The Care of the Dead in Late Antiquity

In my second book, Religion et sépulture: l'Eglise, les vivants et les morts dans l'Antiquité tardive (Paris: EHESS, 2002), forthcoming in English translation as The Care of the Dead in Late Antiquity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), I argue against the scholarly consensus that burial and commemoration of the dead were left by Christian bishops out of their sphere of control and to the care of the family.

This research project started with a philological study (no. 1 below) of the earliest uses of the word “cemetery” in Greek and Latin in which I show that the word was used to designate a single burial, and not a common burial ground, thus challenging general assumptions about the existence of communal burial ground for Christians based on the appearance of a specific term to designate them. A paper on the Latin word area (no. 2) concluded similarly for testimonies about Christian burial in Carthage. Finally, I examined the role of the Roman Church in the development of the catacombs (no. 3).

• 1. “KOIMHTHRION et COEMETERIUM: tombe, tombe sainte, nécropole.” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Antiquité 105, no. 2 (1993): 975-1001.
• 2. “Les areae carthaginoises (Tertullien, Ad Scapulam 3, 1): cimetières communautaires ou enclos funéraires de chrétiens?”  Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Antiquité 108, no. 1 (1996): 175-189.
• 3. “L’Église de Rome et le développement des catacombes: à propos de l’origine des cimetières chrétiens.” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Antiquité 109, no. 2 (1997): 741-763.

These are the preliminary studies that are only summarized in the first chapter. In the rest of the book, I successively consider the role of religion in the choice of a burial place (on conversion and burial, see no. 4), the role of collegia in the organization of collective burial (on the participation of Christians in the collegia, see no.5 a lecture with some general considerations on a re-evaluation of the participation of Christians in public life), the new attention paid to the disposal of the body with the definition of a specific crime of violation of the cadavers and the shift to inhumation, the importance of burying the martyrs and the poor in the construction of Christian identity (no. 6 elaborates on this theme), and finally the funerals and the commemorative practices.

• 4. “Conversion and Burial in the Late Roman Empire.” In Seeing and believing: Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Edited by Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton, 61-83. Studies in Comparative History. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2003.
• 5. “Associations and early Christianity: re-evaluating the participation of Christians in public life (2nd-4th c.).” Unpublished lecture.
• 6. “Sépulture et construction de l’identité chrétienne aux II^e et III^e siècles.” Annali di storia dell’esegesi 21, no. 2 (2004): 131-146.

Since the publication of the book, I have more research on the commemoration of the dead and its transformation in Late Antiquity . No. 7 is a new study of the position of Augustine on the funerary banquets. No. 8 looks at the transformation of the funerary banquets and their material installations in North-Africa between the second and fifth centuries.

• 1. “Nec deserere memorias suorum: Augustine and the family-based commemoration of the dead.” Augustinian Studies 36, no. 1 (2005): 99-111.
• 2. “Commemorating the dead in North Africa: continuity and change from the second to the fifth century CE.” In Ritual Changes, Changing Rituals: Function and Meaning in Ancient Funerary Practices. Forthcoming.