What the gothic Netflix icon has in common with medieval art, symbolism, and feminine power.
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Wednesday and the Middle Ages – Between Death, Beauty and Dark Magic
The Aesthetics of Darkness
Few figures have shaped modern pop culture as profoundly as Wednesday Addams – clad in black, deadpan, ironic, and secretly sensitive. Her style blends Victorian melancholy, gothic symbolism, and morbid grace – echoing the visual world of the Middle Ages.
As in the miniatures of our facsimiles – for instance in the Beatus Apocalypse or the Isabella Apocalypse – death is not hidden but depicted, interpreted, contemplated.
In medieval thought, darkness was not emptiness but a realm of revelation – much like in Wednesday’s world.
“I find beauty in the darkness” could easily have been uttered by a fourteenth-century monk rather than the daughter of the Addams Family.
Black Magic and Feminine Power
Wednesday stands in a long tradition of women who balanced on the edge between genius and damnation.
In the Middle Ages, such figures appeared as healers, prophets, heretics or witches – women of knowledge whose wisdom was feared.
In works like the Book of Kells or the Van Damme Hours, we encounter similar symbols: the serpent, the moon, herbs, and black birds.
They allude to transformation and insight – to the shadow side of knowledge embodied by Wednesday herself.
The Universal Art Group’s facsimiles reveal how subtly medieval artists handled these signs.
A closer look at the delicate illuminations of the De Lisle Psalter shows that “magic” was often simply early science – hidden in pigment and gold.
Death, Ravens, and Memento Mori
Wednesday adores ravens – in the Middle Ages, they were messengers between worlds.
In the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, they appear in scenes of winter, where life and death intertwine.
The cult of death was omnipresent: skulls, bones, and danse macabre imagery reminded viewers of transience – yet also of the soul’s triumph over the body.
Seen through this lens, Wednesday is a child of medieval thought.
The awareness of mortality lends depth to life – and a dark edge to humour.
From the Apocalypse to the Addams Family
The cynicism and irony of the Addams Family would not have been alien to medieval minds.
In the margins of illuminated manuscripts – such as the Isabella Psalter – we find grotesques, fools, and animals in human guise.
They subvert sacred texts with humour – just as Wednesday accepts life in the shadows as her truth.
The parallels to the Beatus Apocalypse are striking: there, the end of the world is not feared but celebrated in radiant colour.
Wednesday would have felt right at home – among angels, monsters, and visions seeking beauty within chaos.
A Modern Parable of Darkness
Wednesday is not merely a teen drama; it is a parable about individuality, morality, and violence – themes echoed in the Kulturalis publication Can We Stop Killing Each Other?
Both works – one fictional, one real – ask: how do we confront otherness?
Where does self-assertion end, and where does destruction begin?
The Universal Art Group and Kulturalis share a common purpose:
the art of questioning – of humanity, of violence, of beauty within the dark.
