In April 2013 a story was picked up by blogs, broadsheets and tabloids in Europe and the United States: a pair of skeletons had been discovered holding hands. The couple in question were found during excavations of the courtyard of a former Dominican convent in Cluj-Napoca in modern-day Romania; since the convent had been founded in the middle of the fifteenth century and was secularised in the middle of the sixteenth, the two skeletons must have been interred at the end of the Middle Ages. Far from being a lone occurrence in the media landscape, a glance at Google reveals a cluster of news stories detailing the excavation of skeletons engaged in various forms of embrace: all, seemingly inevitably, compared to Shakespeare’s tragic lovers Romeo and Juliet. The fascination exerted by these skeleton sweethearts speaks to the same experience described by Philip Larkin in “An Arundel Tomb”, the poem with which this book began. Just as the joined hands of the two effigies seem to prove “our almost-instinct almost true: / What will survive of us is love”, so the joined hands of the two skeletons are eagerly taken up as evidence of the possibility of enduring companionship in the grave and even, perhaps, the afterlife.

When approaching double tombs, our “almost-instinct” has tended to lead away from historical explanations involving broader artistic, political, economic or religious trajectories, and towards particular, individual and emotional concerns. Part of the desire to read these memorials as a sign of love’s ability to outlast death is to want them to be in some sense ahistorical: representations of emotion that transcend the moment of their making, allowing them to be immediately recognisable to modern-day viewers in a way that heraldry or inscriptions are not. My agenda in returning to such contemporary reflections on post-mortem love is to reassert the strangeness of double tombs, the ways in which they speak to styles of thought and categories of experience that are radically different from our own. In doing so, I suggest some possible implications for our broader understanding of, and approach to, the artistic, emotional and social histories of late-medieval Europe.