Medieval and Early Modern Emotional Responses to Death and Dying

In 1405, Henry IV sentenced Richard Scrope, Archbishop of York, to be executed for high treason for his participation in a rebellion against the king. Contemporary English chronicler Thomas Walsingham recorded the death of Scrope, including the curious detail that the Archbishop’s ‘severed head was seen to smile serenely’.¹ Walsingham and other chroniclers go on to recount miracles associated with Scrope’s death, including crops growing abundantly where the execution had taken place. Over three hundred years later, English writer James Hervey penned the religious tract Meditations among the Tombs (1746), in which he conjured for his readers bodily depictions of the dead, whose bare skulls ‘grin horribly’.² Here a ‘haggard Skeleton’ with ‘clattering Hand’ and ‘stiffened Jaws’ is imagined to warn the reader of impending death – a message meant to resonate more deeply than thunder. With the smiling heads of the dead, these two premodern writers incite particular emotional responses in their readers. One image of death is designed to invoke joy and hope, the other, fear, but both aim to guide the reader to a life devoted to faith in Christ in order to prepare for the afterlife. What we might perceive today as macabre or gruesome uses of the corpse reveal the contrasts of past emotional responses to death to our own, and in the opposing intentions of the authors they also illuminate the variety of premodern affective responses to death and dying. This variety forces us to reject any universalising notions of the emotions that death could inspire, either in the past or the present. This special issue of Parergon offers nuanced case studies of how people responded to death and dying in the medieval and early modern period to demonstrate that, despite its inevitability, death produces different emotions depending on the specific historical and cultural moment. Moreover, they reveal how scholars can begin to locate and identify those emotions when the discourses around, and attitudes towards, death have changed so profoundly from the past to the present day.

People in medieval and early modern Europe experienced death and dying differently from the way we do today: the dead formed a more significant social ‘presence’ for medieval and early modern Europeans, who typically experienced the deaths of family and community members in far greater numbers than their modern counterparts.³ Rituals of commemoration and remembrance were informed by changing institutional practices within the Church and the royal courts, and they also varied according to local customs. Conceptions of the body and the soul were different, too, influenced by current theological thinking and lay and learned medical practice. The way the dead were categorised varied – certain types of death were criminal or sinful, others were ‘good’ and noteworthy – and this affected responses to the dead and their surviving families and communities. Emotions were also intrinsic to how people in medieval and early modern Europe prepared for death, said goodbye to loved ones, commemorated their dead, and meditated on life after death. But although death is universal and inescapable, can we say that these are the same emotions we expect to find today in situations of death and bereavement? Which emotions were foregrounded in the past, and how were they expressed and contextualised in historical moments? How did these emotive responses shape literature, art, popular opinion, the press, bonds between community members, the state?

The field of the history of emotions is well placed to address these affective issues by situating such questions in the context of historical understandings and practices of emotions related to death and dying. Begun by historians drawing from the research of anthropologists, psychologists, and neuroscientists,⁴ the history of emotions as a methodological approach has expanded through the work of additional scholars from history, literature, material culture, art history, and performance studies.⁵ As humanities scholars working in the history of emotions, we are not convinced by Paul Ekman’s identification of what he terms ‘basic emotions’,⁶ nor do we seek to trace a teleological ‘civilizing process’ along the lines of Norbert Elias.⁷ Rather...