Cimiteri e sepolture negli ordinamenti civili ed ecclesiastici tra tarda antichità ed età comunale

Abstract

For every human society, death has always represented the last cognitive frontier and, at the same time - through techniques, rites, codifications and symbolic elaborations - the same societies have tried to interpret the phenomenon of mortality, provide it with a sense, integrate it into its own system of values and transform it into a criterion for self-representation. The evolution of the civil and ecclesiastical laws and statutes that societies gave themselves from late antiquity to the Middle Ages reflects a partial but interesting change in mental attitudes and human behavior towards death. Through the diachronic evolution of the cemetery structure between rules and practice, different attitudes are formed towards death: from the separation of the Roman necropolis due to hygienic and sacral rules, up to a progressive familiarity, which was established between late antiquity and the high Middle Ages and which lasted until Napoleon.