The modern idea of a personal death, of “my death,” is a product of the European Middle Ages. In Antiquity and the early medieval period “death, at least as described in epic and chronicle, was a public and heroic event,” says historian Caroline Walker Bynum. “But in the later Middle Ages death became increasingly personal. In painting and in story, [it] was seen as the moment at which the individual, alone before his personal past, took stock of the meaning of his life.”
