Cadaver monuments
 

I was listening to Four Thought this morning: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000z0c4 with half an ear, but the subject caught my attention.


The speaker was talking of the "transgressive" nature of the monument to Alice, granddaughter of Geoffrey Chaucer.



It is a double monument: above, the lady in all her state, below, the cadaver she has become, and is in Ewelme church, Oxfordshire.


Alice died in the mid C15th, when such monuments were extremely fashionable. It was an outward display of piety and, given that the rich would try to buy their way out of purgatory with prayers for their souls, a slightly cynical means of ensuring that those seeing the monument would be moved to prayer.


Can anyone see anything actually "transgressive" about such behaviour, or has the word acquired a new meaning?

No, in a word. I think the speaker may have been misusing the word and thought it meant change from one state to another. (Life to death, in other words).

But what do I know?! I am always coming across words being used in ways I don't understand them to mean. Crossword answers, can't think of an example off the top of my head, but I often think the answer isn't quite correct.

OC

Having heard elsewhere of something "exasperating" a situation (which exacerbated my temper) I know that happens, but I think here it is a very young, trendy woman making her own mind up about the past, and getting it badly wrong.