A Matter of Life and Death: Forms, Functions and Audiences for ‘The Three Living and the Three Dead’ in Late Medieval Manuscripts

This dissertation examines approaches to illustrating the Three Living and the Three Dead, a moralizing tale known across Europe in the late Middle Ages. Illustrated versions of the texts survive in a number of different manuscript contexts. While the earliest depictions show an apparently benign conversation occurring between living and dead, by the late fifteenth century other ways of illustrating the tale had emerged. The most striking of these was the aggressive chase after the living by the dead, which most often accompanied the prayers of the Office of the Dead in Books of Hours. While previous art historical investigations have concentrated on localization, chronology, as well as stylistic and formal analyses, my project engages with the larger questions of function, audience, and the relationship between text and image. The thesis begins by situating the Three Living and the Three Dead in the scholarship on the art of death of the late Middle Ages. The art of that period has long been perceived as a reflection of a time of decline. This perspective was established mainly through consideration of large-scale monuments, mostly French and primarily displayed in public, funerary contexts. I expand the discussion to include small scale, private devotional images of death, and demonstrate that such images could serve practical and positive functions for their users. The wide range of possibilities for illustrating the story in its early history is established in chapter 2. This overview is followed by a series of chapters that offer close examinations of individual manuscripts and establish the functions that the Three Living and the Three Dead served for their original users. In sum, my project sheds light on the importance of the imagery of death and more specifically of the Three Living and the Three Dead in late medieval culture. It contributes to our understanding of a story that became popular across Europe in a variety of forms in response to the context in which it appeared, the function it was intended to serve and the audience for which it was intended.