Roundtable

Opinions and analysis from Lapham’s Quarterly writers and editors.

November 17, 2013

Memento Mori and the Melting Ice

The rationale of the memento mori tradition is that we’ll commit fewer sins, waste less time, if we remember our end. That we won’t be such jerks. “Depend upon it, sir,” says Samuel Johnson, “when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

November 15, 2013

Heavenly Bodies and Bejeweled Bones

By Angela Serratore

Saint Dioskorus in Wald, Germany. c. 1701. All photographs by Paul Koudounaris.

Photographer Paul Koudounaris brings to life a group of long-forgotten Catholic relics: the so-called Catacomb Saints, discovered in the catacombs of sixteenth-century Rome. Believed to be the bones of martyrs, many of the relics were sent to Germany to combat the growing Reformation. There the bones were intricately decorated with jewels and presented as symbols of power for the Catholic Church.

November 08, 2013

Peace Treaty with the Almighty

By Peter Foges

Portrait of Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, by Pierre-Paul Prud'hon.

On the May 12, 1838, the eighty-four-year old Prince de Talleyrand vomited blood at his own dinner table. It happened in the Parisian palais on Rue St. Florentin where he passed his retirement in semi-regal splendor. He had been entertaining old friends, the Princesse de Lieven and the Duke de Noailles. The old man, ever courteous in the manner of an aristocrat brought up in the ancien régime, apologized profusely and retired to bed.

October 31, 2013

Body Snatchers of Old New York

By Bess Lovejoy

When the slaves of New York died, usually of disease and overwork, they were buried in an unincorporated patch of land in a wooded ravine just north of Chambers Street, near the Collect Pond. The city’s fathers had declared the churchyards—the favored burial spots of the elites—off-limits to blacks both free and enslaved. Just as there was a hierarchy for the living in New York, there was a hierarchy for the dead.

October 30, 2013

Funny Bones

By Matthew Leib

Each generation faces death in its own way, and while the skeleton’s hollow-eyed gaze and mocking perma-smile have remained constant across time, humans have pulled a range of faces in response, ranging from the reverent to the ridiculous.