Some of my future blog posts will be tagged as relating to Memento Mori. Translated from Latin, this means remember death, or remember you must die. In art, literature, and funerary monuments, it has a more specific meaning, referring to particular symbols, such as hourglasses, skulls, bells and coffins. These are often used in paintings, memorials and gravestones to represent death.
For me, such morbid representations are often the most interesting finds in any church I visit, along with the contrasting beauty of stained glass. Occasionally of course, both combine, when death is represented in glass, with most windows memorialising someone who has died tending to show Biblical scenes or saints, with a smaller inscription in memory of the dear departed. Such use of windows for remembrance became popular in Victorian times, often replacing the larger carved tablets on the walls of churches (see below for examples of these).
Below are three memorials in churches local to me. I may choose similar ones to write about in more detail in the future. Two have Memento Mori skulls. The name of the first cannot be seen high on the wall at St James, Trowbridge. The second, at St George’s, Beckington. is for the Elizabethan and Jacobean poet Samuel Danyell. The third is for a wealthy Corsham clothier, James Hulbert, in St Bartholomew’s, Corsham – having first resided in Hulbert Close when I lived in Corsham, I am particularly fond of this one.
For posts on this site, I shall use the tag of Memento Mori to cover both the general and specific meaning of the term, i.e. all representations of death. Maybe it is my age, or having had cancer, or perhaps it is because both my parents are no longer living, but I have a fascination with such memorials, their symbolism, and the deceased they offer remembrance to. Within churches, and to some degree in graveyards too, this is disproportionally representative of richer people, as to fund a tablet on a church wall, or a decently descriptive gravestone, let alone a carved monument or memorial window, would never have been cheap. But even if many ordinary people cannot be remembered in this way, it does not mean that those who are memorialised should be forgotten. Researching the brief histories of a particular soldier killed in Flanders, or a Victorian poet falling asleep in their own bed, can provide so much insight into the times in which they lived, especially if, as is often the case, such individuals can be identified online to find further detail.
Other representations of death and the afterlife will also be written about at times on this site, from the cadavers of transi tombs to doom paintings adorning a few rare church walls. These are fascinating to find, and can teach us much about the past, although I get just as excited by spotting a simple skull on an old grave hidden away in the back of a churchyard, forgotten by the world. For the historian and the lover or art, as well as for the more morbid of church explorers such as myself, death, and its MementoMori representation, really is the gift that keeps on giving.
