ABSTRACT
During the late Middle Ages, village cemeteries were busy sites in which things were bought and sold and political agreements were made with the local lord; at the same time, village communities appear to have been particularly diligent in defining and limiting burial rights. Cemeteries were in fact central to the process of constructing community identity and were not merely places to remember and venerate the dead. These different social perceptions of cemeteries are illustrated by the individual and collective uses made of them in the specific but broad context of thirteenth-century rural Piedmont.
