Medieval graffiti website

The Norfolk Medieval Graffiti Survey is pleased to announce that their website is now fully updated and revised. The new site now contains the first elements of a visual catalogue that showcases some of the more interesting and unusual discoveries made by the project. It is currently organised by parish but, as the site expands, we hope to make all the information searchable by subject as well as by site. The new site also contains a link to the new Medieval Graffiti twitter feed - which allows you to learn about new discoveries as they are made. Real-time church archaeology.

Some churches have apotropaic marks and other esoteric graffiti, which whilst not actually Pagan, derives from the pagan worldview which the Christian order inherited. To quote Ronald Hutton:

medieval and early modern Europeans constructed their world-picture out of materials taken from both Christianity and ancient paganism, making a mixture of both which they believed to be a form of Christianity.

A cover-up?

Bartholomew's Notes on Religion reports that a section showing early Greek Orthodox Christian priests defacing the Parthenon has been deleted from an animated film of the Parthenon's history after the Greek Orthodox Church complained.

The Parthenon

If there is historical evidence of this defacement (which certainly occurred in other cases where temples were converted to churches, such as the Pantheon in Rome, the temple of Minerva in Assisi, and the church of St Lawrence in Rome) then it should be included in the film. There is no point in trying to airbrush out events after the fact.

Can these dry bones live?

Henry Alexander Bowler 
The Doubt: Can these dry bones live? (1855)
Tate Gallery, London, UK

The context of this fascinating painting is the Christian belief that people would be bodily resurrected at the Last Trump (the Second Coming).

It appears that most Christians no longer believe this, since the Church of England is apparently happy for people to be cremated.

What it does illustrate is that when you look at bones, there's no-one home in there.  The person has gone.

Some cultures have specific beliefs about bones; others do not.  It would be difficult to guess how a culture might treat its dead from its theology; sometimes funeral practices arise from perceived economic or social necessities as much as from belief systems.  Also, of course, different individuals within cultures will have widely varying beliefs about what happens to body and soul after death.