medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Laura,
Jim's message just reminded me of two things:
- The ius patronatus of a chapel. Did it include a right to burial?
Could the right to a chapel be sold?
- Is there an Italian equivalent to the chantry? The literature on
English chantry chapels is interesting, but I am unsure how applicable
it is to Italy.
Tom Izbicki
jbugslag wrote:
> medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
>
> Laura,
> I've been waiting for someone more learned on the matter than me to weigh in on this, but
> my feeling is that, by 1300, burial in churches was well on the way to becoming quite normal.
> Before the 11th century, burial usually took place in the churchyard, with the exception of "the
> very special dead", the saints in other words, and with the equally important exception of
> founders of churches and their families, which in the time before the investiture controversy
> were very widespread. Beginning in the 11th century, burials within churches began to
> multiply. From founders, heads of religious institutions began to demand this right, and from
> there, the floodgates opened. Before the 13th century, church burial was still a highly
> prestigious privilege, but even after it became quite common, most people would have still
> been buried outside in the churchyard. And initially, the cost of this privilege was prohibitively
> high. At Peterborough in England, for example, Abbot Ernulf (1107-1114) made an
> agreement between his convent and those knights who held abbey lands, that a knight
> should pay yearly two parts of his tithes and at his death a third of his whole estate for burial
> in the church. As well, all his "knightly endowments", including his horse and his arms were
> to be brought with his body to the funeral ceremonies and offered up to St Peter, at which
> time the convent received the corpse in procession and performed the Office of the Dead.
> As burial in the church became more common, the cost was undoubtedly made more
> reasonable. By the later Middle Ages, it was undoubtedly relatively inexpensive, yet other
> factors were then involved in church burial. Under normal circumstances, an individual was
> expected to be buried at his parish church (whether inside or in the cemetery surrounding it),
> but the appearance of the Mendicant orders changed that situation dramatically. More and
> more, mendicant churches began to compete with parish churches for the burial of citizens,
> to the point where they were widely criticized for it. And the concept of an Eigenkirche
> certainly did not go away. Both monastic and collegiate churches were founded in the later
> Middle Ages specifically as burial churches, either for individuals or dynasties. Concurrently,
> private chapels within larger churches began to proliferate. An indicative "early" example is
> the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris; as built in the late 12th and early 13th century, it was
> ringed with projecting buttresses supporting the flyers above. During the late 13th and early
> 14th centuries, the aisle walls were progressively broken through, and private chapels built
> between the buttresses, to the point where the entire cathedral was ringed with private
> chapels. In Italy, such private chapels came to be designed from the beginning, as at S.
> Croce, the Franciscan church in Florence. Although I am not certain of the legal basis for it,
> families could "buy" such chapels, although it was not always the case that they
> accommodated burials. A good source for this phenomenon, from an architectural point of
> view, is H.M. Colvin's Architecture and the Afterlife, but I can't remember whether he
> addresses the institutional aspects of the phenomenon that you were enquiring after.
> Another source that might be useful is Philippe Aries's encyclopedic The Hour of Our Death,
> which certainly treats this phenomenon from many perspectives in considerable detail. Erwin
> Panofsky's book, Tomb Sculpture, may also be useful. In relation to your specific topic, it
> strikes me that the Scrovegni family was essentially emulating noble practice in founding a
> family chapel that would accommodate burial. You might consider "parallel" cases such as
> the Church of Notre-Dame at Ecouis, founded in the early 14th century by Enguerrand de
> Marigny as a dynastic burial church (cf the book on this by Dorothy Gillerman) or the
> monastery of Tewkesbury in England, refurbished as a dynastic mausoleum in the early 14th
> century by the Despenser family. I hope your query provokes a response that addresses
> legislation, because I am interested in it, too.
> Cheers,
> Jim Bugslag
>
> On 12 Apr 2009 at 14:10, Laura Jacobus wrote:
>
>
>> medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and
>> culture
>>
>> Happy Easter and Passover to all.
>>
>> Can anyone tell me what regulations or customs existed regarding
>> burials in churches (thirteen and fourteenth century Italy being my
>> main concerns)? I'm working on a private church (the Scrovegni Chapel
>> in Padua), and my sense is that c.1300 it was still quite rare for
>> lay-people to be buried in churches, though the practice was gaining
>> in popularity and Italian churches began to sprout private family
>> chapels for the purpose around this time. I'd be particularly
>> interested to know whether private churches or family chapels within
>> churches might have needed a special license for burials, or whether
>> it was simply assumed that patrons had the right to be buried in them.
>>
>> All best
>>
>> Laura
>>
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