From Pietas and Pity to Purification: The Transformation of the Meaning of Mourning in Late Antiquity

This research project examined the transformation of meanings associated with mourning from the first through the fourth centuries CE in the Latin West. While mourning has been an interest of classical scholars interested in the Roman funeral and funerary rituals, the impact of the emergence of Christianity on late antique mourning belief and practice has not been previously explored. This study asks how change and continuity both contested and reaffirmed the traditional meanings of mourning in the late antique Latin West. How was mourning used to communicate virtues such as piety, fidelity, and continence in Roman and Christian contexts? How did church fathers resolve the dissonance between the continuation of traditional mourning practices and Christian soteriological belief?Literary and non-literary sources, including fragmentary poetic and historical sources, Roman rhetorical handbooks, as well as letters and homilies from late antiquity, were analyzed using insights and methods from ritual studies together with semiotics to place the ritualized mourning body at the centre of the analysis, a shifting matrix of discourses, duties, moralizations, and idealizations. Consideration of the diversity of underlying discourses, such as status and gender, and their inherently shifting nature helps to address the monolithic representation of mourning created through the reconstruction of fragmentary sources. There are several key findings in this study. It demonstrated that the meaning of mourning was transformed from an outward-looking, exteriorized reflection of the Roman virtue of pietas to a representation of an interiorized piety. The communicative value of mourning in the Roman context could be highly persuasive and present in contexts that exceeded the funeral. As Roman pietas encountered Christian conceptions of holiness and purity, the meaning attributed to the gestures and countenance of mourning was transformed. The interiorization and self-reflexivity of Christian belief and praxis aligned ascetic chastity with the ideal mourner, especially in the idealizations of Christian widows. This significant conceptual transformation of the relationship between mourning and pietas meant that Christian men and women could mobilize mourning to demonstrate and communicate an interiorized sense of piety, which continued to be a potent communicative act throughout late antiquity and beyond.

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