“Bring your dead.” 939 skeletons say Monty Python was wrong

Leprosy carried a powerful stigma in medieval Europe, but new evidence collected from skeletons in Danish cemeteries suggests that sufferers were not always left out in death.

In medieval Denmark, grave location reflected social standing. Families that could afford it bought graves closest to the churchwhere land was considered more prestigious and, therefore, more expensive.

Researchers turned to these cemeteries to explore whether disease influenced who received these privileged places. They specifically examined whether the people with leprosya highly culturally stigmatized disease associated with sin, or tuberculosis, were excluded of high status areas.

The study’s findings were presented in a published Thursday in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.

Contrary to expectations, evidence showed that individuals with these diseases were buried in prominent locations with the same frequency than other members of their communities.

“When we started this work, I immediately remembered the movie ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’specifically from “, states Saige Kelmelisresearcher at the University of South Dakota and lead author of the article.

“I think this image portrays our ideas about how people in the past, and in some cases today, respond to debilitating diseases. However, our study reveals that medieval communities were variable in their responses and composition,” says Kelmelis.

“In several communities, those who were sick were buried next to their neighbors and received the same treatment than anyone else”, he adds.

Beyond the graves

Kelmelis and researchers from the University of Southern Denmark Vicki Kristensen e Dorthe Pedersenanalyzed 939 adult skeletons recovered from five medieval cemeteries in Denmark. Three sites were located in villages and two in rural areas, allowing the team to compare patterns between populations urban and rural areas.

Given that infectious diseases spread more easily in crowded environments, medieval villages likely had transmission rates higher rates of both leprosy and tuberculosis. THE poor sanitation and other unsanitary living conditions common in urban centers may also have increased susceptibility.

Although both diseases were widespread, they shaped daily life in different ways. THE leprosy often produced visible facial damage that clearly signaled the disease. Tuberculosis, on the contrary, used to cause less specific and less visibly noticeable symptoms.

“Tuberculosis is one of those chronic infections with which people can live for a long time without symptoms”, says Kelmelis, cited by .

“Furthermore, tuberculosis is not as visibly disabling such as leprosy and, at a time when the cause of the infection and the route of transmission were unknown, tuberculosis patients probably did not face the same stigmatization as the more obvious leprosy patients”, explains the researcher.

“Maybe medieval people were so busy dealing with an illness than the other It was just the icing on the cake of diseases”, he suggests.

To determine who had been affected, researchers examined each skeleton for telltale signs of illness and estimated age at death. Leprosy can leave characteristic facial lesions along with damage to the hands and feet caused by secondary infections. Tuberculosis typically affects the bones associated with the lungs, including nearby joints.

The team also created detailed maps of cemeteries to identify potential divisions of status, such as graves located within churches or other religious structures. Each individual was represented according to the location of the grave, allowing investigators compare patterns between higher and lower status areas.

“There is documentation of individuals who were able to pay a fee to have a most privileged burial place“, explains Kelmelis. “In life, these people — benefactors, knights and clerics — were probably also able to use their wealth to ensure greater proximity to divinitylike having a pew closer to the front of the church.”

Bring your dead

Scientists have not found any general link between illness and status of burial. Only in the Ribe urban cemetery were there differences that correlated with health: about 1/3 of people buried in the lower status cemetery had tuberculosis, compared to 12% of people buried in the monastery or church.

As people with leprosy or tuberculosis were not excluded from higher status areas, the authors suggest this reflected different levels of exposure to tuberculosis, and no stigma.

However, all the cemeteries contained many tuberculosis patients — especially the urban cemetery at Drotten, where almost half of the graves were in high-status areas and 51% had tuberculosis.

The people who could afford prestigious burials They could also have paid for better living conditions, which helped them survive tuberculosis long enough for the disease to scar their bones.

These results suggest that medieval people were less likely to exclude the visibly sick from society than stereotypes indicate. However, the researchers caution that more excavations are needed to obtain a more complete picture of some cemeteries, and that their strict diagnostic criteria may not have identified all patients.

“The individuals may have been carrying the bacteria but died before it could manifest in the skeleton,” warned Kelmelis. “Unless we can include genomic methodswe may not know the full extent of how these diseases have affected communities in the past.”