Limits of Knowledge: Void and Imagination

Written by Baudoin de Condé (d. ca. 1280) and conceived as a dialogue between three noblemen and three corpses, “The Legend of the Three Dead and the Three Living” remains one of the more vigorous and remarkable exercises in the poetics of the macabre. This paper will explore one of the earliest visualizations of this poem found in the late thirteenth-century literary miscellany that belonged to Marie de Brabant (Arsenal 3142, f.311v). There, the encounter between the dead and the living unfolds within a conspicuously empty space, appreciably different from all the other miniatures found in the manuscript, which feature a golden background and frequently include a rudimentary setting. The emptiness of the locus in which the narrative of “The Legend” takes place is made palpably obvious by the gap, a portion of parchment left completely undecorated, that lies between the three noblemen and the three corpses. What separates the world of the dead from the world of the living is a void, a spatial figuration rather striking in an age when the visual horror vacui was commonplace. Placing this image within the context of late medieval discourses on the void, visuality, and imagination, I will argue that the miniature’s empty space tests the limits of viewer’s knowledge, and explore it as a site of anxiety and abhorrent possibility, an unspoken and unvisualized locus of the violent processes perpetrated by death upon the living world. After considering the miniature against the backdrop of other contemporary death images, I will suggest that the viewer is invited to negotiate this gap, a liminal space of sorts, through the faculties of vision and cognition.