Le cimetière dans le Moyen Âge latin. Lieu sacré, saint et religieux

Résumé En

The cemetery in the Middle Ages sacred holy and religious place. The institution of the Christian cemetery- a collective burial space for the faithful, attached to a cult edifice, and consecrated by a bishop- required a long evolution that implied several discontinuities from Antiquity, and was not fully accomplished until the twelfth century. Placing the dead in consecrated ground reverts to "Ecclesia" in all its forms: a spiritual society made up of the community of the faithful, but also an ensemble of stone buildings rooted in the ground -ground in which the bodies of the Christians are buried, against the walls of churches. In the absence any scriptural or patristic authority medieval people mainly used juridical categories from Antiquity to justify the institution of the Christian cemetery. Canonists and liturgists called the cemetery a "sacred place", "holy" and "religious", according to a tripartition defined by late Roman law ("sacer"/ "sanctus"/ "religiosus"). The notions of Roman law thus "rediscovered" by clerics were manipulated, contorted, in order to conform to the medieval realities, to which they were basically alien.