Single Review on past events

The death of unborn or early deceased infants challenges every society, from prehistory until today. Archaeological sources, as well as written records, shed light on the various strategies brought up by different societies and actors to handle the fact of humans’ certain death.

In her talk during the Jour Fixe on January 20^th Barbara Hausmair, medieval archeologist at the Zukunftskolleg, discussed burial practices for infants, as well as the theological considerations about the spatial dimensions of the afterlife in the Middle Ages. In medieval Christian belief, Original Sin – caused by Adam and Eve eating from the forbidden tree in paradise – could only be absorbed by the sacrament of baptism. Therefore, children dying before baptism were not considered cleansed of Original Sin and therefore after their death excluded from and instead confined in a separated place, the so-called Limbus Puerorum. But not only in the theological concepts of the afterlife were unbaptized children expelled from the realms of the faithful Christians.

In the Middle Ages, Christian corpses were usually buried in the churchyard, with only  clergymen and higher nobility having the privilege of burial inside the church. Unbaptized persons on the other hand were prohibited from being interned inside the church or the churchyard. This spatial separation evolved from theological considerations and liturgical practices that transformed the spatial structure of the church building itself into a micro-duplicate of the divine structure of the cosmos. The entrance of the church and the near-by baptistery symbolized the entrance to Christianity, while the choir embodied the heavenly kingdom itself – reserved for Christians only.

In her recent case studies on burial topography, Hausmair examined several rural churchyards in Austria and Switzerland in regard to graves of very early deceased or even stillborn infants. Osteological analyses of infant bones can reveal the age at which the babies died, for example before being carried to full term (fetus), during or shortly after birth (perinates/neonates) or in the first months of their lives (infants). However, age cannot serve as the sole only indicator for a child’s status within the Christian community. It is the place of the burial itself in relation to other graves within the cemetery but also in relation to Christian spatial concepts embodied in church architecture. The survey revealed a variety of burial practices, all of them showing strong connections to the spatial connotations of cemetery and church topography.

In the case of the Swiss church of Bleienbaach, fetuses and neonates were predominantly buried inside the church close to the western entrance and the presumed former location of the baptismal font, a liminal area that constitutes the border between Christianity and the outside world. In Kirchlindach, mostly neonates and infants were buried next to the choir, a place where usually only priests and elites were interred. In the third case study of the infant cemetery of Göttweig, neonates and fetuses were buried next to a secluded church without burial privilege which is located on a dominant hilltop overlooking the contemporary villages. The topographical position of these burials on the one hand separates them from the regular cemeteries of the Christian communities, but at the same time brings the corpses physically closer to the atmospheric sky, above which in medieval believe heaven was sought to be located. All those cases suggest that medieval laity actively engaged with the sacred space around them in order to influence the status of their presumably unbaptized children in the afterlife, thus indicating substantial deviations from the official teachings and directives of the Church.