Welcome to the Office of the Dead
Medieval manuscripts offer comfort after death
Initial D: A Skull in a Rocky Field, about 1469, Taddeo Crivelli. Tempera colors, gold paint, gold leaf, and ink, Leaf, 4 1/4 × 3 1/8 in. Getty Museum, Ms. Ludwig IX 13, fol. 106, 83.ML.109.106
Body Content
What’s so spooky about religious texts? Plenty.
Let’s start with books of hours. These were Christian prayer books popular in the Middle Ages that contained hourly prayers to recite, including the Office of the Dead.
A Burial, about 1440–1450, Workshop of the Bedford Master. Tempera colors, gold leaf, gold paint, and ink, 9 1/4 × 6 7/16 in. Getty Museum Ms. Ludwig IX 6 (83.ML.102), fol. 133
The Office of the Dead contained a set of prayers that you’d recite for deceased loved ones.
By doing this, you’d decrease the amount of time your relatives would spend in purgatory.
Denise Poncher before a Vision of Death, about 1500, Master of the Chronique scandaleuse. Tempera colors, ink and gold on parchment, 5 1/4 × 3 7/16 in. Getty Museum, Ms. 109 (2011.40), fol. 156
By the late Middle Ages, personal prayer books or “books of hours” were extremely common. Poncher Hours is an unusual example of the degree to which books of hours could be highly personalized for the patron it was commissioned for—in this case, Denise Poncher, a young woman from an elite family whose father served as treasurer of wars for the French crown and whose uncle was bishop of Paris. Read more about the Poncher Hours here.
If you died and didn’t have any living relatives to recite these prayers for you…you were in for quite a long stay.
Typical imagery included funerals, burials, personifications of death as a skeleton or rotting corpses. And, if you could afford it, you could get yourself featured in your very own Office of the Dead, like Denise Poncher in an image from the Poncher Hours—her own personalized book of hours and office of the dead—above.
Office of the Dead, about 1510–1520, Master of James IV of Scotland. Tempera colors, gold, and ink, Leaf, 9 1/8 × 6 9/16 in. Getty Museum, Ms. Ludwig IX 18, fol. 185, 83.ML.114.185
These images and prayers were meant to remind people of death’s immediacy, but also to provide them with a sense of comfort if they followed the instructions and prayers in the Book of Hours.
For more Spooky content, head to Getty's Instagram to watch Macabre Minute with Mel. Or, learn more about Heaven, Hell, and Dying Well: Images of Death in the Middle Ages.
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