These images can be as bizarre and confusing as they are disturbing. Not only are these illustrations thematically horrifying, but their depictions of decaying flesh can be quite vivid and gruesome in their own imaginative way despite medieval art’s lack of emphasis on naturalistic representation. A scene from a mid-fifteenth-century French book of hours shows angels and a demon battling for the soul of a dead man lying in an open grave. Skulls, skeletons, re-animated corpses, grim reapers, and apocalyptic horsemen all made frequent appearances, sometimes rising from the grave or terrorizing the living with weapons in hand.
While such scenes included more than a few unsentimental and un-idealized images of the dead, they were otherwise relatively innocuous, but many other common illustrations could be quite the opposite. Since the Office of the Dead was performed at funerals, depictions of the various stages of Christian funerary services – last rites, the funeral mass, the burial, and praying mourners or clergymen– frequently accompanied these prayers in illuminated manuscripts. 1 It may also be included in another, related type of devotional book – the Psalter. A series of prayers for the souls of the deceased, the Office of the Dead can be found in collections of prayers called books of hours.
The first and best place to look for your recommended dose of medieval-inspired Halloween spirit is the Office of the Dead.
#Medieval illuminations demon leaving movie#
Those things are stuffy and deeply religious, right? It would just be silly to look for anything creepy there, wouldn’t it? Not so fast! Lurking inside these pious tomes are a surprising selection of terrors in a sufficiently wide variety to satisfy the average horror movie fan or haunted house aficionado. Those looking for an enjoyable scare for the Halloween season are unlikely to seek one out in a European medieval manuscript.
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