When the Muslims conquered al-Andalus, they found in the city of Qurṭuba [Córdoba] the ruins (‘athār) of a massive bridge that spanned the river, held on several arches of firm pillars, the work of the people of ancient civilizations now vanished, of which only traces remained (al-‘umam al-māḍīa al-dāthara lam yabqā minhā).

Mérida [Mérida] was one of the first places that the kings of the ‘ajm [non-Muslims] and the emperors before them chose to settle as […] a foundation on which to build. It was completed in the time of the Caesar Uktūbiyān [Octavian]. The first Caesar began it and the second Caesar completed it. The rulers visited frequently and renewed the monuments, excellently made, the decorations, and the astonishing marble. They were

When the forces of Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād crossed the Straits of Gibraltar in 711, followed a year later by those of Mūsā ibn Nuṣayr, the governor of North Africa appointed by the caliph in Damascus, they found all around them the material traces of Roman and Visigothic Hispania. In Córdoba, Roman walls, gates, and streets formed the template of the new capital. Visigothic buildings abutting the southern wall of the city served as the palace and administrative centre of the first Umayyad emir, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān I (756–788). The Great Mosque of Córdoba may have replaced a Visigothic basilica on the same site. Roman hydraulic systems were repaired to supply the garden palaces of Rusāfa, al-Rūmanīya, and Madīnat al-Zahrā’ outside Córdoba.

Introduction

For those who were sentenced to exile in the late Roman empire, the punishment entailed removal from their society, their families, and their polities. The penalty of exile was employed to demonstrate to the population as a whole that the behaviour for which the convicted were exiled was absolutely reprehensible. Exile entailed physical exclusion, social shame, and, therefore, a stigma that separated the person from the rest of society. It was not a physical brand but a social one. When the exiled person also had their property and assets partially or totally confiscated or forcibly transferred, they were demoted to a lower level in society, in both their places of origin and exile.

Exile as a judicial punishment, either as relegatio or banishment or as deportation to islands as specific destinations, was a very common practice in the late Roman empire. The barbarian kingdoms of the West also employed exile as a punishment for individuals who were found guilty of various crimes and offences. As in the case of the Roman empire, literary and legal sources constitute our main supply of information on this subject, which make possible numerous studies on exile in these societies.

Several important studies have focused on the extent of Roman influence on Visigothic legislation. However, fewer publications have analysed whether Visigothic kings from the reign of Euric (d. 484) until the end of the kingdom in 711 adopted or modified judicial exile as it existed in the late Roman and early Byzantine empires.

In August of 1858, a remarkable cache of early medieval gold crowns and crosses was discovered in Huertas de Guarrazar near Toledo. The fragments were immediately reassembled, found their way into private hands, and within just a few months most were sold to the French government. The acquisition was announced in Le Monde illustré on 12 February 1859 along with a brief description and illustration, and published more fully by Ferdinand de Lasteyrie in 1860 with a series of detailed colour engravings. The frontispiece of the publication featured this sumptuous ensemble and centred on the largest and most ornate of the crowns, that of the seventhcentury Visigothic king Recceswinth (r. 653–672), whose name is spelled out in Latin letters dangling from its lower edge. (See Figure 5.1.)

Meanwhile in Spain, diplomatic efforts were underway to repatriate the works. Since the initial announcement of the French acquisition, the Spanish government made valiant efforts to nullify the sale and have the pieces returned. In addition, excavations were carried out at the original site of the discovery. Led by José Amador de los Ríos, four further crowns were unearthed, including one naming another Visigothic king, Swinthila (r. 621–631), which was later stolen and has never been recovered. (See Figure 5.4.) In 1940 leaders of Spain and France ‘agreed to an exchange of national treasures’. Along with a Murillo painting of the Inmaculada (1678), the ancient Iberian sculpture known as La Dama de Elche, and archives from Salamanca, most, but not all, of the pieces of the Visigothic treasure were returned to Spain.

In the first third of the seventh century, a cleric from the ecclesiastical and monastic complex of St Eulalia, in Emerita (Mérida), in southwestern Hispania, felt it appropriate to note the Roman origin of one of the figures in the text that he was writing, the Lives of the Fathers of Mérida, a series of accounts of the lives of ecclesiastics from sixth-century Mérida. This anonymous hagiographer made explicit reference to the Roman origins of the dux Claudius, a military leader and governor in the service of the Gothic king Reccared (r. 586–601) in the province of Lusitania, stating that he was of noble lineage and had been born to Roman parents: ‘Idem vero Claudius nobili genere hortus Romanis fuit parentibus progenitus.’

The Mérida hagiographer's invocation of the Lusitanian dux's ‘Roman’ parentage is strikingly unique within the text, and his evident desire to underscore a figure's Roman heritage is more suggestive than it may seem. Given that the Iberian peninsula was (depending on the region) subject to Roman rule for more than half a millennium, we might expect to find a strong sense of Romanness among its inhabitants well into the post-Roman period. I will refer to ‘Romanness’ as a collective or individual consciousness of belonging to a Roman cultural tradition. Such tradition(s) could have been received through numerous ways, such as the persistence of Roman law, the memory of aristocratic families of Roman origins, and the cult of late Roman saints, among others.

An obvious point of departure when considering Byzantium and the Visigothic kingdom of Toulouse is the reign of Leovigild (568–586). In Edward Thompson's words, Leovigild ‘dressed himself “in royal raiment and seated himself upon a throne”. Hitherto the kings had worn much the same dress as their subjects, and had been accessible to all, like the old Germanic chieftains. But Leovigild surrounded the throne with something of Byzantine pomp, though the details of what he did are not recorded.’ The reign of Leovigild, however, will be my end point. I am interested in what the Visigothic court was like before Leovigild's reforms. This will take us to Toulouse rather than Toledo, and to the courts of western emperors rather than Byzantium. It will not take us to the dress of ‘old Germanic chieftains’.

Our image of the Visigothic court in the fifth century is largely derived from Sidonius's accounts of the courts of Theodoric II and Euric. Certainly this is the most vivid material. But there are several small anecdotes and snippets of information that add to his. For the reign of Athaulf there is Orosius's story of the Narbonnensian familiarissimus of the king, in which we learn that the king decided not to overthrow the empire, but rather to support it with Gothic arms. The story is clearly symbolic, and we do not need to believe the detail, but there was a Roman coterie surrounding Athaulf, Galla Placidia, and Attalus, including the senator Paulinus of Pella, although his view of Athaulf's reign is very much less happy.

Introduction

‘The city of Toledo was the first one founded in Hispania and all the Spanish cities were subject to it.’ Thus begins the short story of Octavianus, King of Hispania who ruled from Toledo, and his enemy Septemsiderus, preserved in the tenth-century codex of Roda. Octavianus, the story continues, summoned Septemsiderus who, for an unexplained reason, refused to obey the king's order. Preparations for war ensued. The two characters marshalled their armies to face each other in battle, but, as the clash neared, Septemsiderus halted his troops, raised his prayers to God, and Octavianus's forces were miraculously destroyed. The victor settled in Lugo, and his seven children founded eponymous cities in Galicia, Leon, and northern Portugal, a geographical focus that probably betrays the origin of the anonymous author.

This story, as Ann Christys has pointed out, must be set against the background of the ambiguous status of Toledo among Christian thinkers in the centuries following the Arab conquest. Although later Latin chronicles and histories would emphasize the connection between the Visigothic kingdom of Toledo and the early medieval Christian kingdoms, this association was far from established before the tenth century, when the story of Octavianus and Septemsiderus was probably written.

Now the aforementioned King Reccared, as we have said, took part in the holy council, recalling for our times how the princeps of old, Constantine the Great, enlightened the holy synod of Nicaea by his presence, as well as

Introduction

What distinguishes a kingdom from an empire? For a passing moment in the early fifth century Athaulf may have mused on converting Rome into a Gothic imperium, yet the realm ruled by his descendants from the late sixth to the early eighth called itself variously the ‘homeland’ or ‘kingdom of the Goths’ or the ‘kingdom of Hispania’, never an empire. Much about it was imperial, of course, in that capacious Roman sense: the provinces which its kings administered, the cities they founded, the laws they enacted as ‘prince’ and ‘Flavius’, their codes and coins, legations and letters, their votive crowns. As in the Donation of Constantine, where the emperor places a tiara upon the head of the pope to wear henceforth in all papal processions ‘in imitation of our imperial power’, Rome casts so long a shadow that too often what we mean by imitatio imperii is any such emulation of its symbols of authority. But can we go beyond—is there a beyond—symbolism?

Abstract: This chapter provides an overview of developments that gave rise to the two foundational subjects of this book, the Office of the Dead and the Book of Hours. The development of the Office of the Dead is traced through the establishment of an early Christian funeral rite, its formalization in the monastic context, and its later use in the secular community including its regular presence in the Book of Hours. The shape, use, and forms of engagement with the Book of Hours is also discussed.

Keywords: funeral liturgy, literacy, Book of Hours, ordo defunctorum

A delicately drawn miniature in a fifteenth-century French Bible manuscript depicts the moment after the fall with Adam and Eve standing by the Tree of Knowledge. Adam is choking and leans forward, holding his hands to his throat in distress. Eve, still holding the offending fruit in her hand, gazes thoughtfully down at an emaciated corpse, an image of death that reclines, grinning, at the foot of the tree. The view of the church was that death entered the world in direct consequence of the fall as one of the penalties paid by humanity for Adam's transgression, as was articulated in biblical texts such as Paul's letter to the Romans, which states starkly: ‘The wages of sin is death.’ Adam and Eve were cast out into a physically, morally, and spiritually corrupting world, in which death embodied our removal from the perfection of God's creation as it was intended to be.

There were two types of death, the spiritual and the physical. To the medieval mind, spiritual death – that is, the separation of the soul from God – was infinitely worse than a mere physical death. Physical death was in some ways viewed as a release from the earthbound life and from the prison of the sinful body to be united with God in heaven. Bernard of Clairvaux described the death of the saints as ‘precious’, for it was ‘the end of labours, the consummation of victory, the gate of life, and the entrance to perfect safety’. But of course, the average person was not a saint, and his or her ‘entrance to perfect safety’ was not assured.

Abstract: The ‘regular’, ‘repellent’, and ‘redemptive’ death images and their corresponding conceptual modes (social death, bodily death and non-death) provide a useful articulation of reoccurring themes present in the wide variety of images found in the Office of the Dead. This articulation draws out some of the fundamental ways we understand the world and death in it: through our relationships with one another, as occupants of a mortal coil, and in relationship to God. The three concepts of death explored here are not exclusive of one another but are found with endless variety and combination. The images support a hermeneutic process each time the reader returns to the images and continues the work of imaginative interpretation.

Keywords: medieval, ritual, identity, experience of death

Death is hard to understand. The word is used to describe many things: an event (a death), a post-life state of being (death), a community (the dead), and a villain with scythe in hand (Death). What is conveyed in these instances – a task that you do yourself, a state of being, a collective identity, an autonomous agent active in the world – are different facets of the complex of ideas that together comprise ‘death’. Our perceptions of these facets are subtly different (active versus passive, natural versus supernatural, solitary versus participatory, sudden versus expected, process versus event, concrete versus abstract, etc.), and how we interpret the nuance of each use of the word impacts how we respond to it. Medieval readers of the Office of the Dead engaged with the images and texts of the Office to explore these nuances, navigating through them to an understanding of death that would respond to their own situation and experience as well as to the broader devotional landscape.

It is not easily done. We cannot familiarize ourselves with the realities of our own death because we cannot experience it in advance. We can only get at this knowledge sideways, drawing on analogous experiences such as the death of a loved one or engaging with representations of death, textual and image-based such as those found in the Office of the Dead in Books of Hours. These tools give us access to deaths external to ourselves.

Abstract: This chapter focuses on variations of corpse imagery, including the shrouded and exposed corpse, the lively corpse, and the skeleton. As a group these images address reoccurring themes present in the visual and literary treatments of medieval bodily death: identity loss, agency, disruption, and time. In addressing these concepts through their impact on the body, these images encouraged readers of the Office to confront fundamental fears associated with physical dissolution.

Keywords: corpse and decay, identity, liturgy, memento mori, three living and the three dead, embodiment

It is likely that everyone has at some time in their lives bitten into an overripe fruit. Some may have been unlucky enough to have reached into the cupboard for a potato and to have felt fingers sinking into the malodorous blackened flesh of vegetable rot. Our reactions are swift – we spit out the rotten fruit and jerk back our potato-befouled fingers almost before we have time to think about it. Our response to rot is sensible: at home and at sea, as in our stomachs, rot can be dangerous, presaging sickness, disease, collapse, or founder. It is a charged term redolent with an instinctive disgust, revulsion, and even fear, particularly when it is applied to the dead human body.

The social death visualized in ‘regular’ death images constructs death through the environment of church and community. The processes for confronting social death in the late medieval period were well developed, but there remained a deep ambivalence about the physical nature of death and the accompanying, and inevitable, rot of the body. The concern for the fate of the body is reflected in the ‘repellent’ death images which depict subjects that confront the reader with the physical realities of death. They present an array of images that dwell on the corpse in various states. In ‘regular’ death images, the dead might be socially present, but they are visually absent. In ‘repellent’ death images, the dead are consistently, and insistently, present and corporeal.

The contemplation of the corpse for the purposes of spiritual enrichment has a long history in Christian practice. Medieval preachers and teachers used the putrefaction of the body as the paramount example of sin made visible, of the vanity of the world, and of our profoundly brief sojourn in it.

Abstract: This chapter explores the ways medieval readers engaged with images of ritual through imaginative and meditative reading practices. The repetitive and formulaic nature of the imagery is considered as a visual and imaginative invitatory to the reader-viewer to be absorbed by the image. Images of ritual offer several avenues to the reader through which to engage with an objectified ‘self’, in the representation of the material signifiers of social identity, and in the focus on the corpse within the communal setting. Finally, the evocation of sounded and somatic experiences of the Office of the Dead as represented and experienced through the image is discussed.

Keywords: funeral, community, self-fashioning, reader engagement, imagination, sound, ritual

The twenty-first-century popular media image of death is the Grim Reaper or a shambling zombie. However, sensational films and novels aside, when most of us think of death, this is not what comes to mind. It is our own dead we think of, not as a decayed body but as the person they were when they were with us: friend, relative, or colleague. What we recall is a ‘social’ body, a person who was part of a complex of family, community, and broader social networks and who defined and was defined by those relationships. We do the same for ourselves. If we consider the impact of our own deaths, it is usually in the context of how our absence will impact the relationships we are part of. This sense of identity-in-community is essential to our perception of ourselves. It embeds us within a complicated web of interconnected relations: kith and kin, civic, institutional, and economic. Death creates absence and leaves a gap in this tightly woven social fabric.

The Office of the Dead is unusual among the texts of the Book of Hours in that it is what we might call a ‘functional’ office. Its function was to prepare a community to manage loss, as well as a body for burial and a soul for the afterlife. It was performative in a way the texts of the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the other principal text of the Books of Hours, were not. People attended the Office of the Dead; there was an ‘audience’ of family, mourners, priests, and community members. These attendees were at once hearing the Office and potentially participating in it.

Abstract: This chapter is concerned with themes of Christian redemption and survival beyond death in images of Job and Lazarus. It was in death that the Christian faithful hoped to be restored to the community and to their own healthful body via the promise of the resurrection. Images of ‘redemptive’ death are thus involved with the social and material conceptions of death and the promise of salvation. Job and Lazarus are discussed in relationship with the Office of the Dead texts and the narrative congruences that gave these images power. Job and Lazarus offered the reader exemplars of good behaviour in the face of death and of mourning both the social and physical bodies.

Keywords: Job, Lazarus, redemption, mourning, salvation

The ‘regular’ and ‘repellent’ deaths are primarily (although not exclusively) concerned with the social and physical bodies, respectively. The ‘redemptive’ death is concerned with both. Redemption through death is fundamental to the Christian story, and this hope was implicit in ‘regular’ and ‘repellent’ images of death. For medieval Christians, death was emphatically not the end; it was a ‘non-death’. It was through death and the Redeemer Christ that the sick and dying hoped to be restored at some time in the future to the community of the blessed and to their own healthful body. ‘Redemptive’ death is thus involved in both the social and material conceptions of death and provides a counterpoint to the fears associated with those deaths. In the images that accompany the Office of the Dead, this hope for, and belief in, the redemptive nature of death is directly expressed through the images of Lazarus and Job, whose stories emphasize the ‘not’ nature of Christian death.

Job and Lazarus die, but they both die unconventional ‘non-deaths’. Job's sufferings are those of a social death expressed in the physical body. His material losses reveal the fragile nature of social position, and his wounds and sickness reveal the mortality of the body. Both cause him to be alienated by his community. His redemption is expressed in his restoration to social ‘life’, to God, and to his community. Lazarus, on the other hand, miraculously crosses and recrosses the boundary between life and death.