Charnel house
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A charnel house is a vault or building where human skeletal remains are stored. They are often built near churches for depositing bones that are unearthed while digging graves. The term can also be used more generally as a description of a place filled with death and destruction.
The term is borrowed from Middle French charnel, from Late Latin carnāle ("graveyard"), from Latin carnālis ("of the flesh").[1]
Africa, Europe, and Asia
In countries where ground suitable for burial was scarce, corpses would be interred for approximately five years following death, thereby allowing decomposition to occur. After this, the remains would be exhumed and moved to an ossuary or charnel house, thereby allowing the original burial place to be reused. In modern times, the use of charnel houses is a characteristic of cultures living in rocky or arid places, such as the Cyclades archipelago and other Greek islands in the Aegean Sea.
Monastery of the Transfiguration (Saint Catherine's), Mount Sinai
Since the Sinai Peninsula is an inhospitable place, the brethren of St. Catherine's have struggled to eke out a subsistence-level existence. The difficulty in establishing a large cemetery in the rocky ground notwithstanding, relics are also gathered for temporal and spiritual reasons: a reminder to the monks of their impending death and fate in the hereafter. The Archbishop of Saint Catherine's is commonly the Abbot as well. After death, he is afforded the dignity of a special niche within the "Skull-House".
North America
A charnel house is also a structure commonly seen in some Native American societies of the Eastern United States. Major examples are the
England
Charnel houses were common in England, primarily before the Reformation. Because they were associated with the Catholic Church, using charnel houses fell out of practice after the Reformation to the point that modern people barely knew they had existed. "Charnelling continued with gusto throughout the late medieval period. However, in the mid-16th century the Dissolution of the Monasteries changed their standing completely. No longer were charnels things of status, instead becoming symbols of close living-dead relations which reflected Popish superstition."[4]
The charnel house at Spitalfields, for example, was in use during Roman times through to the medieval period. "As a large burial ground that was much-used over the space of several centuries, it would not be unusual for old bones to be disturbed when new graves were being dug. These bones would be removed from the ground to make space for newly-buried corpses, and stored instead in the churchyard's charnel house."[5]
During the 1950s reconstruction of
At the
See also
References
- ^ "CHARNEL : Définition de CHARNEL".
- ^ Holy Bible NIV: Exodus 24
- ^ "Surah An-Nazi'at - 1-46". Quran.com. Retrieved 2023-01-24.
- ^ "Dry Bones Live: A Brief History of Charnel Houses, c. 1300-1900 AD".
- ^ "A medieval charnel house below the streets of Spitalfields". 26 January 2020.
- ^ "London's House of the Dead – St Bride's Charnel House". 15 November 2020.
- ^ Gransden, A. (2015). A history of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds 1257–1301. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, pp. 222-223
Sources
- Papaioannou, Evangelos (1980) The Monastery of St. Catherine, Sinai, St. Catherine's Monastery: Guidebook, 48 pp., Cairo: Isis Press.
- public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Charnel House". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 5 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 947. This article incorporates text from a publication now in the
- Craig-Atkins, E., Crangle, J. N., Hadley, D. 'The Nameless Dead: Inside a Medieval Charnel Chapel', Current Archaeology, 321 (2016) 40–47.
- Craig-Atkins, E., Crangle, J. N., Barnwell, P. S., Hadley, D., Adams, A. T., Atkins, A., McGinn, J. R. and James, A., 'Charnel Practices in Medieval England: New Perspectives', Mortality, 24, 2, (2019) 145–166.
- Crangle, J. N., A Study of Post-Depositional Funerary Practices in Medieval England. (PHD Thesis: University of Sheffield, 2016).
- Koudounaris, P., The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses (London: Thames and Hudson, 2011).
External links
- Media related to Charnel house at Wikimedia Commons