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Danse macabre and the virtual churchyard

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Abstract

The late-medieval danse macabre was a multimedia phenomenon. Particular site-specific installations of danse macabre combined within themselves different representational media, including murals, architecture, sculpture, poetic inscription and kinetic bodily participation. This essay argues that the interactions among these different media took place for the medieval viewer in what we might understand as a virtual space. Furthermore, by seeing the danse macabre installation in this way, we can arrive at a new understanding of the form of the danse macabre poetic text, which similarly articulates itself as a virtual space accommodating the interaction of different forces. The essay makes this case by looking at a variety of extant visual traditions pertaining to danse macabre as well as at John Lydgate's ca. 1426 Dance of Death poem.

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Notes

  1.  In addition to appearing in a variety of static media, including stained glass, cloth, wall painting, manuscript illustration, woodcuts and possibly tapestry, danse macabre also maintained diverse associations with performance tradition. For recent accounts of danse macabre art and literature throughout Europe, see Oosterwijk and Knöll (2011), Oosterwijk (2008 and 2004), Gertsman (2010) and Appleford (2008). Kürtz enumerates different manifestations of this tradition, including a nineteenth-century account of a tapestry in the Tower of London (Kürtz, 1975, 145).

  2. Both have been put forward as theories explaining the origin of the danse macabre as a convention. Eisler has pointed out that danse macabre skeletons regularly carry the equipment of grave diggers, and also that they sometimes appear to be not skeletons, but figures wearing skeleton costumes, suggesting their depiction of a folk ritual involving grave diggers pantomiming and possibly dancing (Eisler, 1948, 187; see also Meyer-Baer, 1970, 310). On the idea that the danse macabre was used as a tool of figuration, an image preachers could invoke to instill fear of bodily excess as represented by dancing, see Freeman (2005, 18, 29). Binski remarks that ‘A thirteenth-century council at Rouen forbade dancing in churchyards’ (Binski, 1996, 56). On the cryptic etymology of the word macabre, see, for example, Huet, 1917–1918, 148–58; Eisler, 1948, 187–225; DuBruck, 1958, 536–43; Sperber, 1958, 391–402; Warren, 1971, xvi–xviii; Pearsall, 1987, 62; and Taylor, 1991, 4.

  3. On the specific detail of skeletons carrying musical instruments, see Meyer-Baer (1970, 300).

  4. Gertsman (2010, 4–5) sees the woodcuts as preserving the mural, but Appleford (2008, 287) cautions that this relationship is conjectural.

  5. On the virtuality of the body more generally in process and in motion, and the body as abstraction, see Massumi (2002, 30, 58). See also Manning (2009, 66), on the idea that danced ‘movement has ancillary components that are not part of the literal, visible movement itself, and these exist in the realm of the virtual.’

  6. I use the term ‘architecture’ loosely here to encompass everything from the columns and archways visible in the Marchant woodcuts (which may or may not be part of the scene of the dance, given their juxtaposition with the flowered background), to the Reval and Lübeck dances of death containing buildings and cityscapes in their backgrounds (Gertsman, 2007, 43–52). Unlike the iconic modern depiction of the dance of death at the end of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957), which takes place on an empty hilltop with a background of clouds, many medieval dances of death use the imagery of buildings and architecture to organize their visual information.

  7. Stone from the St. Paul's cloister was used to build the original Somerset House (Clark, 1950, 11). On the Holy Innocents’ destruction, see Gertsman (2010, 6).

  8. Lines cited from Warren (1971, 2–4, ll. 17–24); subsequent line numbers will appear in the text.

  9. Subsequent to Warren's edition, M.C. Seymour placed the extant manuscripts into four sub-groups, mentioning additional details about the variants (Seymour, 1983–1985, 22–24).

  10. Appleford suggests that because the B group contains manuscripts that designate the poem as the Daunce of Poulys, it is likely that this version accompanied the paintings (Appleford, 2008, 295). At the same time, as she and Warren note, Trinity College Cambridge MS R. 3. 21, not part of this group, contains a statement about the words being painted in the cloister at the request of John Carpenter (Warren, 1971, xxvi). Neither the characters who explicitly mention dance (like the Lady of Great Estate) nor the initiating words of the translator appear across all groups; it is hard to say whether the inclusion of such features would make a version more or less likely to be the one appearing with the wall painting.

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Many thanks to the participants in postmedieval's crowd review for their extremely helpful suggestions.

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  1. Department of English, University of California, Davis

    Seeta Chaganti

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Chaganti, S. Danse macabre and the virtual churchyard. Postmedieval 3, 7–26 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2011.22

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