Chalcedon, Council of 165CEMETERIES. That system associated the dead with
objects and sites of piety whose benefits they might
share. The bodies were left in the ground until only the
bones remained. For reasons of space, the bones were
then dug up and taken to a storage area or ossuary. The
graveyard around a church was often used for village or
neighborhood festivals and outdoor events such as ser-
mons, though the church tried in vain to stop those
practices.
With the development of belief in PURGATORYfrom
the 12th century, interment inside the church building
itself became more common. Graves within the sacred
area of the interior of the church seemingly better
enabled the deceased to benefit from PRAYERS, and espe-
cially from masses and liturgical ceremonies. These
indoor sites were soon marked, first by signs on the floor
and then by tombs resembling ALTARS, to demonstrate the
prestige and power of the deceased or of his or her family.
This arrangement required further donations to the
clergy. Soon secular parish priests were in competition
and conflict with the new mendicant orders, who were
poaching deceased parishioners for lucrative burial fees
and elaborate tombs in their new churches, which in part
were specifically designed for just that. This practice led
to a multiplication of the demand for elaborate marble
altars with human effigies and painted altarpieces for the
adjacent or surrounding chapels by the tombs of rich
donors.
These areas near parishes were to provide places
of refuge or asylum for accused criminals and those
seeking shelter from violence. Cemeteries could serve
for community activities such as festivals, dances, fairs,
the administration of justice, and the signing of peace
accords among feuding citizens or subjects. These
uses were condemned in later medieval ecclesiastical
legislation. During the great plagues of the 14th century
mass graves had to be used, often outside the traditional
graveyards, and people were buried with little or no
ceremony.
See alsoBURIAL RULES AND PRACTICES; DEATH AND THE
DEAD; PURGATORY.
Further reading:Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our
Death,trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Knopf, 1981);
Steven Basset, ed., Death in Towns: Urban Responses to
the Dying and the Dead, 100–1600(Leicester: Leicester
University Press, 1992); Christopher Daniell, Death and
Burial in Medieval England, 1066–1550(London: Rout-
ledge, 1997); Philip Rahtz, Tania Dickinson and Lorna
Watts, eds., Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries, 1979: The Fourth
Anglo-Saxon Symposium at Oxford (Oxford: B.A.R.,
1980); Sam Lucy, The Anglo-Saxon Way of Death: Burial
Rites in Early England(Stroud: Sutton, 2000); Peter H.
Sawyer, ed., Names, Words, and Graves: Early Medieval
Settlement: Lectures Delivered in the University of Leeds,
May 1978(Leeds: School of History, University of Leeds,
1979).
Cereta, Laura(Cereto, Cereti)(1469–1499)essayist
She was born in 1469, the eldest of six children, to Silve-
stro Cereta and Veronica di Leno, aristocrats of Brescia in
northern Italy. She was educated at home and at a nearby
convent in mathematics, astrology, and Latin. At age 15,
Laura married Pietro Serina, but 18 months later, he died
of plague at VENICE.
Widowed, childless, and suffering intense grief,
Cereta spent much of the rest of her life writing essays
and letters to prominent churchmen, scholars, and fel-
low citizens of Brescia. She met with humanists and sus-
tained friendships with other learned women. She was
attacked for her views by her male and female peers,
who claimed her father actually wrote her letters since
women were incapable of such writing. She defended
herself ardently.
When Cereta died she had produced a volume of her
collected letters and an unpublished manuscript contain-
ing explicitly autobiographical material. She portrayed
herself as a compliant daughter, denounced the violence
of war, lamented the difficult place of women in search of
fame in a male world, and reflected on the option to
retreat to a convent. Defending women writers, she pro-
moted principles of rationality as guides for the active
female life and was skeptical of traditional views of sexu-
ality and gender roles. She promoted the possibilities of
the convent or urban residence as places where women
could participate in literary culture without injury to
their reputation. She was much mourned at her death at
age 30 in 1499.
Further reading:Laura Cereta, Collected Letters of a
Renaissance Feminist,ed. Diana Robin. (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1997); Margaret L. King and Albert
Rabil Jr., eds., Her Immaculate Hand: Selected Works by
and about the Women Humanists of Quattrocento Italy
(Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies,
1992); Albert Rabil, Jr., Laura Cereta, Quattrocento
Humanist (Binghamton: Center for Medieval & Early
Renaissance Studies, 1981).Chalcedon, Council of Chalcedon was a city in
northwestern Asia Minor, in the vicinity of CON-
STANTINOPLE. It was famous for the assemblies of prelates
of the Christian church held at its imperial palace. The
most important of these assemblies was the Fourth ECU-
MENICALCOUNCIL, held in October 451 at the request of
Emperor Marcian (r. 450–457). About 600 bishops, most
from the East, attended the council. Its purpose was its
definition of faith to deal with heretical movements in the
church, especially those over the nature of Christ. Its
main achievement was a definition of the FAITH, entitled
the Chalcedon Creed, which condemned various HERE-
SIESand established orthodoxy. The fundamental princi-
ple of all Orthodox Christology was that there was in
Christ one person and two natures, the human and the