"I will please the Lord in the land of the living," begins the Office of the Dead.
This verse, from the Latin Vulgate version of the 114th Psalm (Psalm 116 in most English Bibles), was the antiphonal - or congregational response - to the reading of the whole psalm at the beginning of the office of Vespers. The Office of the Dead usually commenced with this evening service, which was followed by the early-morning offices of Matins and Lauds, apparently reflecting an early custom that a night vigil over the dead would precede the funeral on the following day.
This image, from a mid-fifteenth-century Burgundian Book of Hours in the National Library of New Zealand, accompanies the version of the Office of the Dead which found its way into such prayerbooks for laypeople. In this context, it was used not just to recite the offices during a vigil over the body of the dead, but as a regular prayer of supplication for the souls of the faithful departed (some surviving books of hours contain marginal notes commemmorating deaths of those known to the owner - often parents or children). Nevertheless, books of hours often illustrated this scene with images of burial and funereal rites (read, as here, by a priest from a breviary). Many of these images are quite sober: note the illustration of a man carrying a child's body in the lower left of the scene. But R.S. Wieck has recently pointed out that such images are not necessarily as bleak or as macabre as they might appear. In an essay entitled 'The Death Desired' (in DuBruck and Gusick, ed., Death and Dying in the Middle Ages), Wieck notes that "the funeral rites depicted in miniatures at the Office of the Dead represented the ideal end to one's life, death attended by all that the Church, one's family, and one's friends could give: the sacraments, proper burial, and prayer" (p. 442). Wieck sees these pictures as images of hope that a pious and prayerful life will be crowned by an eternal reward after death. Certainly, they indicate that membership of the community created by prayer did not end at death.
Nevertheless, it would perhaps be unwise to overlook the ambivalence with which the psalmist depicts the terrors of mortality in the very words that opened the Office of the Dead:
Circumdederunt me dolores mortis: pericula inferni invenerunt me.
Tribulationem, et dolorem inveni: et nomen Domini invocavi.
O Domine, libera animam meam, misericors Dominus, et iustus: et Deus noster miseretur.
The sorrows of death have compassed me: and the pains of hell have found me.
I have found tribulation, and sorrow: and I called on the name of our Lord.
O Lord, deliver my soul, merciful Lord, and just: and our God hath mercy.
The Office of the Dead can be found in Latin and English here: http://medievalist.net/hourstxt/deadves.htm
