Out of this world: words, vision and the afterlife in late medieval culture

From the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, heaven, hell and purgatory had a grip on the imaginations and also the actions of Christians as never before and never since. What were the different regions of the afterlife like as places? What should one do in order to increase the chances of going to heaven after one's death? Even if one had not led an entirely blameless life, was it still possible to make sufficient amends on one's deathbed in order to avoid hellfire and be sentenced to a spell in purgatory instead? My research is concerned with the ways in which late medieval believers were encouraged and instructed to go out of this world, both in their imaginations and on their actual deathbeds.

I will be focusing on a number of highly influential devotional or pastoral treatises which teach techniques for meditation or dispense advice on preparing the sick and dying for their last hour. Over and above the detailed reading of the original sources, however, there are two points of fundamental significance that I want to make. The first concerns the relationship between words and vision. Long before the thirteenth century, imaginative contemplation of death and the afterlife was well-established as a spiritual exercise in monastic communities. Once, however, an ascetic practice that was hitherto grounded in the daily life of a community starts to be disseminated more widely in society through the medium of books, the verbal dimension assumes a new importance. Authors of 'how to meditate' exercises face the challenge of stimulating visions by means of words on the page. And certain old problems acquire renewed urgency, such as whether we should believe other people's verbal reports of things that normally transcend our capacity for sense-experience. The positions adopted by different authors in respect of these problems are various, and also often equivocal or precarious; what is beyond dispute, however, is that words are somehow always integral to late medieval visions of the afterlife. This point cannot be emphasized enough, because scholarship on medieval spirituality has tended to focus on the visual and the sensual dimensions at the expense of the verbal and conceptual.

The second point of wider significance concerns the impact of the Protestant Reformation. Luther's 'Sermon on preparing to die' of 1519 has been said to represent a radical break with the entire late medieval rite of passage for the dying. On a superficial level, this appears to be true. Luther expresses indifference to the traditional deathbed sacraments; above all, he dispenses with all the forms of words that traditionally accompanied the business of dying, and recommends that the dying person concentrate on a set of mental pictures instead. Yet if Luther's 'Sermon' is set in the context of other sources from both before and after the Reformation, it becomes plain that his radically inward 'imagistic' approach completely failed to supplant the late medieval word-based rituals for going out of this world. These continued to provide the basis for Protestant rites of passage (albeit with altered theological content) well into the second half of the sixteenth century. It is not my intention to deny that the Reformation made no fundamental difference to anything at all - that would be an untenably extreme position. The point is rather that the break with late medieval culture was not always sudden, and may have happened at different times in different domains.

The results of this research will be presented in a book ('Out of this world: words, vision and the afterlife in late medieval culture') whose theme will appeal to medievalists beyond the author's own background in German studies - to specialists of other medieval literatures, to historians of religious thought and devotion, to art historians.