Contenu du sommaire : Les chapitres cathédraux et la mort

Composed from the xiith century onwards, obituaries, which identified—in the form of a timeline—the dead for whom the clergy were obliged to pray each day for all eternity, testify to the importance ascribed to the maintenance—in these churches as in so many others—of individual memories intended for the salvation of each person's soul. Being regularly updated, they also recorded the donations made to finance these daily commemorations, and thus the monetary distributions that canons, chaplains, and clerics earned, which maintained their living standard and gave rise to substantial and regularly increased incomes. Bishops and canons were the most frequent beneficiaries of these anniversaries. A specific church would first of all ensure the salutary remembrance of its members, although a small number of church members were made to participate by founding a church. An individual's earthly family also became involved. Nonetheless, lay people with no blood relation to them, with the exception of the princes of the region, were faced with increasing exclusion.

We often assume that canons were necessarily buried within their cathedrals, especially in the Late Middle Ages. Yet none of the numerous wills left by the canons of Chartres indicated a desire to be buried there. One even finds that their remains are widely dispersed across the city and its suburbs. No bishop is buried within his cathedral. This practice is often justified by the existence of a ban. Canons and bishops end up explaining that Notre-Dame is a church that was founded before the Incarnation and that, as such, the purity of its soil deserves to be protected. The absence of any sepulchers in a French cathedral appears extraordinary, but a comparison with other cathedrals reveals that the ban on bodies is attested in several cities in the XIIIth century, and even later: at the end of the XVth century, such a ban appeared in Saint-Jean de Besançon and perhaps also at Le Puy. A cathedral and its immediate vicinity must no longer be viewed as having been the necessary places of burial for canons between 1200 and 1500.

Throughout the last three centuries of the Middle Ages, the cathedral chapters of Autun and Chalon-sur-Saône attempted to define their policy with regard to death by taking into account the particular situation of their episcopal city, including the topography, the balances that had been established between the different social and political organizations, and the long-standing privileges that the different religious institutions enjoyed. The supporting rites for the dying would continue to play a defining role in the cities of Autun and Chalon-sur-Saône. This was not the case for commemoration services, burials, and places of burial. The cathedral of Autun became an episcopal necropolis in the XIIth century, whereas the cathedral of Chalon had to wait until the end of the XVth century and the beginning of the XVIth century in order to become one too.

Thanks to indirect sources such as wills, the accounts of capitulary offices, and chronicles, it is possible to get a fairly accurate picture of the liturgy of death at the cathedral of Cambrai and to glean information on episcopal and canonical sepulchers for the end of the medieval period. The rites and funerary practices vary somewhat depending on whether the deceased is a bishop or a member of the chapter. Here we intend to follow the final journey of the deceased, from the deathbed to the grave. In the building's interior, the sepulchers were unequally divided up between three assemblies: the choir—reserved for the mausoleums of the bishops—, the naves, and the chapels, where—for better or worse—tombstones and the epitaphs of dignitaries and canons were bunched together. The decoration of the tombstones reflected the personality of the deceased, their particular devotion, and also their financial means and their aesthetic tastes.

Like any other church at the end of the Middle Ages, the cathedral of Angers underwent a significant increase in the demand for mass services – endless when it came to salvation procedures – either embodied by a simple anniversary, or by chantries, which implied a regular service (monthly, weekly, or even daily for the wealthiest individuals). This article deals with a problem that has been largely avoided by the historiography of death. This relates not to the religious meaning or the spiritual significance of these foundations but rather their economic dimension and the financial arrangements that underpin them, all of which were meant to guarantee their perpetuity until the Last Judgement. After presenting the fairly large corpus of sources (handwritten obituaries, wills…), this study successively brings up the financial conditions surrounding the establishment of anniversaries and chantries by recognizing the consequences of the progressive monetization of the economy in the late Middle Ages.

The cathedral chapter of Limoges left behind a significant obituary, albeit one that has not been entirely preserved in its original form. We have made it our mission to explore the situation of the xiiith century through this obituary (3G 11), which includes 370 entries, 84 of which are extras. Of these entries, 145 concern canons, but not all are anniversary donations, since these latter entries came hand in hand with the raising of offices to the double rite, as well as with multiple donations. In total, 107 canons from Limoges feature in the obituary. We thus have the complete list of deans from 1218 to 1308. The records are fairly detailed, outlining—for the most part—the basis of the donation, the debtors, and the « part de l'Œuvre » (overseen by the bailiff of anniversaries) so as to ensure a proper distribution. Yet it was never a question of carrying out a process of absolution over the sepulchers of canons, nor of making comments on the liturgy to follow (only with regard to the lighting and the ringing of the bells). The raising of offices to the double rite meant that the favorite saints of the canons became known, among whom were to be found many local saints.

The increasing power of military and mendicant orders in the three Provençal ecclesiastical provinces from the thirteenth century onwards is traditionally portrayed as a blow to the influence of the secular Church, prelates, and cathedral chapters, occurring within complex and changing local and regional geopolitical contexts. Various examples taken from a corpus of ecclesiastical sources that are still largely unpublished show that relations between the religious communities were often fractious. This often resulted in conflicts—sometimes lengthy ones—, as well as arbitrations, between the different elements of the Provençal clergy regarding the sharing of funeral rights between each community, the distribution of the revenue associated with the administration of death, and even the process of managing the dead and celebrating their memory. Through the lens of funeral operations, we examine this notion of competition and even rivalry between the communities.