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Death and the Fraternity: A Short Study on the Dead in Late Medieval Confraternities

Confraternity procession

Confraternity processionDeath and the Fraternity: A Short Study on the Dead in Late Medieval Confraternities

Joelle Rollo-Koster

Confraternitas: Vol. 1, No. 9 (1999)

Abstract

Since the publication of Philippe Aries’ ground-breaking The Hour of our Death, historians of confraternities have largely followed his lead and treated confraternities as a “guarantee of eternity.” Later studies of confraternities echo Aries’ words: “Of all the work of mercy, the service for the dead became the main purpose of the confraternities … the confraternities … provided assurance regarding the afterlife. The dead were assured of the prayers of their confreres… after burial, the confraternity continued the services and prayers that the church council or monasteries were suspected of neglecting or forgetting.”

We see Aries’ influence in Coulet’s “the union between living and dead that the confraternity built and preserved is evident in the great change in religious sensibility found in the later Middle Ages,” and again in Jacques Chiffoleau’s “the statutes show that the confraternity functioned as a family. And because the confraternity was a substitute family, it played a very important role in the preparation for death, funerary rituals and suffrages for the dead… Rejection for non-observance of the statutes was the only form of confraternal exclusion, since death itself could not have untied the links that boundconfreres… in the mind of medieval men, the imaginary family assembled the dead and the living of each lineage, and confraternities considered that they (the dead) would always be part of the association.” Thus, be it based on a study of confraternal statutes or individual wills, historians have often defined confraternities as extended surrogate families, regrouping the living and the dead under their parentage.

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