Writing, Dancing and Performing Death Across Late Medieval Europe : Texts and Contexts

Our understanding of the medieval Danse macabre is changing with the recent discoveries of a theatrical script from Savoy, and of a related Castilian poem. This collection of texts from the Burgundian realm, France and Savoy, England, Castile-Aragon and the Empire, also contains critical essays that examine these texts and contexts from the fourteenth to the late fifteenth centuries.
This volume re-examines the development and impact of the Danse macabre within broader considerations of performance and poetry that focus on Death as a protagonist. It includes texts never before studied or translated and moves beyond the traditional focus on Paris and London to reassess the wide dissemination of this tradition. The volume complements a collection of studies by the same editors (Oosterwijk, Ungeheuer and Léglu) of the visual tradition across Europe, from Burgundy to Finland, Death and the Danse Macabre in Late Medieval Art: Dissemination, Reception, Evidence.

Catherine Léglu, Ph.D. in Medieval Occitan and French literature (Cambridge 1995), currently professor at the University of Luxembourg, previously at the Universities of Reading and Bristol. She has published three monographs and many articles on satirical and didactic literature as well as on translation and adaptation.
Sophie Oosterwijk, Ph.D. in Art History (Leicester, 1999) and English Literature (Leiden, 2009), independent researcher and Vice-President of the Church Monuments Society. She has published three edited volumes and numerous articles on the Danse Macabre, medieval tomb monuments and commemoration.
Laurent Ungeheuer, Ph.D. in Art History at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, with a thesis on fifteenth-century Parisian illuminated manuscripts. His research focuses on the Burgundian court, medieval books of hours and representations of death. His main publications to date are on the Master of the Golden Legend and the Danse macabre and its Burgundian dissemination.