The Art of Dying: Heaven, Hell, and Dying Well - Images of Death in the Middle Ages

In the early thirteenth century, Bishop Huge of Lincoln paid a visit to the abbey of Fécamp in Normandy. Ostensibly at least, his purpose was to venerate the relic of Mary Magdalene, a prized possession of the monks. Bishop Huge was not allowed to see the Magdalene’s bone itself. The limb was wrapped up in cloth. Out of his great religious fervor, however, the good bishop surreptitiously took out a knife and cut through the wrapping. After failing in his attempt to break the bone, he tried to bite off a piece of the saint, first with his incisors and finally, the report goes, with his molars. The molars did the trick. The bishop went home to Lincoln with a small mouthful of the saint for his cathedral.

The presence of what the great historian of early Christianity Peter Brown has called the “special dead” is only one way in which the Middle Ages thought about death. On the subject of death, the medieval imagination could be very resourceful. The current exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum succeeds admirably in proving this point.