Introduction

In October 2014, a popular medieval website decided to showcase memento mori, the well-known spiritual exercise of the Middle Ages that leads us to reflect on the fleeting nature of human existence, lifting our focus from the short-lived vanities of the day-to-day and re-directing our gaze to the horizon of eternity. The website satisfied a certain modern fascination with a putative medieval obsession with death, especially in the period after the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century. Its materials traced a steady development from death considered dispassionately and in the abstract to personified death, macabre dissolution, and decay.1