What’s so spooky about religious texts? Plenty.
Let’s start with books of hours. These were Christian prayer books popular in the Middle Ages that contained hourly prayers to recite, including the Office of the Dead.
The Office of the Dead contained a set of prayers that you’d recite for deceased loved ones.
By doing this, you’d decrease the amount of time your relatives would spend in purgatory.
If you died and didn’t have any living relatives to recite these prayers for you…you were in for quite a long stay.
Typical imagery included funerals, burials, personifications of death as a skeleton or rotting corpses. And, if you could afford it, you could get yourself featured in your very own Office of the Dead, like Denise Poncher in an image from the Poncher Hours—her own personalized book of hours and office of the dead—above.
These images and prayers were meant to remind people of death’s immediacy, but also to provide them with a sense of comfort if they followed the instructions and prayers in the Book of Hours.
For more Spooky content, head to Getty's Instagram to watch Macabre Minute with Mel. Or, learn more about Heaven, Hell, and Dying Well: Images of Death in the Middle Ages.