Mortality and Imagination: The Life of the Dead in Medieval English Literature by Kenneth Rooney (review)

Although its actual ambit is considerably wider, Kenneth Rooney’s “literary life of the dead” (9) names its principal concern the “macabre idiom” (2). Rooney primarily understands the “macabre,” a notoriously difficult term, as the transi (5), the body in decay that has lost its physical integrity, and the “macabre idiom” as the “iconographic image of the decaying corpse in the visual context, and in a literary context, any narrative suggestive of this visual manner of representing the corpse stricken by the attributes of decay” (12). The foundational text and image of this mode, for him, is the Three Living and the Three Dead (De tribus regibus mortuis) (6), which appears in narrative and visual form in the early fourteenth century. Aware that the word “macabre” first occurs around 1376 in Jean Le Fèvre’s Respit de la mort (15), Rooney nonetheless argues for its usefulness in describing earlier literary descriptions and visual representations of the rotting body. Much of his long and loosely linked first chapter (which weighs in at sixty-five print pages) explores this usefulness by arguing for the parallels between medieval artistic depictions of decaying human bodies and the modern biological accounts of the changes of the body in death, offering an overview of literary instances of rotting bodies, anthropomorphized bones, and erotic or burlesque macabre bodies.

Refreshingly, Rooney does not simply point to the devastation of the Black Death of 1348–50 as a cause of the late medieval turn to the macabre, noticing rightly that examples of the mode predate the cataclysm by several decades. Causation is in any case not of central concern in this study; although Rooney does gesture at one point toward a narrow origin for the representational interest in the iconography of the decaying human bodies in the “traditional rhetoric of transience” (9) of early fourteenth-century homiletic literature, he ultimately seems to prefer a more general explanation, inflected by anthropology, in what he affirms is a natural, universal, and “primitive” “loathing of the dead” (37). This is not a book about religious history or devotional trends. Thus the relationship between the emergence of the macabre and the laicization of monastic and eremitic ascetic models in which abjection plays a key role are left unexplored, while the ars moriendi itself, which Rooney perhaps does not consider literary, is not made part of the discussion.

Rather than an argument about the history or nature of the macabre, Mortality and Imagination is best read as a theme and motif study of how the dead appear in a wide range of late medieval English literary texts. This is the program of the last six chapters of the book, which increasingly move beyond the “macabre idiom” to discuss all representations of the dead in Middle English literature: a vast topic. Chapter 2 discusses spiritual revenants or disembodied ghosts as well as Body and Soul debates; Chapter 4, close in focus to Chapter 3, reviews the literature of debate between Body and Worms; Chapter 5 deals with the Three Dead Kings narrative already discussed in the introduction, and its relation to the romance genre; Chapter 6 discusses instances of Death personified in literary and visual works; and Chapter 7 rehearses the origin of the motif of the Danse macabre and Lydgate’s early fifteenth-century translation of the French poem.

As noted, Rooney’s stated intention to focus on the “macabre idiom” gets somewhat lost in the middle part of the book, and the reader instead gets a sense of the sheer variety of images, genres, and media, and the variety of meanings, uses, and aesthetics involved in late medieval death culture. The appeal of this study for SAC readers may indeed be the very number of texts that prove capable of contributing material, including works such as John Mirk’s Festial; the Gesta Romanorum, a mid-fifteenth-century English prose redaction of a thirteenth...