Publisher's description:
In Imago Mortis: Mediating Images of Death in Late Medieval Culture, Ashby Kinch argues for the affirmative quality of late medieval death art and literature, providing a new, interdisciplinary approach to a well-known body of material. He demonstrates the surprising and effective ways that late medieval artists appropriated images of death and dying as a means to affirm their artistic, social, and political identities. The book dedicates each of its three sections to a pairing of a visual convention (deathbed scenes, the Three Living and Three Dead, and the Dance of Death) and a Middle English literary text (Hoccleve's Lerne for to die, Audelay's Three Dead Kings, and Lydgate's Dance of Death).

Table of contents:
VII List of Figures
XIII Preface
1 Introduction: The Mediating Image of Death
Section One: Facing Death
35 1: "Yet mercie thou shal have": Affirmative Visions of Dying in Illustrations of Henry Suso's "De Scientia"
69 2: Verbo-Visual Mirrors of Mortality in Thomas Hoccleve's "Lerne for to Die"
Section Two: Facing the Dead
109 3: Commemorating Power in the Legend of the Three Living and Three Dead
145 4: Spiritual, Artistic, and Political Economies of Death: Audelay's Three Dead Kings and the Lancastrian Cadaver Tomb
Section Three: The Community of Death
185 5: "My stile I wille directe": Lydgate and the Bedford Workshop Reinvent the Danse Macabre
227 6: The Parlementaire , the Mayor, and the Crisis of Community in the Danse Macabre
261 Epilogue: The Afterlives of Medieval Images of Death
281 Bibliography
297 Index.