Mourning the Dead in Christian Late Antiquity
Date
2020-04-28
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Abstract
The transition of the Roman funeral (with its focus on family) to a Christian liturgy for death (focusing on clergy and text) has never been explored. Nor has mourning the dead, as part of the funeral-in-transition. This study is, therefore, a new inquiry. Its aim is to ascertain how change and continuity constructed a Christian response to death that began to manifest in the Latin West around the time of Charlemagne ca. 800 CE. The study asks: To what extent did late antique Christian families influence the christianization of the Roman funeral? What role did women play in that transformation? Literary and non-literary sources (church councils, letters, homilies, hagiographies, graffiti, inscriptions, etc.) from late antiquity were scrutinized using insights and methods from ritual studies with theories from place and performance studies. Material evidence (archaeology, art, artifacts, monuments, grave goods, etc.) were analyzed with the help of mortuary studies together with memory and social identity studies. Heuristic devices such as the “rhetoric of condemnation” and the “hermeneutics of suspicion” mitigated androcentric bias in the data. In order to assess the transition from the Roman funeral to the Christian liturgy for death, “an ideal type”—the funeral process outlined by Valerie M. Hope in Roman Death—was used for comparison. Finally, the data was read from the perspective of “ordinary” Christians; women were considered in terms of their kinship relationships, domestic practices, roles as memory-keepers, as household managers and healers, as patrons, and especially as caretakers and ritual specialists in terms of death. Key results of this study showed that the transition of the Roman funeral to a Christian liturgy was largely due to a gradual shift in control of the funeral process away from the family and into the hands of the church clergy. By the eighth century negotiation between the two groups had resulted in the codification—directed by the Carolingian reformers—of liturgical books known as ordines and sacramentaries that formalized rituals for dying, death, and burial. Most remarkable was that women’s performance of mourning and ritual lament, however, retained a certain degree of independence that persisted throughout late antiquity and beyond.
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Keywords
funeral rituals; women and the funeral; late antiquity; Christianity; transition to a funeral liturgy; mourning and lament; domestic religiosity; death and burial; private religion; women as ritual specialists
Citation
Mogen, S. L. M. (2020). Mourning the Dead in Christian Late Antiquity (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.