Chapter 7 examines representations of the afterlife: the heavens and purgatory. Venetian artists created some of the most spectacular visions of paradise of the century, works that pulse with vibrancy and life, deploying a series of artistic devices to insist on the veracity of the supernatural. Venice was also home to one of the earliest and most comprehensive purgatorial cycles in Italy, a theme that became an ever more popular one as the seventeenth century progressed.

Liminal spaces of waiting and expectation are at the centre of this chapter that focuses on Hamlet, Waiting for Godot and Beckett’s short story ‘Dante and the Lobster’. The chapter draws on Stephen Greenblatt’s study Hamlet in Purgatory (2001) and on Daniela Caselli’s Beckett’s Dantes (2005), but it also takes the idea of purgatory to describe a dynamic, permeable space for intertextual dialogue. I argue that the texts of Beckett, Dante and Shakespeare do not appear as stable entities but rather are in flux and resonate with one another. Beckett’s recourse to purgatory is therefore not only the adaptation of a space for the imagination of medieval readers, but also a means of reflecting on the processes in which literary space is constructed. A main part of the chapter is devoted to the reading of ‘Dante and the Lobster‘ in dialogue with Hamlet and King Lear and also with the poetry of Thomas MacGreevy, from which many of its themes derive. ‘Dante and the Lobster’ and Hamlet converge on the notion of pause, and the chapter examines the ways in which both works become mutually interanimating in their reflections on dualisms, between human being and animal, Christ and the lobster, beginning and end, hesitation and rashness, fear and the embrace of death.

Shakespeare inherited from the Middle Ages a long-standing association between debt and death. As a consequence of the Reformation’s elimination of purgatory, however, the relationship between debt and death had recently undergone a sea change. This chapter aims to show how a repeated pun of Shakespeare’s, one binding ‘debt’ to ‘death’, signals a shift in the relation between the living and the dead in early modern England: one brought about by the Reformation, and specifically its denial of purgatory. The reconfiguring of relations between the dead and their survivors turned largely on the idea of debt, especially that of a spiritual debt accrued over a lifetime as the commission of sins exceeded their remission. For the people of pre-Reformation England, purgatory was a debtor’s prison in which souls would suffer a temporal punishment for sins that had been forgiven, but for which they still owed a debt. Central to a post-Reformation understanding of the relation between debt and death was the growing practice of double-entry bookkeeping. Double-entry’s key idea of ‘balance’ bore heavy theological implications, evoking the scales of justice and the symmetry of a divine plan.

With Purgatory we readers are at home. It is a place of hope, less a place of punishment due and more a place of conversion. And a comparison between Dante’s conversion in Purgatory in the hands, ultimately, of Beatrice, and Augustine’s conversion as recorded in Confessions allows us to see Purgatorio as moving progressively out of a place of moral reform and the rejection of the vices that formed the structure of Hell, and more a place of an wholesale transformation, a place of illumination.

In Purgatory where Dante learns how all the purposes of the journey thus far which had progressed from the terrifying dark mountainside, through Hell and into Purgatory, are achieved in his finally passing beyond the whole purgatorial mentality itself into a place of the recovery of the original innocence of Eden. Here Dante learns from Beatrice that the burdens of sin can be finally laid down in the Earthly Paradise, and that he should now have learned, at last, how to smile. For here, she says, sin no longer has any place on the agenda of Dante’s recovery, which takes the form of a redemptive act of memory, recalling the innocence lost in Eden; and now, with the recovery of that true memory, he is now able truly to narrate the journey thus far. Now he can write the Comedy.

Part I covers the death arts that focus on the period leading up to and concluding with the advent of death. Both philosophical and biblical traditions enjoined the early modern individual to prepare physically, mentally, and spiritually for the day that he or she would die. In addition to ensuring that one’s worldly goods were in order and left to the most suitable survivors, preparation entailed attending to the health of one’s soul: one would repent of sin, cultivate a legacy of virtue, and contemplate the four last things – Death, Judgement Day, Heaven, and Hell. The primary means of instructing the religiously minded in how to die well were ars moriendi treatises, several of which are represented here. Modernized and annotated excerpts also represent many other genres, high and low, that directed readers to look deathward. Devotional and theological works, conduct manuals, emblem books, calendars, ballads, and last dying speeches illustrate not only exemplars of good and bad dying but also the various arts whereby readers could prepare themselves for the afterlife. Throughout the excerpts, the confessional and political implications of the death arts are highlighted.

Focusing on select examples of monumental art and manuscript illumination, this chapter examines key iconographic themes, visual strategies, and changes in artistic representations of heaven and hell in the Romanesque and gothic periods.In particular, it investigates how medieval artists and their patrons drew variously on scripture, theology, and exegesis to craft images of the afterlife that functioned complexly within the specific historical, cultural, and social contexts in which they were created.Emphasis also lies on the ways that these visual representations of heaven and hell, though often rooted in textual sources, constituted a distinct form of speculation on the afterlife.Seen both individually and together, the works discussed here reveal the central and enduring contribution of art in shaping medieval conceptions of the hereafter.

Visions of the afterlife in late medieval Europe (1300-1500) circulated in collections of saints’ legends and sermons, in religious manuals, mystics’ writings, stand-alone pieces, and literary works. Along with the stories inherited from earlier centuries, there were many new accounts. Together they demonstrate how the medieval Church’s teachings on heaven, hell, and purgatory, as well as on prayers and masses for the dead, on engaging in the sacrament of penance, on accruing merit, on fighting against the demonic realm, and on devotion to the saints, were conveyed to, assimilated, and adapted by the laity. This chapter draws on several categories of these otherworld narratives, including visitations by ghosts, demons, and saints, and explores three primary spiritual dynamics illustrated by the visions:purgatorial ‘transactions of satisfaction’ with the ghosts, spiritual warfare with the demons, and ‘reciprocated devotion’ with the saints. The glimpses of the otherworlds and their inhabitants shored up the religious beliefs and practices of the late medieval laity.

This chapter characterises visionary experiences of heaven, hell, and purgatory received by medieval religious women.The twelfth-century Benedictines Hildegard of Bingen and Elisabeth of Schönau offer detailed representations of a celestial city but fewer specifics regarding the netherworld.Hildegard’s perception of the cosmos informs her view of heaven, whereas for Elisabeth it symbolises a longed-for end to life’s journey.Among the Cistercian women residing at Helfta in the thirteenth century, the graphic descriptions of otherworldly realms described by Mechthild of Magdeburg in The Flowing Light of the Godhead are most remarkable.For her contemporaries, Mechthild of Hackeborn and Gertrude the Great, the joyous union with Christ on earth is emphasised equally with the union in heaven.The striking scenes depicting the judgement of sinners in purgatory found in the revelations of the fourteenth-century saint Birgitta of Sweden serve as an admonition to her more secular audience.

This short introduction first places the medieval tradition of thought about the afterlife in a larger and longer context, then lays out the historiographical background for the collection.It also briefly introduces each of the fifteen chapters, noting how together they tend to shift the focus away from the twelfth century (hitherto considered a key turning point in the history of the afterlife) to the early Middle Ages and the later.It closes by noting that the contributions also keep to a current trend of seriously considering the reception and influence of texts and ideas, here suggesting that afterlife visions (for example) became an integral part of the medieval imagination.

Between AD c. 400 and c. 1100, Christian ideas about the afterlife changed in subtle but important ways. This chapter outlines broad trends in thought about the afterlife in this period in the Latin West, and examines the concomitant changes in thinking about the post-mortem fates of souls. Ongoing contemporary discourse around topics such as sin and penance or baptism contributed to developments in the way that contemporaries understood the afterlife, including heaven, hell, and an interim state between death and universal judgement. Significantly, as Christians came to be more certain about some aspects of the afterlife, the possibility of salvation for individual souls was perceived to be less certain. As a result, by the end of the period there is much greater evidence for concern about the post-mortem fate of the soul than there had been at the beginning, laying the foundations for high medieval theological discussions and developments.

More common than Dante’s afterdeath schematic was that of St Thomas Aquinas; both have a supernal heaven, but Thomas’s infernal regions, based on Scripture and tradition, consisted of the limbo of the Fathers, emptied by Christ at his death, at the highest; immediately beneath it was the temporary hell of purgatory; under that was the limbo of infants; and at the very bottom was the region of the perpetually damned.It was believed that both souls in heaven (the saints) and the suffering souls in purgatory could somehow return to the earth’s surface, and it was also believed that some of the departed souls suffered their purging on earth instead of, or as well as, in purgatory (the ghost in Hamlet is a late example). It was assumed that these souls of the ‘saved dead’ had knowledge of what was happening among still-embodied mortals, and they were able (with divine permission) to have immediate means of communication with them.

This chapter assesses the evidence from the medieval Celtic-speaking world for visions of heaven, hell, and the intermediary state. It begins with a critique of twentieth-century scholarship, which tended to focus its attention on the most fantastical vision texts at the expense of explicating a more representative sample of primary sources. The disparity is noted in the survival rate of texts from medieval Ireland as opposed to medieval Wales, and it is argued that medieval Welsh conceptions of the afterlife need to be pieced together from fragmentary references in religious poetry and other sources. By contrast, many extended descriptions of the afterlife survive from medieval Ireland – both freestanding vision texts and vision narratives embedded in sources of other genres. These are assessed in the context of an argument that more close readings of visions are needed before medieval Irish and Welsh geographies of the afterlife can be fully understood.

This chapter not only explores the efflorescence of ‘new’ visions that occurred, especially, but not only, in the British Isles, during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, it also traces the reproduction of early medieval visions too, arguing that the slow evolution of ‘purgatory’ from early medieval origins facilitated their continued use. Change is nonetheless to be found in this period. There was renewed sensitivity to old anxieties about the authenticity of visions. There was a fresh flux of debate about conceptualisations of the afterlife that were so strongly material. And, most especially, new theological and pastoral priorities were imprinted on vision-texts, which were subtly reshaped by shifting thinking about penitence and prayer. The chapter examines some of the most ‘popular’ visions, measured in terms of manuscript circulation, but it also reconstructs something of the range of visionary experiences too, taking into account narratives that were little attended in their day.

This chapter asks where and how Rome (and, by extension, polemics self-consciously characterized as reactions against Rome) figures in efforts to determine what the living owe to the dead, and what the dead can do for the living. Latin occupies a controlling position within this inquiry; so, too, do texts that cast the world of the living as the home of the dead; so, finally, do Reformation-era debates about the soteriological stakes of praying for the dead. These topics span a period of time in which Rome is the gravitational centre of a sequence of massive upheavals in vernacular piety and attendant debates about the relationship between the living and the dead. The chapter argues that interpreting these debates as facets of the fact of Rome alerts us to the role that the human voice plays in probing the limits of mortality and the nature of the human as such.

Annemarie Weyl Carr examines the shifting imagery of post-mortem punishment in twenty-two depictions of the Last Judgment on Cyprus. The earliest versions, dating from the 12th through mid-14th century, cover three-dimensional, vaulted interiors. Centred on Christ, with degrees of punition arranged around him to contrast with either one another or beatitude, they present punishment as a range of conditions, not a place. The next group, dating from the mid-14th through the 15th century, are organised bilaterally around the scale of judgment, thus creating a clear differentiation between redemption and condemnation. Condemnation, however, remains chaotic, a state of being cast out, not a destination to which one goes. The final images, dating from the late 15th and16th centuries, occupy a single surface each. The Last Judgment may hover as a prophetic future, engulf as a wrap-around panorama, or spread in a landscape, but in each case, the events of punishment are in some way accorded a defined place. Thus, the Cypriot churches show a growing tendency to attribute spatial qualities to Hell. This space, however, embracing the whole of morality from sin and death through resurrection and judgement to damnation, has little in common with the Hell of western European art.

Annemarie Weyl Carr examines the shifting imagery of post-mortem punishment in twenty-two depictions of the Last Judgment on Cyprus. The earliest versions, dating from the 12th through mid-14th century, cover three-dimensional, vaulted interiors. Centred on Christ, with degrees of punition arranged around him to contrast with either one another or beatitude, they present punishment as a range of conditions, not a place. The next group, dating from the mid-14th through the 15th century, are organised bilaterally around the scale of judgment, thus creating a clear differentiation between redemption and condemnation. Condemnation, however, remains chaotic, a state of being cast out, not a destination to which one goes. The final images, dating from the late 15th and16th centuries, occupy a single surface each. The Last Judgment may hover as a prophetic future, engulf as a wrap-around panorama, or spread in a landscape, but in each case, the events of punishment are in some way accorded a defined place. Thus, the Cypriot churches show a growing tendency to attribute spatial qualities to Hell. This space, however, embracing the whole of morality from sin and death through resurrection and judgement to damnation, has little in common with the Hell of western European art.

Attention in this final chapter is directed to the private passions of church personnel as revealed in the executors’ accounts of deceased canons, and in particular Jacques de Houchin, remarkable for his bibliophilic sophistication and (apparently) private music-making. Houchin’s book collection at death ran to more than 300 volumes, including large numbers of classical texts, making him one of the most significant private bibliophiles of his age. He also possessed a large number of music books and musical instruments. Centred on this one man’s proclivities, the chapter paints a picture of private music-making within the confines of the church and its cloister, involving canons, vicars and choirboys.