This chapter highlights women’s roles in medieval death practice, arguing that women’s traditional care for the dying and dead and their social role as mourners were consistent with, and in fact fundamental to, the spiritual role of nuns as valued intercessors. As custodians of family memory, women were central to medieval remembering; however, nuns have typically been seen as marginal to the monastic practices of liturgical memoria – the ritualized prayer for the dead that is generally thought to have become the specialised work of ordained monks by the Central Middle Ages. Focusing on the commemorative and intercessory roles of women as wives and mothers, the place of women in biblical narratives of the Passion and Resurrection and the social and spiritual contributions of female monasticism, this chapter argues that women’s ties to death, as both a practical and a spiritual matter, provided nuns with a central and valued role in medieval memorial practice and intercessory prayer.

From at least the tenth century, key parts of the Christian liturgy were performed with particularly dramatic rituals, especially on high-ranking feast days in the Church calendar. One of the most ubiquitous texts of this type was the Quem quaeritis dialogue, so-named on account of its text, which sets the Angels’ question ‘Whom do you seek?’ and the Three Marys’s answer ‘Jesus of Nazareth’. This liturgical scenario embodies many aspects that modern audiences would associate with theatrical display. Visitatio Sepulchri, MacMillan’s chamber-scale opera (1992–1993) takes the Quem quaeritis narrative and places it within a larger structure that connects it to the Crucifixion and to the Resurrection. The composer uses several medieval chants (the fourteenth-century Parisian liturgy for Easter Day, the Easter sequence Victimae Paschali laudes, and the Te Deum) as well as drawing inspiration from broader aspects of medievalism. This chapter examines the placement, function, and effect of pre-existent chant and other material in Visitatio Sepulchri. It assesses the way in which both musical borrowing and the idea of medieval drama impact upon the creation of the work, on its performance, and on its expressive potential as sacred opera.