The View from a Drawbridge

Warning: You may not want to read this one over breakfast, and if you have a weak stomach, you may want to skip it entirely. The topic describes Medieval procedures for dealing with dead bodies, and it isn’t pretty.)

Italians, particularly Catholic Italians (which is about 80% of them), particularly Catholic Italians in the Middle Ages, had a much more intimate relationship with death than you or I most likely do.

In a recent post entitled Embracing Mortality in the Capuchin Crypt, I discussed memento mori, which became popular in the middle ages as a religious reminder of our mortality. You would see skulls cropping up in paintings, and even artistically arranged bones, or sculptures of skeletons on tombs which are often called cadaver monuments. You are also presented with such inscriptions as tempus fugit (time flies), or ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The belief was that if you kept your imminent death in mind, you’d be less apt to sin in life.

Is it any wonder that people in the Middle Ages were obsessed with death? Without the life-saving vaccines we have today, diseases that we hardly ever see now could easily take you down back then. Plagues could sweep through villages and wipe out 2/3rds of the population. Women often didn’t live through childbirth, and children were lucky to survive their first year. Medical treatment for illnesses could often be just as deadly as the disease. You couldn’t even trust that your loved one’s body wouldn’t be dug up out of its grave by thieves, to be sold to a medical school. To live in that era was to continually come face to face with death.

But according to their Christian doctrines, death isn’t the end of the road as many of us see it now. Those of us who believe in heaven and/or hell think you’re dead, then off you go to one place or the other. But back then it wasn’t so simple. They believed that when you die, all souls first went to purgatory, where all your impurities were burned away. (Unlike hell, though, this is a temporary thing.) Once you were pure, only then could you go to heaven.

If your soul didn’t get a direct flight, but instead had a stopover to purify in purgatory, then why shouldn’t your body go through the same process? Thus, the concept of “double burial” came about. You were disposed of in some form or fashion until all your impure, gross, gooey bits were gone, leaving only your pure white bones behind (more or less. A certain amount of cleaning was involved.) Then, while your pure soul was heading off to heaven, your pure bones were headed off to an ossuary, and you finally, officially, shuffled off this mortal coil.

This double burial concept does appeal to me in that it gives the living a chance to get used to their loss. Back then, you were required to remain in mourning until the deceased’s bones reached the ossuary. So, you at least got about a year to feel all your feels without being pushed to snap out of it. Of course, all that pushing must have gotten intense after ossuary day. Not everyone has the same mourning timeline. But it sure must have been nice to at least have a year-long grace period, at the very least.

In some cases, mourners actively participated in caring for the corpse during the one-year rotting body phase. That sounds horrific to me, but on the other hand, it does give you the opportunity to see that the person you once knew is slowly (albeit disgustingly) melting away and most definitely turning into something else. Something you don’t have an emotional connection to. It would also remind you how impermanent life is, and how silly it is to be vain or arrogant or covetous, because in the end, we all wind up like this, rich and poor alike.

The mindset was very different in the Middle Ages. Burial wasn’t about preserving corpses forever. (They’d probably be horrified by formaldehyde.) No. Flesh was transient; bones were enduring and could be preserved reverently.

Double burial also had some practical purposes. Burial space was quite often at a premium, so it was a great idea to dig people up, and stack what little remained, i.e. their bones, in an ossuary. Let the next dead person have a turn at your gravesite. That makes perfect sense. Because let’s face it: there will never be a shortage of dead bodies.

Venice, in particular, struggled with limited burial space. Lest we forget, the whole place is on a big lagoon. Dig more than a foot or two down, and your hole fills up with water. So, the elite were buried inside churches in niches or under the stone floors or in crypts. Convents and monasteries also had cloisters where it wasn’t unusual to find graves. But there were only so many of those.

The lower classes would be buried in churchyards, but they had this nasty habit of popping back up during floods, or the waterlogged coffins would collapse, leaving a gaping, smelly hole, and the decomposition process took a lot longer due to all the water, and while it was happening, it was contaminating the drinking water. (A fun fact is that a lot of the piazzas in Venice used to be churchyards. The bones had to be removed before they were paved over, but no doubt they missed quite a few, so every time you cross a little Venetian piazza, you’re probably walking over someone’s grave. The exception being the piazza of San Marco. No one was ever buried there, despite what tour guides might tell you.)

So how was the whole purgatory/decomposition process handled aside from the smelly, messy burial and digging up thing, especially in Venice where that wasn’t practical? Beneath many Christian churches from the Middle Ages, especially Catholic ones, and most definitely Italian ones, there is a putridarium. Now, these were not used for the very poor, or for plague victims or for mass deaths, but for everyone else, they were a viable option.

A putridarium is a stone room lined with stone seats (most often, but one is known to have inclined niches). There was no wood in these rooms. And there’s a drain hole in the seat, so it looks like a room full of stone age toilets. They had no ornate designs. There was no attempt to beautify the decay. A body is seated (or inclined) in the seat, and over time, all their nasty, gooey, impure bits slough off and go down the drain hole. There’s a sieve placed in the hole so no bones accidentally go down there, too. There’s a stone bason below the hole, and in some cases (though not in Venice, due to the groundwater issue), the liquid was allowed to drain directly into the soil.

Eventually, what you’re left with is basically a skeleton that might be covered in dried skin depending on the climate. This is then taken out of there, and, in a sacred ritual with prayer, the bones are separated out and cleaned with vinegar or wine until they’re nice and white and pure like your soul, and they are then placed in the ossuary. Try as I might, I couldn’t get a definitive answer as to what became of the contents of the bowl that was in the hole below you, or the skin. It was considered impure, so it must have been discarded somehow. But maybe not knowing is for the best.

Disgusting, right? Oh, but it gets much worse. In many locations, monks, priests, nuns, and/or loved ones would spend a great deal of time in these Putridariums, in order to pray and contemplate mortality. They’d visit quite frequently throughout the process. In some places, they’d put new clothes on the bodies over time as the decomposition ruined their current outfits, but in most cases the bodies were wrapped in simple shrouds. This was centuries before air conditioning, and the stench was often so bad that it would permeate the basilica above and disrupt the mass. The bug population also increased over time. (If that was what was happening to your body, I shudder to think how purgatory was going for your soul.)

In most cases these putridariums have long since been sealed off, repurposed, or destroyed, but there are one or two still out there that can be seen, in Naples and Palermo. The ones in Venice are inaccessible and have only been seen by archeologists while doing building restorations. Here are a few pictures I pulled off the internet. They are a fascinating monument to an era when death was too close for comfort.

Putridariums fell out of fashion in the late 18^th century (although a few continued to be used until the early 20^th century), when medical thinking increasingly linked decay with disease because they mistakenly thought disease was spread by miasmas. However erroneous their thinking, it must have been nice to get rid of those smells. In Venice, Napoleon banned burials within the city in 1807 and now most Venetians are buried on the island of San Michele, which I blogged about here. Space is still at a premium, and most graves are still temporary, but they employ other methods to get one to the ossuary stage these days.

Putridariums thrived in a time and place when space and ritual mattered more than permanence. Their use is one of those practices that sound shocking now but were once considered practical, reverent, and even spiritually meaningful, especially in places like Venice. In modern times, corpse disposal is seen as messy and inconvenient and something we are willing to pay good money for someone else to deal with so that we don’t have to think about it overmuch. But maybe by skipping that step, we are missing a crucial piece of the puzzle of our own mortality and also underestimating the true and temporal value of our lives.

Additional Sources:

Consider the Putridarium

Journey to the mysterious ‘soul purification’ room of Ischia, Italy

Atlas Obscura–Poor Clares Convent Cemetery