L'ermite et la mort durant le haut Moyen Age

The questions raised by hermits in their relation with the world consist in knowing whether their presence in cemeteries is that of mere caretakers or that of organizers of the good death, creating thus the community of the living and the dead. As early as the Vth-VIth centuries the martyr's bloody offering for the conversion of the Barbarians tended to be rapidly replaced by the near vicinity of their cells in l'Isle-Aumont, Marville, Nivelles and Fuchaux, serve as focus for the community and integrate death to life. They make the stone sarcophagus into new baptismal fonts in which, with some humour, they lie after having washed and got dressed. Death is active, public and singing. In the VHIth century a more anxious death, marked by confession, appears among the Vosges hermits and those who had assumed episcopal functions. Boniface's authoritarian methods brought about a pessimistic clericalisation of death until the IXth-Xth centuries

Archaeology · Art · Confession (law · Humanities · Martyr · Pessimism · Relation (database · Theology · Death, Funerary Practices, and Mourning · History · Medieval European History and Architecture · Philosophy

• The Archaeology of Monasticism

  Sheila Bonde, Clark Maines•Speculum•1988

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