Books of hours: Dances of death, Pennsylvania Museum, 1945-65-13

Pennsylvania Museum, 1945-65-13

The three dead and three living

The secret woman

The office of the dead starts with Jesus raising Lazarus. To the left are the three dead, to the right the three living, and below is the hermit.

Then the dance starts with 62(!) delightful scenes. First come the 30 men. The scenes are copied faithfully from a printed book by Anthoine Vérard. There's the whole series from the Pope down to the dead king and the authority, except that the merchant is missing. Where he should have been is instead a blank page, and on the other side is a full page illustration.

The women's dance is more intriguing. There aren't that many printed versions of the women's dance, so it is difficult to say what source the artist has copied.

There are 32 of them, and the sequence has strong similarities with the manuscript BNF Ms. 1186.

In both sources, the spinster woman comes right after the young woman, La jeune damoiselle. The hospitable woman, La femme daccueil, is here called "La femme secrette" (which is a bit odd, since it's La femme amoureuse who is the prostitute (whereas in the marginals by Kerver it's the other way around), and the Franciscan nun, La cordeliere, is called La dame de religion.

The BNF ms. 1186 only has 30 women, so the book of hours in question has two more. The first is a novel one, the priestess: La prestresse. She is added after La fame de village, where other (later) manuscripts instead add "the old woman", La vieille — not to be confused with La vieille damoiselle or La vieille potenciere.

The other addition in this book of hours is the witch, La sorciere, who was soon to become a staple character in the dance.

The last manuscript that we will examine also contains both men and women. And it has text as well as images. The book used to belong to Carlos V,