Cities of the Living and the Dead: burial practices and emotional communities in late medieval Mediterranean cities

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My doctoral project is a comparative study of burial practices in European and Islamic cities in the later medieval Mediterranean world and what these can tell us about the social make-up of cities. Burial practices offer us an insight into the emotional communities which inhabited later medieval Mediterranean cities. I will employ the concept of emotional communities to refer to communities united by particular burial practices and grief. In these cities, burial practices and the meanings attached to them differed between emotional communities, and in turn contributed to their construction. Thus, they offer us a unique way of reconstructing these cities from the bottom-up. I will look at how practices and their meanings differed across constructed communities and how these intersected with social categories such as religious affiliation, social status, gender, occupation and kinship ties.My study will focus on four cities: Cairo, Damascus, Marseille and Florence. In examining these four cities, two Islamic and two Christian, the specificities within and between each socio-religious system can be analysed. A wide net will be cast in terms of the source materials that I will use. These will include chronicles, biographies, pilgrimage guides, travellers' accounts, legal writings and archaeological evidence, but also contemporary literary accounts featuring social commentaries on death and burial, such as the Decameron and the One Thousand and One Nights.The project will be divided thematically into five chapters, where I will then work from my methodological base to prise out the similarities and differences within these four cities. Chapter One will focus on the spatial element of burial practices, building up a picture of where burial takes place in the broader topographical landscapes of these cities. Chapter Two will further examine how different communities were buried in these spaces. Here, I will focus on material culture, considering the structure of tombs and incorporating archaeological and epigraphical evidence. The following chapters will centre more specifically on funerary rites, with Chapter Three focusing on the practice of wailing and Chapter Four analysing the nature of funerary processions. Chapter Five will look more specifically at memorial practices for the deceased after funerals had taken place, further exploring conceptions of community continuity between 'cities of the living and the dead'.