THE CREATION OF COMMUNITY THROUGH EPITAPHS: THE CASE OF EARLY MEDIEVAL LYON

This chapter argues that communities were represented and created through the text, image, and space of funerary inscriptions (epitaphs), and that such epitaphs had a key role in the communication between the living and the dead in early medieval communities. The focus is a series of epitaphs from early medieval Lyon. This group of epitaphs comprises several elite epitaphs, commemorating the saints and bishops of Lyon, as well as a number of less elite inscriptions that invoke the saints. This selection of inscriptions provides insight into the formation of diff erent yet overlapping communities, including the living Christian congregation in Lyon; the community of the living with the dead; and the relationships of the dead one another, through ad sanctos burials. This chapter fi nds that the community formation in Lyon was enacted through epitaphs and underpinned through the patronus, both the saintly patron and the earthly, episcopal one.