L’écrit sur la tombe : entre nécessité pratique, souci pour le salut et élaboration doctrinale. À travers la documentation épigraphique de la Normandie médiévale

Abstract

Medieval funerary inscriptions, in Normandy as in the remainder of France, do not speak about death as a concept. They rather describe a particular death, the one which touched the dead buried near the inscription. If it’s difficult to locate in the texts the speech of Church on death, the examination of the epitaphs and other commemorative texts allows considering the various functions of the writing on the tomb and seeing how it answers at the same time to circumstances of burial, needs for commemoration and eschatological concerns.

Keywords

• epigraphy
• inscription
• endotaph
• epitaph
• commemoration
• salvation