Masked in the Cemetery: Death, Plague, and the Danse Macabre
“All power of the world is a pack of cards. There are various cards, some are called kings, other queens, again others knaves. Thus, too, power is distributed on earth, one man is a king, another a mayor, and so on. Although in a pack one card is more decorative than another, and one is esteemed of more value than the other, yet they are all made of paper and cardboard stuck together. Thus, all who are endowed with power and surpass others in dignity, the lord and servant man are all fashioned of the same material, are all mortal and feeble.” (Nohl, 130-1)
There is much debate on the origins of the Dance of Death. But there is evidence of its existence in a large part of Western Europe and parts of Eastern Europe since the Middle Ages. “In Germany it was the Totentanz of Passion Plays; in France there are records of the Danse Macabre performed in the Cimetière des Innocents, near Paris, in 1424. Spanish dramatization of La danza general de la muerte can be dated as early as 1360; whilst in Italy, the triumph of death, Trionfo della morte, formed an integral feature of carnival” (Howarth, 134).
The Dance of Death is “the third genre of the macabre in chronological order of appearance” (Binski, 153), following “The Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead”(1) and the transi tombs.(2) The Dance of Death may be “literary or artistic representations of a procession or dance, in which both the living and the dead take part. The dead may be portrayed by a number of figures, or by a single individual personifying Death. The living members are arranged in some kind of order of precedence, such as pope, cardinal, archbishop, or emperor, king, duke. The dance invariably expresses some allegorical, moral or satirical idea” (Clarke, 1).
Some claim that the Dance of Death was originally a “public performance on improvised stages, in courtyards, cemeteries, or churches” (Eichenberg, 14). Early in the Dance’s development, Death and his victims would move in a slow and dignified manner, but eventually the Dance became more of an entertainment as the victims danced away with their death.(3) As well as dancing, the actors cavorted, sang, and played instruments.(4) The Dance thus grew in popularity and it spread into other forms of media. Regardless of its original form, “representations were created in a variety of media: drama, painting, poetry, sculpture, woodcut, stained glass, tapestry, manuscript and printed book” (Montague).
The Catholic Encyclopedia offers the following description of the Dance of Death as a moral drama:
The scene of the play was usually the cemetery or churchyard, though sometimes it may have been the church itself. The spectacle was opened by a sermon on the certainty of death delivered by a monk. At the close of the sermon there came forth from the charnel-house, usually found in the churchyard, a series of figures decked out in the traditional mask of death, a close-fitting, yellowish linen suit painted so as to resemble a skeleton. One of them addresses the intended victim, who is invited to accompany him beyond the grave…. The invitation is not regarded with favour and various reasons are given for declining it, but these are found insufficient and finally death leads away his victim. A second messenger then seizes the hand of a new victim, a prince or a cardinal, who is followed by others representing the various classes of society, the usual number being twenty-four. The play was followed by a second sermon reinforcing the lesson of the representation. (Herbermann)
It is generally agreed that the Dance of Death was created sometime during the Middle Ages. Although in classical antiquity the skeleton existed as a motif, appearing in Greek and Roman art on funerary monuments or as the motif of the “skeleton at the feast,” the Dance of Death did not exist. For the ancients, “the skeleton or the corpse thinly covered with skin (as in the lemures) represent not death in the abstract, but an individual. The former was symbolized by a youth with an inverted torch. The soul of the dying was depicted as a butterfly or a bird. In fact the whole treatment of death was euphemistic” (Clarke, 2).
What is impossible to say is in what form and where the first Dance of Death appeared. Various sources cite its first appearance either in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Scotland, England or Arabia, in the form of a play, dance, poem, sermon, or fresco. Edelgard Dubruck, in his essay on the poetic interpretation of death during the Middle Ages, states that the earliest representations of the Dance “were frescoes showing a procession (later, a dance) of representatives of all social ranks and groups in a descending order, men only, each accompanied by a mummified figure (later a skeleton)” (299), and adds that earlier representations of the dead are quite static while “the dead of later Dances snatch and drag their victims to their inevitable ends” (299). The Encyclopedia of Death and Dying, however, claims that the first appearance of the Dance was theatrical. Fears of the plague and mors repentina (sudden death) were themes that were “metaphorically dramatized along the lines of English morality plays. [Later ….] performing troupes picked up the affinity between bone-rattling skeletons and the sounds of percussion for dramatic effect. Musicians of the day thus aided the development of death as a dance” (Howarth, 134).
Another possibility is that the Dance of Death developed from the “Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead,” as they have some elements in common: a pedantic prologue, a confrontation between the dead and the living, and a division of classes. However, there is one important difference: “The keynote of the Danse macabre is, to put it quite simply: ‘Sir, join the dance, thy hour has struck,’ whereas in the Dis des trois morts et des trois vifs, the dominant note is: ‘As I am, so thou shalt be. Therefore repent, before it is too late” (Clarke, 97). However because of this difference and others, Clark states that this theory “has been adequately refuted” (95). More likely is the possibility that the Dance originated from an illustrated sermon. For example, “in a fifteenth century exemplum, or moral tale, we read of a preacher who suddenly pulled out a skull which he had been holding under his cloak, in order to bring his point home to the congregation” (Clarke, 94).(5)
James Clarke, in his book on the danse macabre, offers another, more plausible explanation of the Dance, that it based on a Latin poem called the Vadomori (“I’m going to die”), the title given to it by later editors. It was written in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century in France, and two versions of the poem remain. The first version commences “with a prologue which tells of the inevitability of death, and the Fall of man as its cause. Adam brought death into the world; now prince and pauper alike are subject to the same universal fate, the lex moriendi. Then follow ten distichs, each spoken by one person, each beginning and ending with the words Vado mori” (101).
However, Clark also considers this theory to be unlikely, for reasons similar to his dismissal of the Legend as the basis for the Dance’s development. Both the Vadomori and the Dance have a division of social classes in an order of precedence from the highest to the lowest. Also, “in both works the Church and the State have an approximately equal representation; both have speeches to death. But in the Vadomori poem Death does not appear at all” (101-2).
Most often, it has been stated that the first appearance of the danse macabre was in a poem, Le Respit de la Mort, written by Jean le Fèvre, in 1376: “Je fis de macabré la danse.” It has been assumed that le Fèvre had written this poem “after recovery from the plague which he contracted in the epidemic that raged Paris in 1374. Thus the plague surely gave rise to the poem” (Polzer, 116). However, Christine Boeckl, in her book about plague iconography, suggests that it was not the plague which le Fèvre had contracted, but instead that the poet had written this work “after an undisclosed grave illness in 1376” (43). She adds: “Le Fèvre’s elegy was made visual in the Cimetière des Innocents in Paris in 1424 – which, incidentally, was not a major plague year. This suggests that the popularity of the danse macabre (Dance of the Dead) was not directly related to bubonic plague epidemics” (43-4).
To compound the problem, The Catholic Encyclopedia claims that the oldest traces of the Dance come from Germany, although there is “the Spanish text for a similar dramatic performance dating back to the year 1360, ‘La Danza General de la Muerte’”(6) (Herbermann), possibly written by a Spanish monk, and “may be the earliest dance of death known” (Strayer, 86).
Despite the date of the Spanish Dança general, many authorities still claim that the first known representation of the Dance of Death “was painted […] at the cemetery of the Church of the Holy Innocents in Paris. In the Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris the anonymous author recorded: ‘It is in the year 1425 also that the danse macabre was completed at the Innocents; it was begun in the month of August 1424 and was finished the following Lent.’ The mural was done on the southern wall of the cemetery. Inside the wall was a cloister; above the cloister, charnel houses were built. The cemetery doubled as a marketplace, and the cloister and charnel houses were frequented by Parisians en promenade” (Montague).
Accompanying the mural were hortatory inscriptions, neither of which can be attributed to any particular artist or author. It is believed that the mural was created before the text, which was added later to clarify the meaning of the pictures. “Naturally this does not exclude the possibility that the poet who expounded the paintings may have known earlier poems on the subject of the inevitability of death, and may have made use of such poems in his stanzas” (Clarke, 90), such as the Vadomori. The mural, along with the inscriptions, was destroyed in 1786, however, a relatively faithful reproduction was made in book form.
In the Bibliothèque Nationale there are two manuscript copies of the verses which accompanied it. And, in 1485, the Paris printer Guyot Marchant published the Danse Macabre, the first known book to contain a representation of the Dance of Death. The artist and the cutter of the illustrations are unknown, and the book itself does not claim to be a copy of the painting at the Innocents. But the verses in the book correspond to those in the manuscripts at the Bibliothèque and are therefore the same as those painted at the Innocents. The woodcuts, in all but a few minor instances, conform perfectly to the text, so it is likely that they are renditions of the scenes on the cemetery wall. For the purpose of making the Dance suitable to book form, Marchant presented only four figures on each page; however, to imagine the mural at the Innocents, one must picture a continual procession. (Montague)(7)
However, those authorities who would like to place the origins of the Dance in France ought to consider evidence other than the mural at the Innocents. Amy Turner Montague, in her essay on the Dance of Death, claims that the earliest records of a Dance was a dramatic piece, performed in 1393 at a church in Caudebec, Normandy, according to a document from the church archives. Unfortunately, the document no longer exists “but the abbot Miette derived the following from it: ‘The actors represented all levels of society, from the sceptre to the shepherd’s crook. One by one they departed, to show that each man comes to his end, the king in the same manner as the shepherd. This dance… is none other than the famous danse macabre.’” (Montague).
Strangely, the belief that the origin of the Dance of Death was actually a dance, a rather unpopular one, although there is evidence to support this theory. Sachs, in his book on dance, suggests that the danse macabre might have its roots in stories in which people are cursed to dance until they drop dead. Starting in the eleventh century, there were increasing cases of dance manias, which took place during festivals or on days during which someone died. People would “begin suddenly and irresistibly to sing and dance in the churchyard, disturb divine service, refuse to stop at the priest’s bidding” (251). Cursed to dance as a result of their disrespectful behavior, they continue until the ban is removed by the archbishop.(8) “This is the gruesome motif of the dance curse which Hans Christian Andersen in his popular fairy tale [“The Red Shoes”] has fashioned into the story of the little Karen, who cannot find rest until the executioner has cut off her feet” (252).
Curses aside, this phenomenon of the dance manias was a verifiable event. Sachs suggests that groups of people, frazzled and distraught by war, plague and various misfortunes, would wander from place to place. Holding hands or not, they would “circle and jump in hideously distorted choral dances – for hours at a time, until they collapse[d] foaming at the mouth” (253-254). Spectators would join in the dance as if compelled. These manias would continue for months despite the attempts of priests and medical men to intervene.(9) There were occurrences of this phenomenon again from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries.
Eventually the dancers were to be found in their trance-like state in the cemeteries. Sachs suggests that the dancers sought to commune with their dead, out of superstition, a literal danse macabre. “For in Arabic kabr means ‘grave,’ mákbara, ‘churchyard,’ and makâbr, ‘churchyards.’ There can no longer be any doubt that the name has come from the Arabic, since we know that one of roots of the dance of death goes back to the Arabs” (252).(10)
For a long time “the ecclesiastical councils opposed these obscoeni motus, saltationes seu choreae (obscene dances) in church and churchyard – each time the evil was to be rooted out, and each time the attempt failed” (Sachs, 252). Dancing in itself was problematic for the church, and this type of uncontrolled, frenzied dancing was extremely suspicious. At the same time that this frenzied dancing grew in frequency, so did witchcraft,
which was encouraged by closely related phenomena such as the frenzies of the flagellants (11) and the dancers. Far from diminishing after the first shock of the Black Death of 1347-1349 had worn off, these psychic epidemics increased in numbers and frenzy as the fourteenth century went on, an indication of widespread “social and cultural maladjustment.” These movements, which swept the Low Countries, Germany and northern France in 1347 and continued at least until 1420, were more than responses to plagues and famines; they were manifestations of the misery and fear caused by uncontrollable and unpredictable change in a Christian society in which change was not valued. (Russell, 200-1)
One of these responses to continuous plagues and famines was that eventually “death also informed the iconography which could be ‘read’ by the common people, those who did not understand Latin and the illiterate, and, of course, poets and playwrights. The Three Living and the Three Dead …, the Ars Moriendi, and the Dances of Death were popular imagery especially after the invention of printing” (Dubruck, 299).
Still, murals were the commonest form of the Dance of Death in the fifteenth century. There were close to one hundred Dances, most of which have been lost.(12) Most of those Dances painted in what became Protestant Europe were either destroyed, or simply covered over with whitewash or plaster. In Catholic Europe, the murals “suffered from the prejudice of the Age of Enlightenment and the rebuilding zeal of the Rococco period. The Middle Ages were regarded as an age of darkness and barbarism, and wall paintings of that period were held in scant esteem. What was spared by destruction decayed as a result of neglect, since constant renovation is required for mural paintings” (Clarke, 4).
Of what remains of the Dance today, the most famous visual depiction is Hans Holbein the younger’s series of 42 engravings, known as the Totentanz. But, “today the Dance of Death is best-known through the musical interpretations of Franz Liszt’s Totentanz (1849) and Saint-Saëns’ Danse macabre (1874); while Modest Mussorgsky’s A Night on Bare Mountain formed the score for a stunning visual animation of the dance in the 1950 Walt Disney film, Fantasia” (Howarth, 135), not to mention other representations which can be found in the poems of Goethe or Walter Scott, or Bergmen’s 1956 film, The Seventh Seal, to name but a few.
It is interesting to note that Liszt’s Totentanz was inspired by the frescoes in the Campo Santo in Pisa, either in 1838 or 1839. While he was looking at them, as he reported later to his biographer Lina Ramann, “the music of the hymn Dies Irae came into his mind and his composition Danse macabre took shape. This work, vast in conception and revolutionary in technique, has always been considered one of Liszt’s most remarkable pianoforte productions. It is the most outstanding performance relating to the Dance of Death in the musical sphere” (Clarke, 57). This fresco is a Trionfo della Morte, artist unknown, created around 1530.
Death is shown, not as an airy skeleton, as was usually the case before the Black Death, but rather, as a horrible old woman cloaked in black, with wild, snakelike hair, bulging eyes, clawed feet with talons, and a scythe to collect her victims, whom she feeds to snakes and toads. Death was like a bird of prey, sweeping down on its victims. A similar scene by Orcagni at St. Croce in Florence, shows several corpses plus a few miserable creatures, half alive, vainly imploring Death to take them and end their suffering. (Gottfried, 91)
Although these depictions of the Trionfo were painted during the Cinquecento, “The earliest traces of this conception may be found [during the Middle Ages] in Dante and Petrarch” (Herbermann).
Regarding the macabre, Italians prefer the visual arts over the dramatic arts. “Il ‘Trionfo della Morte’ e l’‘Incontro dei Tre Vivi e dei Tre Morti’ appaiono maggiormente diffusi in Italia, mentre la ‘Danza Macabra’ è maggiormente rappresentata in Francia” (Cerchio, 90) The pictorial form of the Dance, altered however, to suit their taste, was still popular with the Italian people. Also, in contrast to the Spanish, “the poem had little attraction for them. One isolated example is the Ballo de la morte, the manuscript of which is in the Riccardiana Library at Florence. It was edited by Vigo, the historian of the Dance of Death in Italy, who allots it to the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century” (Clarke, 58). It is interesting to note that Clarke, after having denied the connection between the Dance and the Vadomori, admits that “the Italian Ballo de la Morte begins with two lines that may have been taken direct from the Vadomori” (102).
The Trionfo della morte in Pisa, with its depiction of a horrible death, is one of the best examples of the changes in art due to the plague. “Preplague Tuscan art was warm and sympathetic. It stressed personal relationships and, when it dealt with religious themes, emphasized the humility of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and the saints. Postplague art, like postplague thought and funerary monuments, was obsessed with the most gruesome aspects of pain, and with the image of death” (Gottfried, 91) After 1347, new plague imagery was created by the artists but they also turned to preexisting themes such as the Trionfo della morte and the Madonna della Misericordia, adopting and adapting them as subjects, and thus, the old themes “became imbued with new meanings” (Boeckl, 45).
This flexibility of the Italian artists to adapt themes can also be seen: “Nella Danza Macabra di Pinzolo, ad esempio, sono puntualmente raffigurati i setti vizi capitali e nella Danza Macabra di Clusone ritroviamo i sette vizi e le virtù” (Cerchio, n.98), both of which are located in northern Italy, as are the other Italian Dances. It is not surprising “that all the Italian examples are to be found in the North, which was more open to the transalpine influences than the centre and the south of the peninsula” (Clarke, 51), considering the popularity of the dance in nearby France and Germany.
As popular as the visual forms were, while groups danced themselves into a frenzy in churchyards to the North, a similar form of dance mania, tarantism, took place in Italy from the Middle Ages on into the eighteenth century. Also, it has been noted that there is a record of the dramatic form of the Dance which took place in Florence in 1433, during a carnival procession arranged by Piero di Cosimo:
A huge wagon drawn by oxen rumbled along, quite black and painted over with skulls and crossbones and white crosses; upon it stood death with his scythe, surrounded by covered graves. From time to time the procession halted, there was a dull blast of a trumpet, the graves opened, the dead arose; they were men in black clothes on which the outline of a skeleton was painted, and sat down on the edges of the graves and sang. The song began ‘Dolor, piánto, e peniténzia’… and further on the following verses occurred:
Morti siam: come vedete:
così morti vedrem voi;
fummo già come voi sete,
voi sarete come noi. (Nohl, 256)
Traces of the dance can also be seen today not only during carnival celebrations throughout the peninsula, but also in Palermo, where the Abballu di li diaboli (the Devils’ dance) takes place once a year on Easter Sunday. Death, flanked by devils, roams the streets, shooting randomly at people with a sort of crossbow, who then must give a monetary contribution to the devils, which then affords a repeat of the dance the following year.
There are two general beliefs about the plague in regards to the Dance of Death: either the Dance was a direct consequence of the plague or it was not. One of the few authorities who denies the Dance as being a result of the plague is Boeckl. Her argument is that people were already greatly preoccupied with death before the outbreak of the Black Death. The evidence of this fact was that death already existed as a topos before 1347 in the forms previously mentioned. “Thus, the cause of this fascination with the macabre before the outbreak of bubonic (and pneumonic) plague remains in part an enigma” (69). She then insists that it’s necessary to examine death imagery as it “seems less related to actual events than to the then current theological debate on eschatology. It is my contention that the Trecento’s increased fixation on ‘memento mori’ was based primarily on doctrinal revisions concerning heaven and hell” (69).
Therefore, she proposes “that death imagery, the transi, and even the danse macabre were not initiated by the frightening experiences of bubonic plague. A number of authors, in addition to myself, attest that depression was not necessarily the psychological response of the survivors who commissioned works of art after the passing of a cataclysmic event” (158). What follows this statement is a less than convincing argument.(13)
It is undeniable that there were significant cultural changes after the Black Death. As already noted, in art it was particularly evident. “The Black Death and the various outbreaks of plague have found a staggering, graphic expression in ‘dance of death’ pictures and engravings and in the numerous ‘Icones Mortis.’ A ‘dance of death’ representation’ was possessed practically by every large town” (Nohl, 37). One example, which has survived to the present day is the Great Basle Dance of Death, which was commissioned by the Church Fathers assembled there after the plague which has struck the area and killed many people. Painted with oil colors in the cemetery of the Predicant Church, either in 1439 or 1441, “‘it was to illustrate in the most emphatic manner the uncertainty of human life….’ At the same time in numerous other towns and countries Dances of Death were executed, just as poetry again and again selected as its theme the transitory nature of human life” (Nohl, 130).
In fact, to understand the mood of late fourteenth and fifteenth century people, it is necessary to consider the psychological effects of “the new omnipresence of plague and the possibility of sudden, painful death. In the High Middle Ages, an era of expansion and fruition, literature and art expressed a buoyant optimism. After the Black Death, this was replaced by a pervasive pessimism” (Gottfried, 89). In the Middle Ages, before the Black Death,
people accepted the inevitability of death and prepared for it, but they were rarely preoccupied with it. Burials were often in common graves, and elaborate tombs were rather rare. The Black Death changed all this. Funerals became festivals, the greatest event of a lifetime. […] Funerary monuments were comparatively scarce before the Black Death, even among the nobility. In England, when they were used, funereal brasses usually showed a lord and his lady bedecked in all their finery. After the plague, funerary monuments and death masks became common, and their themes changed. Many brasses showed shrouded, macabre corpses or skeletons with snakes and serpents surrounding and protruding from their bones; on their faces were grisly, toothy smiles. Tombs in the Netherlands showed hideous images of naked corpses with tightly clenched hands, rigid feet, gaping mouths, and bowels filled with worms. In Germany, woodcuts called ‘The Art of Dying’ appeared. They were linked panels showing the drama of death. Death was painful – in contrast to the peaceful slumber of years past – and people were to tremble at its coming. All this marked the appearance of the ars moriendi, the cadaver and death as a major motif in art and literature.” (Gottfried, 89-90)
Also common were the Christian mystery plays which generally depicted “human decay and the torments of hell” (Gottfried, 93). At the same time, mostly in calendars, the different stages of life were represented “with analogies drawn to the seasons of the year. In the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the calendars emphasized spring and summer; in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, they turned to themes of autumn and winter” (Gottfried, 93-94).
Psychologically speaking, the Dances and the dance manias “represent a more or less violent reaction of the enormous mass of sentiments which had accumulated in the deeply impressed minds of individuals during the time of the Black Plague” (Nohl, 256). After 1347, death was no longer considered the gentle guide of souls waiting for the resurrection, as viewed by Saint Francis of Assisi who referred to death as a “sister,” or in the form of the ferryman Charon on the river Styx. Fears of the plague-stricken and death became horror, and there was a sense that “life itself was a desperate battle against death’s dominion... Many historians have noted the changed image of death in late medieval literature and art. It becomes a ravishing monster, the master of a dance in which all must join” (Herlihy, 63).
However, some scholars take the middle road. David Herlihy, who wrote a book about the Black Death, eloquently states that “the plagues touched every aspect of social life, but in doing so they became intertwined with every other social influence. From the matrix of forces shaping the late medieval world, it is impossible to factor out those attributable to the plague alone” (19). Paul Binski, writing about Medieval death rituals, says the macabre existed before but “the most influential exogenous theory holds that the macabre was reinforced by late-medieval demographic disaster, most especially the Black Death … and subsequent recurrences of the plague” (126-7). Philip Ziegler also agrees in his book about the Black Death, quoting Émile Mâle who wrote that, before the mid-fourteenth century, religious art was made to inspire the viewers with love, hope, and compassion. By the fifteenth century, this is no longer the case. The majority of fifteenth-century art is “‘sombre and tragic. Art offers only a representation of grief and death.’ Yet Mâle saw this evolution at its most rapid in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, the fruit not of the plague itself but of the great wave of terror and dismay which engulfed Europe even after the plague passed.” (276).
Dubruck also takes another factor into consideration, as well: the Great Schism. Both the Schism of the Church and the Black Death caused a shift in the mentality of the European people who had lived through these events. Before these events, the idea that death was something that could be learned, as illustrated by the ars moriendi, was a popular belief. However, in the fifteenth century, “people at large seemed uncertain about the end of humankind’s existence, for which the clergy was no longer capable of preparing its flock. In historiography, death was first treated factually, sometimes personified, while later different groups were blamed for mass destruction by the plague (Jews, flagellants)” (295). (14)
No matter what its origins, the basic message of the Dance is simple. On an allegorical level, the Dance is death, and to join the dance signifies to die. The theme of the dance is that all men are equal in death, “with the further conclusion that man must repent before it is too late” (Clarke, 105). The purpose of the Dance was to demonstrate the fact that everyone must die and therefore should prepare for the final Judgement. Although it must have pleased the common man to see those of higher status reduced to his level, clearly “non faticherà a ritrovare e identificare se stesso fra la vasta gamma dei personaggi, delle maschere sociali e morali, ciascuna accompagnata dal proprio doppio scheletrico” (Cerchio, 97).
These themes of Death as a leveler, and meditation on death as a means to a better life leave little doubt that the original purpose of the Dance was religiously didactic. It has been noted that “this meditation on death is similar to certain devotional practices associated with Christ’s Passion. The relationship between the Dance and the Passion is actual: Crucifixion representations are found in the center of the Dance of Death paintings at both Kleinbasel and Berne” (Montague), as well as other churches in various European countries.
Not only during the drama does the Dance begin and end with a sermon, but “many of the picture cycles begin or end with the preacher in his pulpit” (Clarke, 94). In the Dance, Death did not appear as a monster who triumphed by ruthlessly destroying all mankind as in other forms of the macabre, “but as the messenger of God summoning men to the world beyond the grave, a conception familiar both to the Holy Bible and to the ancient poets” (Herbermann).
However, the Church Fathers’ intentions to inspire repentance might have backfired at some point as the Dance became transformed from the didactic into something more transgressive.
The experience incorporated in these graphic representations (of the Dance of Death) is the equality of all men in the face of death, an experience of all the greater import as, not only did it shake the foundations of the rigid system of mediæval castes, but produced the consciousness of the equality of all men before the face of God – that consciousness which led up to the Reformation. If prior to this the higher estimation of the great had been sustained by the ostentatious show of their obsequies and the innumerable masses said for their souls, this deception failed now that even bishops and prelates frequently remained unburied and their corpses became the food of dogs. (Nohl, 37)
It is possible that for the Church, the Dance had, in part, evolved from mystery plays performed to educated the laity. But if the friars had originally controlled the Dance and its message, by the fifteenth century this was no longer the case. “Other circles had adopted it and modified it to suit their own purposes. It was painted on the walls of parish churches and cathedrals, reproduced in books of devotion. When transplanted into these new surroundings it quickly lost much of its ascetic and didactic character” (Clarke, 105). The Dance of Death then became “a theatrical piece of vaudeville whose strength derives from its parodic acknowledgement of emerging social norms and conventions and its picaresque inversion of those norms, of decorous rest and disciplined display” (Binski, 156).
Perhaps one of the best examples of the Dance as parody might be las calaveras of José Guadalupe Posada (famous for his quote “La muerte es democrática”), in whose work those in the highest strata of society are subjected to the same fate as those in the lowest.
Now beyond the control of the friars, it is not difficult to imagine how the Dance lost the Church’s approval, especially since dancing itself was often condemned. Dancing itself “was sensual and was tied in closely with music associated with seduction; in one longstanding Christian moral view, dance and music possess an erotic undertone. Dancing was a vehicle for the vices, and in the Dance of Death music and dance act as forms of seduction and so deceit” (Binski, 155). The theme of the dance was no longer a simple call to repent. Binski suggests that, at a primitive level, the Dance
challenges the sacred notion of the dead at rest validated by the Requiem Mass of the funeral service…. Since the earliest examples of the tableau of the Dance accompanied cemeteries of charnels, the image too offered a subversive comment on the Church’s frequent prohibitions on dancing in churchyards, enacted at Rouen in 1231 and again at Basle in 1435; a reminder that consecrated ground tended to attract vulgar activities which vigorously asserted the principal of life ... The Dance was a vigorous piece of taboo-breaking, connecting ritually purified spaces to the signs of fallen human nature in the world and all its worldliness. (154-5)
One final explanation of the Dance which has been gaining popularity is that those who participate in the Dance, the living and the dead, do not represent types but individuals, and that “they do not signify death in the abstract, but the dead” (Clarke, 106). This interpretation takes into account the medieval superstition that the dead are capable of rising from their graves on occasion and dance. While they dance, the living are drawn into their circle, with the consequence of later suffering sickness or even death. This superstition may have left its trace on some versions of the Dance, but it does not explain the Parisian danse macabre at the Innocents.
The Dance of Death was an important part of the macabre movement, traces of which may be seen before the Black Death, but it was not until after the Black Death that the psychological state of the people with their fear of sickness and sudden death made them more receptive to the macabre and it was able to develop into a full fledged movement. Sigmund Freud claimed that humans are driven by two instincts which he calls Thanatos (the death instinct) and Eros (the life instinct). The Dance, in a way, is the visualization of this theory, the battle between life and death. The end is always the same, however: death will come for each of us. Since we all must go to our graves, perhaps the moral of the Dance is that, instead of fighting and kicking and screaming uselessly, it would be best to go dancing.
Notes
(1)“This legend appeared in the second half of the twelfth century: three cadavers or skeletons meet three young men (princes?) in the forest, and each addresses one of the living. The predominant themes of the encounter are: Vos eritis qui nos sumus (you will be what we are) and also, ubi sunt qui ante nos fuere? (where are those who lived before us?)… The legend seemed to attenuate monastic asceticism in favor of a new valuation of the body and life” (Dubruck 311).
(2) “In such tombs, which came into being around 1400, a dichotomy is commonly, though not universally, established between the representation of the dead in their full social station, as complete, perfected representatives of a particular class or group in a state of timeless repose, and their representation as a corpse, naked or shrouded, in various stages of composition” (Binski 139). For a detailed discussion on the transi tombs, see Binski, pp139-152.
(3) Binski makes an interesting point about the difference between the movements of the “living” dancers and the “dead” dancers. The living move with the restrained and cautious steps of courtly dancers, while the dead dance with the enthusiastic high kicks of plebian ring dancers. “The Dance of Death is thus at one level a tableau of class norms,” Binski writes, and “the dead by virtue of their movement are another order, another class” (156).
(4) Cerchio has an interesting comment: “…in numerose Danze Macabre, gli scheletri siano muniti di strumenti musicali particolarmente fragorosi – tamburi e trombe specialmente. La tromba e il tamburo sono strumenti ambivalenti che possono contrassegnare sia la nascita, sia la morte. Essi uniscono al simbolismo sonoro quello del soffio (tromba) e quello della vibrazione (tamburo). Come strumento di distruzione, la tromba è ricorrente in varie immagini del Vecchio e del Nuovo Testamento… oppure a quelle dell’Apocalisse. Il tamburo, emblema del movimento ritmico e del trascorrere del tempo, scandisce tanto la fase creativa quanto quella distruttiva dell’attività cosmica” (107).
(5) Clarke also gives this example: “When Friar Dietrich Coelde was engaged in putting an end to the deadly feud between the Hoeks and the Kabbeljaus at Amsterdam, he produced two skulls and asked the audience if they recognized to what parties the dead men had belonged” (94).
(6) “The Dança general de la Muerte differs from the French danse macabre in that there is a reprimand of Death, who in turn launches a scathing and relentless criticism against all strata of society. The democratic aspect of the work is also shown by its indicting the powerful and the weak” (Stayer 86). Also, woodcuts and pictorial representations of the Dance in Spain are unknown. “Extant are two Dances, the Dança general (Escurial Library MS b IV, fols. 109r-129r) and its offshoot, the Dança de la muerte (publ. 1520, 136 stanzas, fifty-eight participants), both processional. The manuscripts are of the fifteenth century, and the originals (lost) in Latin or Catalan may go back to the fourteenth. The Dança general consists of seventy-nine stanzas and thirty-three personages, of whom twenty-two are also in the Paris Dance, while eleven reflect Spanish life. The Dança general features death personified and sporting various attributes: bow and arrow, nets, a saw, a trumpet, a (fishing) hook. The themes of these two texts are: death as leveler and as sudden attacker, causing terror; they preach vanitas, vanitatum and the decomposition of the body” (Dubruck 307).
(7) “The popularity of the Dance in book form was great; one year after Marchant’s first printing, he reprinted the book and published a similar work, the Danse Macabre des Femmes” (Montague). Almost all manuscripts of the women’s Dances are from the fifteenth century.
(8) Russell also writes of this phenomenon of the dance manias: “This movement was reflected in the more grotesque dances of death that passed into art and literature….The great outbreak of the dancers occurred in 1347. Some dance stories seem to be moral exempla rather than actual fact. At Utrecht in 1278 (Hecker, p.153), two hundred dancers are said to have danced on a bridge over the Moselle until it collapsed and they drowned; but this is similar to the famous account of the dancers of Kolbig (Hecker, pp. 153-154), who in 1021, unheeding the pleas of the priest to stop their revels, were forced supernaturally to continue their dance for a full year without ceasing” (320).
(9) “Though these [dance manias] proliferated after the plagues of the next century, they commenced early in the thirteenth. At Erfurt in 1237 more than a hundred children attempted to jump and dance all the way to Armstadt, and many were killed. The mania was a reality. By the end of the thirteenth century the dance of death began to be a popular moral theme in art and literature and reached its height in the fifteenth century along with the obsession with grisly memento mori. Though the danse macabre was originally a dance of the dead, it soon became a dance of living people who were reminded of the nearness of death and the vanity of the world. In the typical dance-of-death story, revelers would be checked in the midst of their dance by the appearance of a spectral figure which caused them to stop still in terror and grief” (Russell 136-7).
(10) The etymology of the word “macabre” is uncertain, although Sachs is not the only author who supports the idea that the word may be Arabic in origin. “Esso potrebbe secondo alcuni derivare dal nome di un artista medioevale, mentre alcuni studi più recenti tenderebbero a delineare due ipotesi principali. Secondo la prima, l’aggettivo rimanderebbe al libro dei Maccabei in cui viene ricordato il martirio dei sette fratelli, figli di Felicita, e i riti funebri celebrati in loro onore. Il libro dei Maccabei ha, nella tradizione cristiana, un particolare rilievo per quanto concerne gli insegnamenti relativi al culto dei morti. L’altra ipotesi lo fa invece risalire all’arabo ‘maqbara’ (tomba) o ‘maqâbir’ (cimitero) e all’equivalente ebraico ‘meqaber’” (Cerchio 89). A more amusing version of now the danse macabre got its name, although it sounds less like a plausible theory and more like an urban legend, is to be found in Nohl’s book: “In France in the fifteenth century the diseases which were supposed to be prowling about as phantasms were to be scared away by the still uglier masks of the danse macabre: ‘An adventurer of the name of Maccaber, probably of Scottish origin, accompanied the English who in 1424 flooded France, came to Paris and quartered himself in a very ancient tower, which probably dated from Roman times, in the vicinity of a chapel, round which a cemetery had been established. The Maccaber, who is described as being half a skeleton, seems to have produced a great impression on the popular imagination; and supernatural powers were attributed to him. But his reputation increased particularly when, in 1424, he instituted a pantomime, i.e. an ecclesiastic procession, which was repeated for several months – this was called afterwards Maccaber Dance (Danse Macabre) – or Dance of Death. An infinite number of men and women of all ages were invited to dance by a figure representing death, and the dance took place in the cemetery where the inventor had his quarters. This gruesome entertainment lasted from August 1424 till 1425; the number of participants and spectators increased daily. The churches remained empty, and the English, especially the Duke of Bedford, were not the last to take part in the spectral performance. The entertainment then ceased, but was revived in 1429” (255-56).
(11) In it striking to note certain similarities among the flagellants and the Dances. Herlihy writes: “Processions of men through cities, scourging themselves in expiation of their own sins and those of society, were not unprecedented in the history of medieval piety. A similar movement, called the ‘Great Alleluia,’ had swept through the cities of Italy in 1260. But the Black Death gave the practice unprecedented dimensions… The bands marched from town to town, sleeping outdoors as part of their penance. At the central squares, the leader preached repentance. The marchers sang hymns and performed a kind of ritual dance. At its climax they fell to the earth and took positions indicating the types of sins they had committed – usury, perjury, adultery, murder. They then stripped to the waist and whipped themselves with knotted cords. After this discipline, they donned their clothes and marched on. It was all dramatic theater” (italics mine) (67-8).
(12) “Of those which have been preserved the most celebrated are those of Lubeck, Basle, Berne, Strasbourg, Minden, Paris, Dijon, and London” (Nohl 37).
(13) Boeckl’s argument is that “religious art produced in catastrophic times was cathartic, was far from expressing negative feelings, and in effect restored hope to people and helped them overcome the ravages of an epidemic without lasting psychological damage” (159). First, surviving an event as catastrophic as the Black Death without psychological damage seems more than unlikely. Second, it is difficult to interpret the Dance of Death as an effort to restore hope, when the message is essentially that everyone is going to die. Portraying death as a ravishing monster, human bodies in various stages of dying and decay, in my opinion, may be considered “expressing negative feelings” about death.
(14) Polzer also makes some interesting comments about the origins and influences which led to the full-blown movement of the macabre. “The view largely prevails that the extreme and indiscriminate mortality of the Black Death influenced the late medieval preoccupation with natural death. This is unquestionable. However, in the light of the Christian alternative, which considers death the gateway to eternal life, the extent and character of this nexus remain to be more closely studied, as it bears on reason and the search for rational cause and control, on faith and the fatalistic acceptance of God’s wrath, and on the fascination with natural death and decay which, as we shall see, was gathering momentum before the Black Death struck” (107). Also, of interest: “Death is a perpetual human dilemma. An intensifying preoccupation with natural death and decay is evident in the later Middle Ages. This intensified concern with natural death can be considered a by-product of a remarkable late medieval prosperity which gave rise to the growth of the towns and the democratization of religious devotion. Monumental urban cemeteries were then prepared to collect the dead and cleanse important civic precincts of graves in the path of ordered urban growth. These cemeteries were given the shape of cloisters; they were attached to funerary chapels or churches; and they were given decoration to suit their function” (123,126).
Bibliography
Binski, Paul, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation. Ithaca, New York, Cornell University
Press, 1996.
Boeckl, Christine, Images of Plague and Pestilence: Iconography and Iconology. Missouri, Truman
State University Press, 2000.
Cerchio, Bruno, ed. Ars Moriendi: L’arte di morire. Torino, Ananke, 1997
Clarke, James M., “The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance” in The Literature
of Death and Dying, Robert Kastenbaum, ed., New York, Arno Press, 1977.
DuBruck, Edelgard E. “Death: Poetic Perception and Imagination (Continental Europe)” in Death
and Dying in the Middle Ages, Edelgard E. DuBruck & Barbara I. Gusick, eds., New York,
Peter Lang Publishing, 1999.
Eichenberg, Fritz, Dance of Death: A Graphic Commentary on the Danse Macabre Through the
Centuries. New Yotk, Abbeville Press, 1983.
Gottfried, Robert, The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe. New York,
The Free Press, 1983.
Herbermann, Charles G, & George Charles Williamson. “Dance of Death” in The Catholic
Encyclopedia, Volume IV. 24 March 2003 <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04617a.htm>.
Herlihy, David. The Black Death and the Transformation of the West. Cambridge, Harvard
University Press, 1997.
Howarth, Glennys, ed., Encyclopedia of Death and Dying. New York, Routledge, 2001.
Montague, Amy Turner, “A Short History of the Dance of Death” in The Dance of Death: Les
Simulachres & Historiées Faces de La Mort. Boston, The Cygnet Press, 1974.
Nohl, Johannes. The Black Death: A Chronicle of the Plague. London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd.,
1926.
Polzer, Jospeh, “Aspects of the Fourteenth-Century Iconography of Death and the Plague” in The
Black Death: The Impact of the Fourteenth-Century Plague, Daniel Williman, ed.,
Binghamton, New York, Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies, 1982.
Russell, Jeffrey Burton. Withcraft in the Middle Ages. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1972.
Sachs, Curt, World History of the Dance. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 1965.
Strayer, Joseph R., ed. Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 4. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons,
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Ziegler, Philip, The Black Death. New York, The John Day Company, 1969.
There is much debate on the origins of the Dance of Death. But there is evidence of its existence in a large part of Western Europe and parts of Eastern Europe since the Middle Ages. “In Germany it was the Totentanz of Passion Plays; in France there are records of the Danse Macabre performed in the Cimetière des Innocents, near Paris, in 1424. Spanish dramatization of La danza general de la muerte can be dated as early as 1360; whilst in Italy, the triumph of death, Trionfo della morte, formed an integral feature of carnival” (Howarth, 134).
The Dance of Death is “the third genre of the macabre in chronological order of appearance” (Binski, 153), following “The Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead”(1) and the transi tombs.(2) The Dance of Death may be “literary or artistic representations of a procession or dance, in which both the living and the dead take part. The dead may be portrayed by a number of figures, or by a single individual personifying Death. The living members are arranged in some kind of order of precedence, such as pope, cardinal, archbishop, or emperor, king, duke. The dance invariably expresses some allegorical, moral or satirical idea” (Clarke, 1).
Some claim that the Dance of Death was originally a “public performance on improvised stages, in courtyards, cemeteries, or churches” (Eichenberg, 14). Early in the Dance’s development, Death and his victims would move in a slow and dignified manner, but eventually the Dance became more of an entertainment as the victims danced away with their death.(3) As well as dancing, the actors cavorted, sang, and played instruments.(4) The Dance thus grew in popularity and it spread into other forms of media. Regardless of its original form, “representations were created in a variety of media: drama, painting, poetry, sculpture, woodcut, stained glass, tapestry, manuscript and printed book” (Montague).
The Catholic Encyclopedia offers the following description of the Dance of Death as a moral drama:
The scene of the play was usually the cemetery or churchyard, though sometimes it may have been the church itself. The spectacle was opened by a sermon on the certainty of death delivered by a monk. At the close of the sermon there came forth from the charnel-house, usually found in the churchyard, a series of figures decked out in the traditional mask of death, a close-fitting, yellowish linen suit painted so as to resemble a skeleton. One of them addresses the intended victim, who is invited to accompany him beyond the grave…. The invitation is not regarded with favour and various reasons are given for declining it, but these are found insufficient and finally death leads away his victim. A second messenger then seizes the hand of a new victim, a prince or a cardinal, who is followed by others representing the various classes of society, the usual number being twenty-four. The play was followed by a second sermon reinforcing the lesson of the representation. (Herbermann)
It is generally agreed that the Dance of Death was created sometime during the Middle Ages. Although in classical antiquity the skeleton existed as a motif, appearing in Greek and Roman art on funerary monuments or as the motif of the “skeleton at the feast,” the Dance of Death did not exist. For the ancients, “the skeleton or the corpse thinly covered with skin (as in the lemures) represent not death in the abstract, but an individual. The former was symbolized by a youth with an inverted torch. The soul of the dying was depicted as a butterfly or a bird. In fact the whole treatment of death was euphemistic” (Clarke, 2).
What is impossible to say is in what form and where the first Dance of Death appeared. Various sources cite its first appearance either in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Scotland, England or Arabia, in the form of a play, dance, poem, sermon, or fresco. Edelgard Dubruck, in his essay on the poetic interpretation of death during the Middle Ages, states that the earliest representations of the Dance “were frescoes showing a procession (later, a dance) of representatives of all social ranks and groups in a descending order, men only, each accompanied by a mummified figure (later a skeleton)” (299), and adds that earlier representations of the dead are quite static while “the dead of later Dances snatch and drag their victims to their inevitable ends” (299). The Encyclopedia of Death and Dying, however, claims that the first appearance of the Dance was theatrical. Fears of the plague and mors repentina (sudden death) were themes that were “metaphorically dramatized along the lines of English morality plays. [Later ….] performing troupes picked up the affinity between bone-rattling skeletons and the sounds of percussion for dramatic effect. Musicians of the day thus aided the development of death as a dance” (Howarth, 134).
Another possibility is that the Dance of Death developed from the “Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead,” as they have some elements in common: a pedantic prologue, a confrontation between the dead and the living, and a division of classes. However, there is one important difference: “The keynote of the Danse macabre is, to put it quite simply: ‘Sir, join the dance, thy hour has struck,’ whereas in the Dis des trois morts et des trois vifs, the dominant note is: ‘As I am, so thou shalt be. Therefore repent, before it is too late” (Clarke, 97). However because of this difference and others, Clark states that this theory “has been adequately refuted” (95). More likely is the possibility that the Dance originated from an illustrated sermon. For example, “in a fifteenth century exemplum, or moral tale, we read of a preacher who suddenly pulled out a skull which he had been holding under his cloak, in order to bring his point home to the congregation” (Clarke, 94).(5)
James Clarke, in his book on the danse macabre, offers another, more plausible explanation of the Dance, that it based on a Latin poem called the Vadomori (“I’m going to die”), the title given to it by later editors. It was written in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century in France, and two versions of the poem remain. The first version commences “with a prologue which tells of the inevitability of death, and the Fall of man as its cause. Adam brought death into the world; now prince and pauper alike are subject to the same universal fate, the lex moriendi. Then follow ten distichs, each spoken by one person, each beginning and ending with the words Vado mori” (101).
However, Clark also considers this theory to be unlikely, for reasons similar to his dismissal of the Legend as the basis for the Dance’s development. Both the Vadomori and the Dance have a division of social classes in an order of precedence from the highest to the lowest. Also, “in both works the Church and the State have an approximately equal representation; both have speeches to death. But in the Vadomori poem Death does not appear at all” (101-2).
Most often, it has been stated that the first appearance of the danse macabre was in a poem, Le Respit de la Mort, written by Jean le Fèvre, in 1376: “Je fis de macabré la danse.” It has been assumed that le Fèvre had written this poem “after recovery from the plague which he contracted in the epidemic that raged Paris in 1374. Thus the plague surely gave rise to the poem” (Polzer, 116). However, Christine Boeckl, in her book about plague iconography, suggests that it was not the plague which le Fèvre had contracted, but instead that the poet had written this work “after an undisclosed grave illness in 1376” (43). She adds: “Le Fèvre’s elegy was made visual in the Cimetière des Innocents in Paris in 1424 – which, incidentally, was not a major plague year. This suggests that the popularity of the danse macabre (Dance of the Dead) was not directly related to bubonic plague epidemics” (43-4).
To compound the problem, The Catholic Encyclopedia claims that the oldest traces of the Dance come from Germany, although there is “the Spanish text for a similar dramatic performance dating back to the year 1360, ‘La Danza General de la Muerte’”(6) (Herbermann), possibly written by a Spanish monk, and “may be the earliest dance of death known” (Strayer, 86).
Despite the date of the Spanish Dança general, many authorities still claim that the first known representation of the Dance of Death “was painted […] at the cemetery of the Church of the Holy Innocents in Paris. In the Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris the anonymous author recorded: ‘It is in the year 1425 also that the danse macabre was completed at the Innocents; it was begun in the month of August 1424 and was finished the following Lent.’ The mural was done on the southern wall of the cemetery. Inside the wall was a cloister; above the cloister, charnel houses were built. The cemetery doubled as a marketplace, and the cloister and charnel houses were frequented by Parisians en promenade” (Montague).
Accompanying the mural were hortatory inscriptions, neither of which can be attributed to any particular artist or author. It is believed that the mural was created before the text, which was added later to clarify the meaning of the pictures. “Naturally this does not exclude the possibility that the poet who expounded the paintings may have known earlier poems on the subject of the inevitability of death, and may have made use of such poems in his stanzas” (Clarke, 90), such as the Vadomori. The mural, along with the inscriptions, was destroyed in 1786, however, a relatively faithful reproduction was made in book form.
In the Bibliothèque Nationale there are two manuscript copies of the verses which accompanied it. And, in 1485, the Paris printer Guyot Marchant published the Danse Macabre, the first known book to contain a representation of the Dance of Death. The artist and the cutter of the illustrations are unknown, and the book itself does not claim to be a copy of the painting at the Innocents. But the verses in the book correspond to those in the manuscripts at the Bibliothèque and are therefore the same as those painted at the Innocents. The woodcuts, in all but a few minor instances, conform perfectly to the text, so it is likely that they are renditions of the scenes on the cemetery wall. For the purpose of making the Dance suitable to book form, Marchant presented only four figures on each page; however, to imagine the mural at the Innocents, one must picture a continual procession. (Montague)(7)
However, those authorities who would like to place the origins of the Dance in France ought to consider evidence other than the mural at the Innocents. Amy Turner Montague, in her essay on the Dance of Death, claims that the earliest records of a Dance was a dramatic piece, performed in 1393 at a church in Caudebec, Normandy, according to a document from the church archives. Unfortunately, the document no longer exists “but the abbot Miette derived the following from it: ‘The actors represented all levels of society, from the sceptre to the shepherd’s crook. One by one they departed, to show that each man comes to his end, the king in the same manner as the shepherd. This dance… is none other than the famous danse macabre.’” (Montague).
Strangely, the belief that the origin of the Dance of Death was actually a dance, a rather unpopular one, although there is evidence to support this theory. Sachs, in his book on dance, suggests that the danse macabre might have its roots in stories in which people are cursed to dance until they drop dead. Starting in the eleventh century, there were increasing cases of dance manias, which took place during festivals or on days during which someone died. People would “begin suddenly and irresistibly to sing and dance in the churchyard, disturb divine service, refuse to stop at the priest’s bidding” (251). Cursed to dance as a result of their disrespectful behavior, they continue until the ban is removed by the archbishop.(8) “This is the gruesome motif of the dance curse which Hans Christian Andersen in his popular fairy tale [“The Red Shoes”] has fashioned into the story of the little Karen, who cannot find rest until the executioner has cut off her feet” (252).
Curses aside, this phenomenon of the dance manias was a verifiable event. Sachs suggests that groups of people, frazzled and distraught by war, plague and various misfortunes, would wander from place to place. Holding hands or not, they would “circle and jump in hideously distorted choral dances – for hours at a time, until they collapse[d] foaming at the mouth” (253-254). Spectators would join in the dance as if compelled. These manias would continue for months despite the attempts of priests and medical men to intervene.(9) There were occurrences of this phenomenon again from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries.
Eventually the dancers were to be found in their trance-like state in the cemeteries. Sachs suggests that the dancers sought to commune with their dead, out of superstition, a literal danse macabre. “For in Arabic kabr means ‘grave,’ mákbara, ‘churchyard,’ and makâbr, ‘churchyards.’ There can no longer be any doubt that the name has come from the Arabic, since we know that one of roots of the dance of death goes back to the Arabs” (252).(10)
For a long time “the ecclesiastical councils opposed these obscoeni motus, saltationes seu choreae (obscene dances) in church and churchyard – each time the evil was to be rooted out, and each time the attempt failed” (Sachs, 252). Dancing in itself was problematic for the church, and this type of uncontrolled, frenzied dancing was extremely suspicious. At the same time that this frenzied dancing grew in frequency, so did witchcraft,
which was encouraged by closely related phenomena such as the frenzies of the flagellants (11) and the dancers. Far from diminishing after the first shock of the Black Death of 1347-1349 had worn off, these psychic epidemics increased in numbers and frenzy as the fourteenth century went on, an indication of widespread “social and cultural maladjustment.” These movements, which swept the Low Countries, Germany and northern France in 1347 and continued at least until 1420, were more than responses to plagues and famines; they were manifestations of the misery and fear caused by uncontrollable and unpredictable change in a Christian society in which change was not valued. (Russell, 200-1)
One of these responses to continuous plagues and famines was that eventually “death also informed the iconography which could be ‘read’ by the common people, those who did not understand Latin and the illiterate, and, of course, poets and playwrights. The Three Living and the Three Dead …, the Ars Moriendi, and the Dances of Death were popular imagery especially after the invention of printing” (Dubruck, 299).
Still, murals were the commonest form of the Dance of Death in the fifteenth century. There were close to one hundred Dances, most of which have been lost.(12) Most of those Dances painted in what became Protestant Europe were either destroyed, or simply covered over with whitewash or plaster. In Catholic Europe, the murals “suffered from the prejudice of the Age of Enlightenment and the rebuilding zeal of the Rococco period. The Middle Ages were regarded as an age of darkness and barbarism, and wall paintings of that period were held in scant esteem. What was spared by destruction decayed as a result of neglect, since constant renovation is required for mural paintings” (Clarke, 4).
Of what remains of the Dance today, the most famous visual depiction is Hans Holbein the younger’s series of 42 engravings, known as the Totentanz. But, “today the Dance of Death is best-known through the musical interpretations of Franz Liszt’s Totentanz (1849) and Saint-Saëns’ Danse macabre (1874); while Modest Mussorgsky’s A Night on Bare Mountain formed the score for a stunning visual animation of the dance in the 1950 Walt Disney film, Fantasia” (Howarth, 135), not to mention other representations which can be found in the poems of Goethe or Walter Scott, or Bergmen’s 1956 film, The Seventh Seal, to name but a few.
It is interesting to note that Liszt’s Totentanz was inspired by the frescoes in the Campo Santo in Pisa, either in 1838 or 1839. While he was looking at them, as he reported later to his biographer Lina Ramann, “the music of the hymn Dies Irae came into his mind and his composition Danse macabre took shape. This work, vast in conception and revolutionary in technique, has always been considered one of Liszt’s most remarkable pianoforte productions. It is the most outstanding performance relating to the Dance of Death in the musical sphere” (Clarke, 57). This fresco is a Trionfo della Morte, artist unknown, created around 1530.
Death is shown, not as an airy skeleton, as was usually the case before the Black Death, but rather, as a horrible old woman cloaked in black, with wild, snakelike hair, bulging eyes, clawed feet with talons, and a scythe to collect her victims, whom she feeds to snakes and toads. Death was like a bird of prey, sweeping down on its victims. A similar scene by Orcagni at St. Croce in Florence, shows several corpses plus a few miserable creatures, half alive, vainly imploring Death to take them and end their suffering. (Gottfried, 91)
Although these depictions of the Trionfo were painted during the Cinquecento, “The earliest traces of this conception may be found [during the Middle Ages] in Dante and Petrarch” (Herbermann).
Regarding the macabre, Italians prefer the visual arts over the dramatic arts. “Il ‘Trionfo della Morte’ e l’‘Incontro dei Tre Vivi e dei Tre Morti’ appaiono maggiormente diffusi in Italia, mentre la ‘Danza Macabra’ è maggiormente rappresentata in Francia” (Cerchio, 90) The pictorial form of the Dance, altered however, to suit their taste, was still popular with the Italian people. Also, in contrast to the Spanish, “the poem had little attraction for them. One isolated example is the Ballo de la morte, the manuscript of which is in the Riccardiana Library at Florence. It was edited by Vigo, the historian of the Dance of Death in Italy, who allots it to the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century” (Clarke, 58). It is interesting to note that Clarke, after having denied the connection between the Dance and the Vadomori, admits that “the Italian Ballo de la Morte begins with two lines that may have been taken direct from the Vadomori” (102).
The Trionfo della morte in Pisa, with its depiction of a horrible death, is one of the best examples of the changes in art due to the plague. “Preplague Tuscan art was warm and sympathetic. It stressed personal relationships and, when it dealt with religious themes, emphasized the humility of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and the saints. Postplague art, like postplague thought and funerary monuments, was obsessed with the most gruesome aspects of pain, and with the image of death” (Gottfried, 91) After 1347, new plague imagery was created by the artists but they also turned to preexisting themes such as the Trionfo della morte and the Madonna della Misericordia, adopting and adapting them as subjects, and thus, the old themes “became imbued with new meanings” (Boeckl, 45).
This flexibility of the Italian artists to adapt themes can also be seen: “Nella Danza Macabra di Pinzolo, ad esempio, sono puntualmente raffigurati i setti vizi capitali e nella Danza Macabra di Clusone ritroviamo i sette vizi e le virtù” (Cerchio, n.98), both of which are located in northern Italy, as are the other Italian Dances. It is not surprising “that all the Italian examples are to be found in the North, which was more open to the transalpine influences than the centre and the south of the peninsula” (Clarke, 51), considering the popularity of the dance in nearby France and Germany.
As popular as the visual forms were, while groups danced themselves into a frenzy in churchyards to the North, a similar form of dance mania, tarantism, took place in Italy from the Middle Ages on into the eighteenth century. Also, it has been noted that there is a record of the dramatic form of the Dance which took place in Florence in 1433, during a carnival procession arranged by Piero di Cosimo:
A huge wagon drawn by oxen rumbled along, quite black and painted over with skulls and crossbones and white crosses; upon it stood death with his scythe, surrounded by covered graves. From time to time the procession halted, there was a dull blast of a trumpet, the graves opened, the dead arose; they were men in black clothes on which the outline of a skeleton was painted, and sat down on the edges of the graves and sang. The song began ‘Dolor, piánto, e peniténzia’… and further on the following verses occurred:
Morti siam: come vedete:
così morti vedrem voi;
fummo già come voi sete,
voi sarete come noi. (Nohl, 256)
Traces of the dance can also be seen today not only during carnival celebrations throughout the peninsula, but also in Palermo, where the Abballu di li diaboli (the Devils’ dance) takes place once a year on Easter Sunday. Death, flanked by devils, roams the streets, shooting randomly at people with a sort of crossbow, who then must give a monetary contribution to the devils, which then affords a repeat of the dance the following year.
There are two general beliefs about the plague in regards to the Dance of Death: either the Dance was a direct consequence of the plague or it was not. One of the few authorities who denies the Dance as being a result of the plague is Boeckl. Her argument is that people were already greatly preoccupied with death before the outbreak of the Black Death. The evidence of this fact was that death already existed as a topos before 1347 in the forms previously mentioned. “Thus, the cause of this fascination with the macabre before the outbreak of bubonic (and pneumonic) plague remains in part an enigma” (69). She then insists that it’s necessary to examine death imagery as it “seems less related to actual events than to the then current theological debate on eschatology. It is my contention that the Trecento’s increased fixation on ‘memento mori’ was based primarily on doctrinal revisions concerning heaven and hell” (69).
Therefore, she proposes “that death imagery, the transi, and even the danse macabre were not initiated by the frightening experiences of bubonic plague. A number of authors, in addition to myself, attest that depression was not necessarily the psychological response of the survivors who commissioned works of art after the passing of a cataclysmic event” (158). What follows this statement is a less than convincing argument.(13)
It is undeniable that there were significant cultural changes after the Black Death. As already noted, in art it was particularly evident. “The Black Death and the various outbreaks of plague have found a staggering, graphic expression in ‘dance of death’ pictures and engravings and in the numerous ‘Icones Mortis.’ A ‘dance of death’ representation’ was possessed practically by every large town” (Nohl, 37). One example, which has survived to the present day is the Great Basle Dance of Death, which was commissioned by the Church Fathers assembled there after the plague which has struck the area and killed many people. Painted with oil colors in the cemetery of the Predicant Church, either in 1439 or 1441, “‘it was to illustrate in the most emphatic manner the uncertainty of human life….’ At the same time in numerous other towns and countries Dances of Death were executed, just as poetry again and again selected as its theme the transitory nature of human life” (Nohl, 130).
In fact, to understand the mood of late fourteenth and fifteenth century people, it is necessary to consider the psychological effects of “the new omnipresence of plague and the possibility of sudden, painful death. In the High Middle Ages, an era of expansion and fruition, literature and art expressed a buoyant optimism. After the Black Death, this was replaced by a pervasive pessimism” (Gottfried, 89). In the Middle Ages, before the Black Death,
people accepted the inevitability of death and prepared for it, but they were rarely preoccupied with it. Burials were often in common graves, and elaborate tombs were rather rare. The Black Death changed all this. Funerals became festivals, the greatest event of a lifetime. […] Funerary monuments were comparatively scarce before the Black Death, even among the nobility. In England, when they were used, funereal brasses usually showed a lord and his lady bedecked in all their finery. After the plague, funerary monuments and death masks became common, and their themes changed. Many brasses showed shrouded, macabre corpses or skeletons with snakes and serpents surrounding and protruding from their bones; on their faces were grisly, toothy smiles. Tombs in the Netherlands showed hideous images of naked corpses with tightly clenched hands, rigid feet, gaping mouths, and bowels filled with worms. In Germany, woodcuts called ‘The Art of Dying’ appeared. They were linked panels showing the drama of death. Death was painful – in contrast to the peaceful slumber of years past – and people were to tremble at its coming. All this marked the appearance of the ars moriendi, the cadaver and death as a major motif in art and literature.” (Gottfried, 89-90)
Also common were the Christian mystery plays which generally depicted “human decay and the torments of hell” (Gottfried, 93). At the same time, mostly in calendars, the different stages of life were represented “with analogies drawn to the seasons of the year. In the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the calendars emphasized spring and summer; in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, they turned to themes of autumn and winter” (Gottfried, 93-94).
Psychologically speaking, the Dances and the dance manias “represent a more or less violent reaction of the enormous mass of sentiments which had accumulated in the deeply impressed minds of individuals during the time of the Black Plague” (Nohl, 256). After 1347, death was no longer considered the gentle guide of souls waiting for the resurrection, as viewed by Saint Francis of Assisi who referred to death as a “sister,” or in the form of the ferryman Charon on the river Styx. Fears of the plague-stricken and death became horror, and there was a sense that “life itself was a desperate battle against death’s dominion... Many historians have noted the changed image of death in late medieval literature and art. It becomes a ravishing monster, the master of a dance in which all must join” (Herlihy, 63).
However, some scholars take the middle road. David Herlihy, who wrote a book about the Black Death, eloquently states that “the plagues touched every aspect of social life, but in doing so they became intertwined with every other social influence. From the matrix of forces shaping the late medieval world, it is impossible to factor out those attributable to the plague alone” (19). Paul Binski, writing about Medieval death rituals, says the macabre existed before but “the most influential exogenous theory holds that the macabre was reinforced by late-medieval demographic disaster, most especially the Black Death … and subsequent recurrences of the plague” (126-7). Philip Ziegler also agrees in his book about the Black Death, quoting Émile Mâle who wrote that, before the mid-fourteenth century, religious art was made to inspire the viewers with love, hope, and compassion. By the fifteenth century, this is no longer the case. The majority of fifteenth-century art is “‘sombre and tragic. Art offers only a representation of grief and death.’ Yet Mâle saw this evolution at its most rapid in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, the fruit not of the plague itself but of the great wave of terror and dismay which engulfed Europe even after the plague passed.” (276).
Dubruck also takes another factor into consideration, as well: the Great Schism. Both the Schism of the Church and the Black Death caused a shift in the mentality of the European people who had lived through these events. Before these events, the idea that death was something that could be learned, as illustrated by the ars moriendi, was a popular belief. However, in the fifteenth century, “people at large seemed uncertain about the end of humankind’s existence, for which the clergy was no longer capable of preparing its flock. In historiography, death was first treated factually, sometimes personified, while later different groups were blamed for mass destruction by the plague (Jews, flagellants)” (295). (14)
No matter what its origins, the basic message of the Dance is simple. On an allegorical level, the Dance is death, and to join the dance signifies to die. The theme of the dance is that all men are equal in death, “with the further conclusion that man must repent before it is too late” (Clarke, 105). The purpose of the Dance was to demonstrate the fact that everyone must die and therefore should prepare for the final Judgement. Although it must have pleased the common man to see those of higher status reduced to his level, clearly “non faticherà a ritrovare e identificare se stesso fra la vasta gamma dei personaggi, delle maschere sociali e morali, ciascuna accompagnata dal proprio doppio scheletrico” (Cerchio, 97).
These themes of Death as a leveler, and meditation on death as a means to a better life leave little doubt that the original purpose of the Dance was religiously didactic. It has been noted that “this meditation on death is similar to certain devotional practices associated with Christ’s Passion. The relationship between the Dance and the Passion is actual: Crucifixion representations are found in the center of the Dance of Death paintings at both Kleinbasel and Berne” (Montague), as well as other churches in various European countries.
Not only during the drama does the Dance begin and end with a sermon, but “many of the picture cycles begin or end with the preacher in his pulpit” (Clarke, 94). In the Dance, Death did not appear as a monster who triumphed by ruthlessly destroying all mankind as in other forms of the macabre, “but as the messenger of God summoning men to the world beyond the grave, a conception familiar both to the Holy Bible and to the ancient poets” (Herbermann).
However, the Church Fathers’ intentions to inspire repentance might have backfired at some point as the Dance became transformed from the didactic into something more transgressive.
The experience incorporated in these graphic representations (of the Dance of Death) is the equality of all men in the face of death, an experience of all the greater import as, not only did it shake the foundations of the rigid system of mediæval castes, but produced the consciousness of the equality of all men before the face of God – that consciousness which led up to the Reformation. If prior to this the higher estimation of the great had been sustained by the ostentatious show of their obsequies and the innumerable masses said for their souls, this deception failed now that even bishops and prelates frequently remained unburied and their corpses became the food of dogs. (Nohl, 37)
It is possible that for the Church, the Dance had, in part, evolved from mystery plays performed to educated the laity. But if the friars had originally controlled the Dance and its message, by the fifteenth century this was no longer the case. “Other circles had adopted it and modified it to suit their own purposes. It was painted on the walls of parish churches and cathedrals, reproduced in books of devotion. When transplanted into these new surroundings it quickly lost much of its ascetic and didactic character” (Clarke, 105). The Dance of Death then became “a theatrical piece of vaudeville whose strength derives from its parodic acknowledgement of emerging social norms and conventions and its picaresque inversion of those norms, of decorous rest and disciplined display” (Binski, 156).
Perhaps one of the best examples of the Dance as parody might be las calaveras of José Guadalupe Posada (famous for his quote “La muerte es democrática”), in whose work those in the highest strata of society are subjected to the same fate as those in the lowest.
Now beyond the control of the friars, it is not difficult to imagine how the Dance lost the Church’s approval, especially since dancing itself was often condemned. Dancing itself “was sensual and was tied in closely with music associated with seduction; in one longstanding Christian moral view, dance and music possess an erotic undertone. Dancing was a vehicle for the vices, and in the Dance of Death music and dance act as forms of seduction and so deceit” (Binski, 155). The theme of the dance was no longer a simple call to repent. Binski suggests that, at a primitive level, the Dance
challenges the sacred notion of the dead at rest validated by the Requiem Mass of the funeral service…. Since the earliest examples of the tableau of the Dance accompanied cemeteries of charnels, the image too offered a subversive comment on the Church’s frequent prohibitions on dancing in churchyards, enacted at Rouen in 1231 and again at Basle in 1435; a reminder that consecrated ground tended to attract vulgar activities which vigorously asserted the principal of life ... The Dance was a vigorous piece of taboo-breaking, connecting ritually purified spaces to the signs of fallen human nature in the world and all its worldliness. (154-5)
One final explanation of the Dance which has been gaining popularity is that those who participate in the Dance, the living and the dead, do not represent types but individuals, and that “they do not signify death in the abstract, but the dead” (Clarke, 106). This interpretation takes into account the medieval superstition that the dead are capable of rising from their graves on occasion and dance. While they dance, the living are drawn into their circle, with the consequence of later suffering sickness or even death. This superstition may have left its trace on some versions of the Dance, but it does not explain the Parisian danse macabre at the Innocents.
The Dance of Death was an important part of the macabre movement, traces of which may be seen before the Black Death, but it was not until after the Black Death that the psychological state of the people with their fear of sickness and sudden death made them more receptive to the macabre and it was able to develop into a full fledged movement. Sigmund Freud claimed that humans are driven by two instincts which he calls Thanatos (the death instinct) and Eros (the life instinct). The Dance, in a way, is the visualization of this theory, the battle between life and death. The end is always the same, however: death will come for each of us. Since we all must go to our graves, perhaps the moral of the Dance is that, instead of fighting and kicking and screaming uselessly, it would be best to go dancing.
Notes
(1)“This legend appeared in the second half of the twelfth century: three cadavers or skeletons meet three young men (princes?) in the forest, and each addresses one of the living. The predominant themes of the encounter are: Vos eritis qui nos sumus (you will be what we are) and also, ubi sunt qui ante nos fuere? (where are those who lived before us?)… The legend seemed to attenuate monastic asceticism in favor of a new valuation of the body and life” (Dubruck 311).
(2) “In such tombs, which came into being around 1400, a dichotomy is commonly, though not universally, established between the representation of the dead in their full social station, as complete, perfected representatives of a particular class or group in a state of timeless repose, and their representation as a corpse, naked or shrouded, in various stages of composition” (Binski 139). For a detailed discussion on the transi tombs, see Binski, pp139-152.
(3) Binski makes an interesting point about the difference between the movements of the “living” dancers and the “dead” dancers. The living move with the restrained and cautious steps of courtly dancers, while the dead dance with the enthusiastic high kicks of plebian ring dancers. “The Dance of Death is thus at one level a tableau of class norms,” Binski writes, and “the dead by virtue of their movement are another order, another class” (156).
(4) Cerchio has an interesting comment: “…in numerose Danze Macabre, gli scheletri siano muniti di strumenti musicali particolarmente fragorosi – tamburi e trombe specialmente. La tromba e il tamburo sono strumenti ambivalenti che possono contrassegnare sia la nascita, sia la morte. Essi uniscono al simbolismo sonoro quello del soffio (tromba) e quello della vibrazione (tamburo). Come strumento di distruzione, la tromba è ricorrente in varie immagini del Vecchio e del Nuovo Testamento… oppure a quelle dell’Apocalisse. Il tamburo, emblema del movimento ritmico e del trascorrere del tempo, scandisce tanto la fase creativa quanto quella distruttiva dell’attività cosmica” (107).
(5) Clarke also gives this example: “When Friar Dietrich Coelde was engaged in putting an end to the deadly feud between the Hoeks and the Kabbeljaus at Amsterdam, he produced two skulls and asked the audience if they recognized to what parties the dead men had belonged” (94).
(6) “The Dança general de la Muerte differs from the French danse macabre in that there is a reprimand of Death, who in turn launches a scathing and relentless criticism against all strata of society. The democratic aspect of the work is also shown by its indicting the powerful and the weak” (Stayer 86). Also, woodcuts and pictorial representations of the Dance in Spain are unknown. “Extant are two Dances, the Dança general (Escurial Library MS b IV, fols. 109r-129r) and its offshoot, the Dança de la muerte (publ. 1520, 136 stanzas, fifty-eight participants), both processional. The manuscripts are of the fifteenth century, and the originals (lost) in Latin or Catalan may go back to the fourteenth. The Dança general consists of seventy-nine stanzas and thirty-three personages, of whom twenty-two are also in the Paris Dance, while eleven reflect Spanish life. The Dança general features death personified and sporting various attributes: bow and arrow, nets, a saw, a trumpet, a (fishing) hook. The themes of these two texts are: death as leveler and as sudden attacker, causing terror; they preach vanitas, vanitatum and the decomposition of the body” (Dubruck 307).
(7) “The popularity of the Dance in book form was great; one year after Marchant’s first printing, he reprinted the book and published a similar work, the Danse Macabre des Femmes” (Montague). Almost all manuscripts of the women’s Dances are from the fifteenth century.
(8) Russell also writes of this phenomenon of the dance manias: “This movement was reflected in the more grotesque dances of death that passed into art and literature….The great outbreak of the dancers occurred in 1347. Some dance stories seem to be moral exempla rather than actual fact. At Utrecht in 1278 (Hecker, p.153), two hundred dancers are said to have danced on a bridge over the Moselle until it collapsed and they drowned; but this is similar to the famous account of the dancers of Kolbig (Hecker, pp. 153-154), who in 1021, unheeding the pleas of the priest to stop their revels, were forced supernaturally to continue their dance for a full year without ceasing” (320).
(9) “Though these [dance manias] proliferated after the plagues of the next century, they commenced early in the thirteenth. At Erfurt in 1237 more than a hundred children attempted to jump and dance all the way to Armstadt, and many were killed. The mania was a reality. By the end of the thirteenth century the dance of death began to be a popular moral theme in art and literature and reached its height in the fifteenth century along with the obsession with grisly memento mori. Though the danse macabre was originally a dance of the dead, it soon became a dance of living people who were reminded of the nearness of death and the vanity of the world. In the typical dance-of-death story, revelers would be checked in the midst of their dance by the appearance of a spectral figure which caused them to stop still in terror and grief” (Russell 136-7).
(10) The etymology of the word “macabre” is uncertain, although Sachs is not the only author who supports the idea that the word may be Arabic in origin. “Esso potrebbe secondo alcuni derivare dal nome di un artista medioevale, mentre alcuni studi più recenti tenderebbero a delineare due ipotesi principali. Secondo la prima, l’aggettivo rimanderebbe al libro dei Maccabei in cui viene ricordato il martirio dei sette fratelli, figli di Felicita, e i riti funebri celebrati in loro onore. Il libro dei Maccabei ha, nella tradizione cristiana, un particolare rilievo per quanto concerne gli insegnamenti relativi al culto dei morti. L’altra ipotesi lo fa invece risalire all’arabo ‘maqbara’ (tomba) o ‘maqâbir’ (cimitero) e all’equivalente ebraico ‘meqaber’” (Cerchio 89). A more amusing version of now the danse macabre got its name, although it sounds less like a plausible theory and more like an urban legend, is to be found in Nohl’s book: “In France in the fifteenth century the diseases which were supposed to be prowling about as phantasms were to be scared away by the still uglier masks of the danse macabre: ‘An adventurer of the name of Maccaber, probably of Scottish origin, accompanied the English who in 1424 flooded France, came to Paris and quartered himself in a very ancient tower, which probably dated from Roman times, in the vicinity of a chapel, round which a cemetery had been established. The Maccaber, who is described as being half a skeleton, seems to have produced a great impression on the popular imagination; and supernatural powers were attributed to him. But his reputation increased particularly when, in 1424, he instituted a pantomime, i.e. an ecclesiastic procession, which was repeated for several months – this was called afterwards Maccaber Dance (Danse Macabre) – or Dance of Death. An infinite number of men and women of all ages were invited to dance by a figure representing death, and the dance took place in the cemetery where the inventor had his quarters. This gruesome entertainment lasted from August 1424 till 1425; the number of participants and spectators increased daily. The churches remained empty, and the English, especially the Duke of Bedford, were not the last to take part in the spectral performance. The entertainment then ceased, but was revived in 1429” (255-56).
(11) In it striking to note certain similarities among the flagellants and the Dances. Herlihy writes: “Processions of men through cities, scourging themselves in expiation of their own sins and those of society, were not unprecedented in the history of medieval piety. A similar movement, called the ‘Great Alleluia,’ had swept through the cities of Italy in 1260. But the Black Death gave the practice unprecedented dimensions… The bands marched from town to town, sleeping outdoors as part of their penance. At the central squares, the leader preached repentance. The marchers sang hymns and performed a kind of ritual dance. At its climax they fell to the earth and took positions indicating the types of sins they had committed – usury, perjury, adultery, murder. They then stripped to the waist and whipped themselves with knotted cords. After this discipline, they donned their clothes and marched on. It was all dramatic theater” (italics mine) (67-8).
(12) “Of those which have been preserved the most celebrated are those of Lubeck, Basle, Berne, Strasbourg, Minden, Paris, Dijon, and London” (Nohl 37).
(13) Boeckl’s argument is that “religious art produced in catastrophic times was cathartic, was far from expressing negative feelings, and in effect restored hope to people and helped them overcome the ravages of an epidemic without lasting psychological damage” (159). First, surviving an event as catastrophic as the Black Death without psychological damage seems more than unlikely. Second, it is difficult to interpret the Dance of Death as an effort to restore hope, when the message is essentially that everyone is going to die. Portraying death as a ravishing monster, human bodies in various stages of dying and decay, in my opinion, may be considered “expressing negative feelings” about death.
(14) Polzer also makes some interesting comments about the origins and influences which led to the full-blown movement of the macabre. “The view largely prevails that the extreme and indiscriminate mortality of the Black Death influenced the late medieval preoccupation with natural death. This is unquestionable. However, in the light of the Christian alternative, which considers death the gateway to eternal life, the extent and character of this nexus remain to be more closely studied, as it bears on reason and the search for rational cause and control, on faith and the fatalistic acceptance of God’s wrath, and on the fascination with natural death and decay which, as we shall see, was gathering momentum before the Black Death struck” (107). Also, of interest: “Death is a perpetual human dilemma. An intensifying preoccupation with natural death and decay is evident in the later Middle Ages. This intensified concern with natural death can be considered a by-product of a remarkable late medieval prosperity which gave rise to the growth of the towns and the democratization of religious devotion. Monumental urban cemeteries were then prepared to collect the dead and cleanse important civic precincts of graves in the path of ordered urban growth. These cemeteries were given the shape of cloisters; they were attached to funerary chapels or churches; and they were given decoration to suit their function” (123,126).
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