Memento mori (a Latin phrase for “remember your mortality”)
are objects that were usually carried or worn by a person as a reminder
of one’s mortality. What’s particularly interesting about them is that
they were very common objects for hundreds of years. They served the
purpose of reminding the owner of mortality and the shortness of life.
Prior to the 15th century, the objects would usually be in the shape of a
full skeleton or a combination of a skeleton and a healthy body. Early
in 16th century, the trend evolved into the image of a skull or half
skull, half face. The ones above served a practical purpose in that they
contains a pocket watch.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the trend of having
memento mori objects went out of fashion. This was around the same time
that families ceased having viewings of deceased loved ones in the home
and used mortuaries instead. The concept of caring for a family member’s
body until burial was no longer the cultural norm. As a society we have distanced ourselves from the concept of death both mentally and physically. Considering death is as natural to life as birth, this is not necessarily a positive trend.
That’s not my baby!
A “Changeling” was a creature from European folklore that
took the form of an infant. According to legends, a demon, troll, or
elf would swap a normal infant with a Changeling, leaving the parents to
discover a strange, emotionless, or disturbed hollow creature in place
of their child.
While today there are many scientific explanations to such
phenomena (autism, mental retardation, exposure to toxins, etc.) at the
time their were no rational explanations for such occurrences. To
Medieval parents Changelings were very real. Most tragically the method
of retrieving a child was to expose the Changeling, usually through
horrific form of abuse such as exposure to hot objects, leaving the
Changeling in a pile of manure at night, or near drowning. It was
thought that by exposing the Changeling to such danger, the fairies
would return the real child, not wanting their spawn to be harmed.
Religious reformer Martin Luther believed in a more drastic approach,
advocated infanticide when shown a Changeling in 1532;
“I, Dr. Martin Luther, saw and touched a changeling. It
was twelve years old, and from its eyes and the fact that it had all of
its senses, one could have thought that it was a real child. It did
nothing but eat; in fact, it ate enough for any four peasants or
threshers. It ate, shit, and pissed, and whenever someone touched it, it
cried. When bad things happened in the house, it laughed and was happy;
but when things went well, it cried. It had these two virtues. I said
to the Princes of Anhalt: “If I were the prince or the ruler here, I
would throw this child into the water–into the Molda that flows by
Dessau . I would dare commit homicidium on him!” (Weimar: Böhlau, 1912-1921)
Belief in Changelings would continue beyond the Middle Ages, even lasting in some rural communities into the 19th century.
Quartering was the third part of an execution method
known as hanging, drawing and quartering, and most commonly applied to
those convicted of high treason in England. First the condemned was half hanged,
usually from a gibbet. However, the neck was not broken, but they were
left hanging so as to almost choke. it was important that the condemned
was left alive at this point for the following stage of execution.
Next, they were taken down and laid out, and had their abdomen cut open and their entrails pulled out in front of them. The entrails were often burnt at this point. Somewhere about now the condemned usually died. Finally,
the corpse was cut into four parts, and those parts sent to different
points of the kingdom to be displayed over city gates.
Usually one
portion was sent their county of origin. Note, because high treason was a
conviction imposed by Act of Attainder, it almost inevitably applied
only to nobles. Commoners involved in rebellion would normally be cut
down on the spot of battle, or summarily executed shortly after
capture. Also, note that there were some creative variations on the
theme.
When Hugh Le Despenser the Younger was executed, he was
hanged from a ladder. This enabled the executioners to perform an
additional humiliation. His genitals were cut from him and stuffed in
his mouth. Queen Isabella reportedly insisted on this because he was
also convicted of sodomising the king.
“Wound
Man” is an illustration which first appeared in European surgical texts
in the Middle Ages. It laid out schematically the various wounds a
person might suffer in battle or in accidents.
Late medieval anatomy works often contain a standard set of
illustrations, copied and recopied from text to text. Typically, these
depict the body front and back; the skeleton and muscles within it each
from the same two viewpoints, and so on. Strangest to our modern eyes is
the illustration that usually comes last: the Wound Man, a compendium
of all the injuries that a body might sustain. Captions beside the stoic
figure describe the injuries and sometimes give prognoses: often
precise distinctions are drawn between types of injuries, such as
whether an arrow has embedded itself in a muscle or shot right through.
