BURIALS IN RENAISSANCE FLORENCE, 1350-1500

Despite the wealth of interest in Renaissance Florence, little attention has been paid to a key feature of the city's life: its burial customs. Burial rites provide a way of looking at both the characteristic features of a society as well as its deepest concerns. By using the customs and rituals associated with death as an index to long-term changes in religious sensibilities and social styles, this dissertation makes an important contribution to our understanding of Florentine culture and society.;This dissertation examines the forms and social functions of the burial ritual in Florence from 1350 to 1500. The first chapter examines the constituent parts of the ritual, and analyzes significant changes in form for the period under consideration. Chapter Two documents the economics of burials--the cost of funeral trappings such as wax, mourning clothes and hangings, as well as the distinctions in burial costs for Florentines of different social ranks, for men and women, and for laymen and ecclesiastics. The third chapter traces the regulations which impinged upon the journey from death to grave. These regulations consisted of communal sumptuary laws designed to limit excesses of display, statutes which established wage and price guidelines for necessary services, canonical and synodal legislation, and confraternal injunctions to honor a fellow member. An analysis of burial display and its social meaning constitutes the fourth chapter. This chapter traces changing patterns in the consumption of funeral pomp over the course of the 15th century, and indicates the relationship of burial display to its social function. Chapter Five examines the Florentine cult of the dead. Here the analysis focuses on anniversary masses and meals, tombs and commemorative imagery, and the cultivation of the memory of the dead. This dissertation makes a significant contribution not only to our understanding of Florentine society but to Renaissance studies as a whole, and to the growing literature on the history of death.