2010; Oosterwijk 2008); and the wide dissemination of the Legend of the Three Living and Three Dead in both manuscripts and murals (Fein 2002; Kinch 2008). These new forms of death art have conventionally been seen as a by-product of a plague-obsessed Europe, an interpretation that conveniently avoids two other, more important events in the evolution of European death culture: 1) the development of a vigorous culture of lay piety, in which images played an active role in the social and religious lives of late medieval individuals (Brantley 2007; Kamerick 2002; Marks 2004); 1 and 2) the pene- tration of visual culture into all aspects of medieval cultural life (Camille 1989, 160; 215-219; Crosby 1997, 132-133; Hamburger 1998). In the first two decades of the 15 th century, major changes in death culture took place as a result of this evolving lay devotional culture, including the widespread dissemination of vernacular translations of clerical texts ( Visitacio Infirmarum ) and death meditations (Heinrich Seuss's mid-14 th century "On the Most Useful Science of Dying," the early 15 th century Ars Moriendi , both disseminated widely in vernacular translations) (Appleford 2008; Beaty 1970; Gillespie 1989). The explosion of this devotional material in general provides a much more salient cultural context for un- derstanding the explosion of death iconography than the Plague, as the laity now had access to a broad range of material to help them prepare for death, the central event in

Winter Journals the spiritual narrative of the individual Christian. In a recent book, I have argued that late medieval representations of the dead and dying body are intended to generate in the devotional subject an affective surplus, which can then be profitably invested not only in prayer and spiritual growth, but also in public self-representations of piety that affirm the social and political identities of both artists and patrons (Kinch 2013). I refer to the dialectic between the self-negating aspect of death meditation, which stresses loss, rupture, and mourning, and its self-validating strain, which stresses both for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution spiritual health and reward and social cohesion, as affirmative negation. The Office of the Dead provides a perfect locus for such affirmative negation in death meditation, as the efficacy of the prayer is fundamentally rooted in the affective

state of the devotional subject: the more passionate the devotionalPowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) subject who prays, the more productive the prayer on behalf of the deceased. This function of the Office gained particular salience in the late medieval period, when new forms of commemorative prayer on behalf of souls in Purgatory extended the potency of the Office (Le Goff 1984): the beloved dead could shorten their stay and diminish their suffering through the prayers of the living, whether family members or chantry priests (Lauwers 1996; Wood-Legh 1965). This belief was made explicit in one mid-15 th - century illustration of the Office (Baltimore, Walters Library MS 251, fol. 118), in which a soul is released from its purgatorial punishment and depicted in transit to heaven (Wieck 1988, 146, pl. 38). But the affective economy of the Office combines this liturgical emphasis on commemoration and advancement of the souls of the dead with the penitential practice of contemplating death as a curb on sin (Calkins 1983; Yvard 2002) . Illustrations of the Office demonstrate a shift from the former (commemoration) to the latter (devotional penitence) over the course of the 15 th century, a change driven in part by the visual culture of death. Prior to the 15 th

1 The literature on this topic is vast, but in the context of the relationship between death art and devotional writing, see also Binski (1996), who connects medieval death art to the cultural practices sur- rounding death ritual, and Camille (1996), who focuses on the development of pathos in representations of death by a single artist, Pierre Remiet.

century, a relatively standard lead illustration of the Office of the Dead was a funeral scene, often quite basic, as in this image executed by the "Master of Death," Pierre Remiet, in the Hours of Nicholas Rolin (London, British Library, Yates Thompson MS 45, last q. 14 th c. fol. 134) (figure 1), depicting a coffin and several attendants chanting from open books. Such images, which persisted well into the 15 th century, link the Office text directly with its liturgical function and stress the commemoration and aid of the dead, depicted as a peaceful continuity, rather than the drama of a personal confrontation with death (Alexandre-Bidon 1993, 86-87).

Figure 1 By the early 15 th century, as Millard Meiss noted, these scenes became more elaborate when Parisian artists began experimenting with volumetric space, opening up the chapels where the coffin was displayed to more detail, more figures, and more drama (Meiss 1968). Meiss also notes a sudden attention to the dead body, which in Parisian Books of Hours of the 1410s begins to appear nude and exposed on the ground prior to burial in the work of the Boucicaut Master, the Limbourg Brothers, and, most fa- mously, the Master of the Rohan Hours, whose lavish attention to the dead body in his magisterial sequence of Office of the Dead illustrations is justly famous. These striking images stimulate intense spiritual energies and thus powerfully en- hance the devotional impact of the reading of the text of the Office. As artists freely integrated material from new genres of death art and social praxis, the text of the Of- fice of the Dead became more of a site of devotional death meditation than a strict liturgical practice. For example, the Three Living and Three Dead appear in lead illustrations of the Office (Kinch 2013, 122-136), and so do visual allusions to the Danse Macabre (Kinch 2013, 188-190; Oosterwijk 2008, 138-143), despite the fact that these well-known narratives bear no direct relation to the Office of the Dead, suggesting that the artists conceived of the text of the Office as a spur to a devotional meditation for which images are an effective stimulus. The cultural narrative of the

death and dying process begins to appear in illustrations of the Office of the Dead in the early 15 th century, as well, including specific references to practices like final communion, extreme unction, corpse vigils, corpse preparation, and alms-giving, usually presented in medallions or inset frames arrayed around a central image (Fiero, 1984; Wieck, 1999). One mid-century Book of Hours (London, British Library, Eger- ton MS 2019, ca. 1450-1460; fol. 142, figure 2), includes a lead illustration of the Office of the Dead that combines both social and literary allusion into one composite made up of seven distinct images. In the lower margin, the left-hand medallion alludes to the Danse Macabre by depicting the Pope, the Emperor, the King, and his Queen in a line walking toward a skeleton carrying a red spear and riding a black unicorn with a menacing red horn.

Figure 2 The unicorn as an emblem of death appears in some 15 th -century illustrations of the Barlaam and Iosaphat story (Brantley 2007, 127-131), and here the artist has mixed it freely with the Danse Macabre as a spur to reflection on the imminence and ubiquity of death. In the outer margins, a separate visual narrative unfolds of a man receiving last communion (right middle margin); followed by his wife sewing his corpse in a shroud (upper left); a woman receiving consolation from a clerical figure (illuminated initial "D" from opening of Office "Dilexi quoniam"); and a funeral (upper right). At the center of the page, we find the culmination of the visual narrative: a half page miniature of a burial scene, in which a tonsured cleric, leading a group of mourners, asperges the corpse as it is laid in the grave, its soul rescued in the upper register by an angel who battles back a demon as the naked soul reaches for God, in a blue tunic at the upper boundary. Moving, in other words, from the lower boundary, where the affective stimulus is the shock of the death of the mighty drawn effectively from a single image alluding to the famous Danse Macabre , the image works the viewer assiduously through stages of preparation for death and burial that culminates in a

final affirmative release of the soul of the deceased. The kneeling figure in the illuminated initial serves as a mimetic double for the reader, who exemplifies the living whose devotion to prayer and consolation from the clergy result in beneficial out- comes for their loved ones. These new, multi-scene medallion images illustrating the Office of the Dead prompt a broader, multi-layered narrative reflection on the mean- ing of death for the individual, including the relationship to the dead for whose spiritual future the living are responsible, to living loved ones whose care and solicitation will ensure a good death, and to her/his own death. The Bedford Workshop (active from the 1410s to the early 1430s), whose use of narrative medallions was a signature design element (Châtelet 2000, 164; Spencer 1965, 498; Stirnemann 2005, 536), engaged in characteristically creative re- interpretation of these new models. In the famous Book of Hours for which the Work- shop was named, the Bedford Hours (London, British Library, Additional MS 18850), the Bedford Workshop utilized narrative medallions to illustrate the Monday Hours of the Dead (fol. 120), an abbreviated devotional prayer from the Weekday Hours consisting of the text of the liturgical rite for funerals (König 2007, 100-104). 2 That choice opened up the possibility of illustrating the text of the Office with a much more dramatic image than was customary (fol. 157): a magisterial Last Judgment image that pointedly links the death of the individual with the eschatological machinery of Chris- tian Apocalypse. 3 A plaintive corpse in the lower margin calls out: "O mort cruelle trop es dure et amere" ('O cruel death, you are too harsh and bitter'), as a marginal angel and demon battle for his soul and the souls of the damned and elect are separat- ed by an enthroned Christ. The page is a riot of colour, every inch decorated either with representational figures or with vines and flowers; the only words on the page are the nine opening words of the Office of the Dead set in a text box consisting of three short lines. Text, in other words, has been overwhelmed by image and design in this luxury manuscript, commissioned for a French aristocrat in the 1410s and acquired and re-purposed by John, Duke of Bedford in the 1420s, the great patron of Parisian art in the 1420s (Stratford 1993). Set against this magisterial image is the more modu- lated and restrained medallion illustration in Morgan Library MS M 359 (fol. 119v) (figure 3), also produced by the Bedford Workshop around 1430 for an unknown English patron. 4 For the remainder of this essay, I will provide a close reading of the narrative of affirmative negation developed in the elaborate cycle of medallions illustrating the Office of the Dead. By contrast to the stately single image of the Bedford Hours, the Morgan MS M 359 (henceforth, "M 359") illustrations provide an unusually dense script for the devotional reader's engagement with the Office of the Dead in the form of 111 medallion images, one on every folio page of the Office, representing one third of the manuscript's 332 medallion images, a visual abundance rare in Office illustrations, which usually offer a single image on the lead page (Wieck, 1988, 124). After an initial min-

2 The main miniature is by the Bedford Master, with the marginal roundels executed by artists in the Workshop. For more detailed discussion of the identities of the artists involved in the Bedford Work- shop, see Reynolds (2005) and Reynolds (2006). 3 Based on the border style, the Monday Hours image (fol. 120) was executed in an earlier campaign than the Office of the Dead image (fol. 157), which König (2007) rightly calls "one of the Bedford Master’s most impressive images" (109). 4 I have situated that manuscript in the social context of Regency Paris in the 1420s (Kinch 2013, 232- 248), with particular attention to the detail of the Danse Macabre figures in the Office of the Dead cycle. See, also, Voelkle (1990; 1991).

iature of a funeral scene flanked by 4 medallions (fol. 119v; discussed below), the cycle continues with individual medallion scenes on the next six pages (fol. 120r- 122v), articulating a fuller narrative of the death and mourning cycle; followed by 58 medallions that represent the first visual form of the Danse Macabre (f. 123r-151r); a cycle of 15 scenes illustrating the 15 Signs of the Apocalypse (fol. 151v-160); and finally a cycle of 27 scenes illustrating the life of Job (fol. 160v-173v). This cycle, which has received far too little attention, moves the devotional reader through the virtual experiences of death, mourning, and social re-integration, before broadening this visual meditation on death to a representation of the intermingling of the commu- nities of the living and the dead through expanding circles of significance. The Danse Macabre cycle (f. 123-151) – the first extant visual evidence of this widespread 15 th - century topos – stresses the social community of Paris during the English occupation through images that link the living and the dead, but also provide social detail and specificity unrivalled in any extant literary or visual text. The 15 Signs of the Apoca- lypse expand to a larger eschatological narrative in which the fates of the living and dead are ultimately intertwined (151v-159v). The larger cycle of images ends, finally, with the story of Job (160-173v), told in a unique narrative that emphasizes Job's family's integrity throughout his trials.

Figure 3 The larger narrative structure begins with an astute focus on the human scale of death and mourning: in a central miniature (fol. 119v; figure 3), we see a funeral scene, with a coffin beneath a large catafalque lit by over 30 candles, an overload of detail relative to the visual convention (usually a small cluster of candles, five or six). The image suggests attention to a specific moment: two of the candle-holding monks

in the foreground hold their tapers at an angle, signaling that they just lit the last candles and the mourners are captured in the midst of chanting the office. The image beautifully suspends the ritual, and through its mimetic representation of the act of chanting the Office, entangles the viewer, ostensibly turning to this page to chant the Office herself, in that same affective moment that signals the ritual parting of the beloved from the community of the living. Medieval funerals were heavily freighted with significance, as the ritual prayers of the living ensured a speedy and successful transition for the dead, while the act of praying for the dead itself had a penitential character, offering a key moment of reflection on one's own mortality, a key prod to true penance. The sensory detail of the candles and the chanting monks vividly evokes a felt environment, which draws upon the reader's own prior somato-sensory experience to conjure powerful mnemonic emotional effects. The funeral scene signals a final point in a transitional process that the outer medallions, arranged in an X pattern, gloss through scenes that take place prior: lower left, extreme unction; upper right, final moments; upper left, consolation of the widow; lower right, the preparation of the corpse. The artist has designed visual links to move the eye from one medallion to another, each marking crucial elements in a narrative of death and mourning. Focused on moments where an emotional valence is attached to a ritual act that helps all of the actors to move through a prescribed sequence of feeling, rather than getting lost in the pain (for the dying) or grief (for the living) of the moment. Lighted candles provide a crucial sensory cue, as they were central to church rituals, and particularly important in the ritual of death and dying (Woolgar 2006, 151-152). Candles feature prominently in most images of funeral scenes, but they also appear regularly in bedside death scenes in illustrations of the Office (Wieck 1988, 125, fig. 109; Wieck 1997, 120, fig. 93). Here, the profusion of candles in the central funeral image radiates out into the medallion images in the diagonal connecting upper- right and lower-right: in the image depicting Extreme Unction, a tonsured priest offers the host to a man who is still conscious enough to receive it, his head upright on a pillow. Finely-drawn daubs of red on the priest's cheeks, nose and forehead register the emotion of the moment, as he performs this crucial liturgical act. At the foot of the bed, a man holds a lighted candle, illuminating the scene and providing a visual tie to the image in the upper right, where the candle has been transferred to the hand of the dying man. Painted in a single yellow and a single red stroke over a mauve curtain, this candle is a subtle but telling detail, enacting visually a cultural narrative of the deathbed scene. The lighted candle provides a visual focus for the dying man to concentrate on God's grace, and the detail of the priest supporting the hand corresponds exactly to deathbed instructions, which encourage the dying man to hold the candle, providing a crucial psycho-motor connection to the last breath that, ideally, blows out the candle in a sign of the soul exiting the body (Alexandre-Bidon 1998, 95-96). The woman in the pink robe and black veil appears at the foot of the bed, holding a golden object, perhaps related to the Ars Moriendi instructions to include devotional objects to focus the attention of the dying, usually a crucifix, or an image of Mary or an especially beloved saint, as stipulated in "The Book of the Craft of Dying" (Hortsmann 1999, 417). In one image, a woman is depicted retrieving a crucifix from the hands of a man whose closed eyes signify the moment of death (Wieck 1999, 449, figure 1). A woman in the same dress appears in two other images in the M 359 sequence, reflecting the response to the event of death: in the first, her head bent in a conventional gesture of

sadness, she receives the hand of a kneeling man who has come to comfort her. In the lower right, on the other hand, she is depicted in the process of converting her mourning into a practical act: sewing the funeral shroud around the body, a corpse preparation step traditionally completed by women (Alexandre-Bidon 1998, 109-110).

Figure 4 In an earlier manuscript on which the Bedford Workshop collaborated (MS M 453; figure 4), 5 a similar design to the Office of the Dead image – a central scene flanked by medallions – exhibits interesting variations of similar scenes that demonstrate the kind of choices a workshop might make in the execution of a commission subtly to alter the tone of an image. The scene of Extreme Unction depicts the dying man with his hands crossed on his chest, while an attendant looks on as a tonsured priest in a red robe offers him final communion. The composure and control of the image suggests the ideal death of the medieval Christian, here depicted in its most direct form. Just below that medallion in the left margin, a woman in a green robe sews a corpse, but in this version the woman has begun at the head and worked down, the artist depicting the process at its midpoint. From a psychological standpoint, cov- ering the face first probably makes best sense, as it might facilitate treating the body as an object. This psychological context is what makes the artistic decision by the Bed- ford Workshop to reverse that sequence in M 359 so interesting: the woman has

5 For a discussion of the Master of Morgan 453, who collaborated with the Bedford Workshop on this manuscript, as well as New York, Morgan MS M 1004, see Clark (1995).

worked from the feet, and has completed all but the head. The exposed face of the deceased produces a powerful image of a final moment of personal contact with the beloved before the body is prepared to move into the public rituals of the Church. And of course that uncovered face registers powerfully with the devotional subject who reads the book in a way that uncovered feet do not, reminding the viewer of the "hor- rible face" of death, a phrase current in penitential writing on death from Peter of Celle to Petrarch (Kinch 2013, 7-8). These kinds of subtle choices indicate that the artists of M 359 desired to weave into the text of the Office a narrative of personal engagement with death and dying. These images place the subject in a precise memory-affect location, which is then protracted in the manuscript by a sequence of images on the next six pages of the text of the Office, a unique narrative articulation that continues to follow key ritual post- mortem moments, each of which is marked by the care and attention of the body of the deceased. First, a funeral procession, in which the priest from the lower left medallion on 119v recurs, singing the office with a second man as they follow a priest, also singing, carrying the cross. Their sonic performance is, of course, mimicked by the devotional subject as she reads the Office herself, providing an auditory channel to link the private devotional behavior with the public. In subsequent images, the shrouded corpse is laid in the grave (120v), the mourners return home (121r), a group of men speak to monks, who are being asked to perform masses (121v); a memorial service is being sung (122r); and finally, a mass for the dead, perhaps an annual commemorative mass, is depicted at the moment of the elevation of the host (122v) (Wieck 1999, 438- 439). The images simultaneously remind devotional subjects of their mortality, even as they construct a visual narrative that depicts the process by which the community of the living ministers faithfully to the needs of the dead; this cycle of images thus provides an affirming narrative coherence amid the disordered emotion of death meditation. Late medieval Christians obviously experienced these rituals in their social lives, so the role of such visual depictions lies less in a reflection of a social reality than in a stimulus to recall the concrete instances of mourning and loss as means to generate an affective surplus that can be invested in the spiritual health of the beloved dead, and the dead to come. The Office of the Dead cycle in M 359 culminates in a unique pictorial narrative of the life of Job, images of whom become more and more common in the late 15 th - century illustrations of the Office. The appearance of Job as an illustration of the text of the Office makes good sense, as the nine lessons of Matins are drawn from passages from the Old Testament Book of Job . But this development of an illustration in direct reference to the content of the Office comes quite late in the tradition, and this sequence in M 359, the first narrative cycle of Job in a Book of Hours, may have been influential in this process. I do not have space in this brief article to work through the fascinating narrative elements of this cycle, but I do want to end with a close look at the culminating image, Job's deathbed scene, which epitomizes the ideal goal of the spiritual work represented by the praying of the Office itself, and realizes the cultural ideal of a quiescent preached in the Ars Moriendi and exemplified in other ideal deaths, like the Dormition of the Virgin scenes that appear regularly in Books of Hours (Duclow 1999), including a beautiful sequence earlier in M 359 (f. 102v-103r). Though the voice of suffering in the text of the Office encourages the devotional subject to identify with the "I" of Job's text, and thus focus on his trials and tribulations (Wieck 1999, 433), the narrative sequence culminates in Job's good death, and finally

affirms his social identity. In the closing sequence, Job is depicted first with his re- stored treasure (172v), and then on his deathbed (173r) (figure 5), surrounded by his family, who have gathered to aid him in his final moments. His wife, with a wimple and headdress piled high in 15 th -century fashion, kneels in prayer at the foot of his bed, and a daughter and a son, each slightly smaller than the previous, imitate their mother's devotion. On the next folio, alone, Job's eyes close as he dies (173v), his soul departing through a window, where it is met by an angel who shepherds it to God, who waits smiling. The narrative focus falls squarely on the apotheosis of this righteous man: no devils fight for his soul, as his suffering in life has prepared a direct route to Heaven for him.

Figure 5 This visual narrative of Job ventures, of course, far beyond the text of the Office, and even the text of the Bible, though it might suggest familiarity with an obscure textual tradition known as the Testament of Job , an apocryphal narrative from early Christianity in which Job's piety facilitates a deathbed vision of "those who had come for his soul" (Kraft 1974, 85). But this visual extrapolation is warranted by the Workshop's desire to affirm, at the end of the Office, the good end of a righteous, and wealthy, man, whom the wealthy patron of a luxury manuscript like M 359 aspires to imitate. Such an aspiration accords poorly with late medieval theology, which continues to stress that few are the blessed who fly straight to Heaven, but it accords perfectly with the logic of social aspiration that governed the production and consumption of deluxe manuscripts in the late medieval period. Praying the Office of the Dead daily through the pages of this beautiful manuscript, elite readers could simultaneously affirm their social status even as they piously advanced the souls of

their beloved dead and polished the gem of their own souls in mindful meditation on mortality. In the democracy of death of late medieval culture, some are more equal than others.

Illustrations 1. London, British Library, Yates Thompson MS 45, last q. 14 th c. (fol. 134) 2. London, British Library, Egerton MS 2019, ca. 1440-1450 (fol. 142) 3. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M 359, ca. 1430-1435 (fol. 119v) 4. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M 453, ca. 1420-1425 (fol. 133v) 5. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M 359, ca. 1430-1435 (fol. 173r)

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