SEPOLCRI

Spaces of Encounters and burial Practices of the Other: Liminality, Cemeteries, and funerary Rituals in early modern Italy

The project provides the first comprehensive and connective analysis of non-Catholic funerary practices and burial spaces in Italy, c. 1500–1780, highlighting changing attitudes toward minority groups in a predominantly Catholic society. According to Canon Law, the burial of non-Catholics and heretics in consecrated ground was strictly forbidden. As a result, non-Catholics were typically buried outside city walls, in unmarked graves or open fields—reflecting their perceived impurity and exclusion from the social and spiritual community. Catholic participation in the funeral rituals of other religions was likewise prohibited. Despite these formal restrictions, numerous documented exceptions show that Catholics did occasionally attend non-Catholic funerals and that some non-Catholics were buried in consecrated cemeteries. From the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, significant changes emerged: in cities where religious minorities played an important role in the urban economy, some groups were granted official burial grounds. SEPOLCRI investigates both canonical norms and everyday practices to better understand the evolving relationship between minority groups and the dominant Catholic majority.

Through the lens of funerary practices, the project examines broader questions of tolerance, intolerance, inclusion, and marginality, considering a range of non-Catholic populations—Jews, Orthodox Christians, Protestants, and Muslims—from various social backgrounds and degrees of mobility, including long-established foreign communities, merchants, travellers, students, enslaved individuals, and seafarers. By focusing on how non-Catholic funerary customs intersected with Catholic urban life, SEPOLCRI offers a transformative contribution to scholarship on religious diversity, urban history, and Counter-Reformation studies. It places marginalized individuals at the centre of inquiry, reshaping our understanding of premodern dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, tolerance and intolerance, negotiation, and representation within the religious, political, and social fabric of early modern Italy.

The project is funded by the European Union.

Drawing showing the transportation of the body of a Jewish man in Venice. Note the mocking nature of the drawing including a pig on top of the coffin.

Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Provveditori e Sopraprovveditori alla Sanità, Necrologi, reg. 998 c. 1 (1701-1765).