interdict strictly as being contrary to the Christian religion. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when a prince or a person of rank died far from his country, the body was often cut up and boiled so as to extract the bones, which were sent home in a chest, whereas the rest was interred, not without ceremony, however, on the spot. Emperors, kings and bishops have undergone this strange operation. Pope Boniface VIII forbade it as detestandae feritatis abusus, quam ex quodam more horribili nonnulli fideles improvide prosequuntur.[1] Yet his successors sometimes granted dispensations. Numbers of Englishmen who fell in France in the Hundred Years' War enjoyed this privilege, notably Edward of York and the earl of Suffolk, who died at Agincourt; Henry V himself; William Glasdale, who perished at Orleans at the time of its relief; a nephew of Sir John Fastolfe, and others.
At the close of the Middle Ages the whole vision of death may be summed up in the word macabre, in its modern meaning. Of course, this meaning is the outcome of a long process. But the sentiment it embodies, of something gruesome and dismal, is precisely the conception of death which arose during the last centuries of the Middle Ages. This bizarre word appeared in French in the fourteenth century, under the form macabré, and, whatever may be its etymology, as a proper name. A line of the poet Jean Le Fèvre, "Je fis de Macabré la dance,” which may be dated 1376, remains the birth-certificate of the word for us.
Towards 1400 the conception of death in art and literature took a spectral and fantastic shape. A new and vivid shudder was added to the great primitive horror of death. The macabre vision arose from deep psychological strata of fear; religious thought at once reduced it to a means of moral exhortation. As such it was a great cultural idea, till in its turn it went out of fashion, lingering on in epitaphs and symbols in village cemeteries.
The idea of the death-dance is the central point of a whole group of connected conceptions. The priority belongs to the motif of the three dead and three living men, which is found
- ↑ An abuse of abominable savagery, practised by some of the faithful in a horrible way and inconsiderately.
