Contextualising English Late-Medieval Carved Cadavers (Mar 2016) (original) (raw)

In this paper I will contextualise a subset of Northern European cadaver monuments (transi) of the Late-Medieval era, and explore the extant 40 English carved cadaver memorials (herein ECCMs) dating from between c1420/25 to 1558; all bar two are carved from a single piece of stone, all bar one memorialise high ranking clerics or male members of the wealthy land-owning and mercantile classes, and all image an emaciated and naked (apart from a strategically placed hand or piece of shroud cloth) recently dead individual, often largely anatomically correct despite pre-dating Vesalius, the father of anatomy. By examining late-medieval vernacular theology, and perceptions of purgatory, and speculating on understandings of the body post-mortem, my paper will support current scholarly writing that these sculptures were pedagogical in nature, prompting prayers from the living to comfort the deceased in purgatory. However, I will also suggest that they providing a visual reminder to the living that purgatorial suffering was not just spiritual, but also physical during the stage that anthropologist Robert Hertz has described as the 'wet stage of death'; the stage before the corpse became fully skeletal. Thus, I will argue then that these are sculptures commissioned to project the spiritual humility of those with material excess; a necessary quality when 'it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God' (Matt 19:24). I will also note their potential importance to the study of pre-Vesalian anatomy, a currently marginalized topic. By examining the viscerality of these often realistic depictions of a cadaver, through Paul Messaris' concept of iconicity (the emotion elicited from gazing at an image), alongside the medieval Northern European notion of post-mortem sentience (the concept that the dead can in some sense perceive), I hope to present the what, why and how of these unusual forms of late-medieval English mortuary art. Without going into too much detail, I wish to give a general overview of the 40 extant ECCMs before exploring their theological and anatomical aspects. I should note there are a further 3 of these cadaver sculptures in Wales (all are single, all are anonymous, 1 is clerical and 2 of the laity) but there are none in Scotland. Thus in total, there are 43 extant carved cadaver sculptures in Britain, with only 1 known to have been destroyed; all that remains is the upper effigy of an archbishop.