Death and the Danse Macabre in Late Medieval Art

The Danse macabre has a long literary and artistic tradition across much of Europe, from Finland to Britain, France, Spain, the Empire and the Low Countries. It shares its moralising message with the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead and with transi monuments. The essays in this volume offer new insights into the dissemination and reception of the Danse macabre in different media from the early fifteenth century on. It also critically assesses the available evidence about artists and patrons and about extant and lost examples, from monumental murals to cycles in manuscripts and print. This volume complements a collection of studies on the textual Danse macabre tradition across Europe by the same editors (Léglu, Oosterwijk and Ungeheuer), entitled Writing, Dancing and Performing Death across Late Medieval Europe: Texts and Contexts (Brill, 2026).

Sophie Oosterwijk, Ph.D. in Art History (Leicester, 1999) and in English Literature (Leiden, 2009), is an independent researcher. She has published numerous articles on the Danse macabre and on medieval tomb monuments as well as four co-edited volumes, including a text edition of John Lydgate’s Dance of Death (Brill, 2021) and Writing, Dancing and Performing Death across Late Medieval Europe: Texts and Contexts (Brill, 2026).Laurent Ungeheuer, Ph.D. in Art History (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, 2015), is an independent researcher. His work focuses on the Burgundian court, medieval books of hours and representations of death. He has published several articles and is co-editor of Writing, Dancing and Performing Death across Late Medieval Europe: Texts and Contexts (Brill, 2026).Catherine Léglu, Ph.D. in Medieval Occitan and French literature (Cambridge), is currently professor at the University of Luxembourg, previously at the Universities of Reading and Bristol, UK. She has published three monographs and many articles on satirical and didactic literature as well as on translation and adaptation, and is co-editor of several volumes, including Writing, Dancing and Performing Death across Late Medieval Europe: Texts and Contexts (Brill, 2026).