Depicting Death in Late-medieval British funerary sculpture; English and Welsh carved cadavers, c1420/5-1588 (original) (raw)

Between c1240/5 and 1588 there was a fashion amongst members of the religious elite, wealthy landowners, and prosperous merchants to have themselves depicted as a naked, emaciated cadaver, lying in a burial shroud with their modesty protected by a strategically positioned hand or piece of cloth. Although a fashion imported from the continent, and part of the wider European late-medieval depiction of the dead, these English and Welsh carved cavaders are an often overlooked part of British visual mortuary culture. Firmly connected with purgatory and thus Roman Catholic after-life beliefs, the 41 extant carved cadavers are wonderful examples of how death was central to life and the pre-and post-mortem self during this period of British history. Acting as memento mori and warnings against vanitas and voluptas these unusual sculptures typically depicted the specific individual in the liminal period between life and death, although a small number do show the individual as dead. Perhaps most interestingly though, given the earliest pre-date Vesalius by almost a century, these sculptures are largely anatomically accurate; although again with a few exceptions. This paper briefly explores these English and Welsh carved cadavers in terms of their anatomical depictions and their connections with late-medieval religious rituals and beliefs. It also discusses them in relation to the modern interpretation of the British late-medieval carved cadaver that is currently being hand-sculpted in wood by anatomical sculptor Eleanor Crook; probably the first to be carved in almost 500 years.

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