Pela “conservação dos homens” e “decência dos santuários”: os debates políticos sobre a construção dos cemitérios extramuros em Minas Gerais (1800-1858)

Abstract

Burial in churches and their surroundings was for many years a widespread practice by Christians throughout Europe. This habit was brought by the Portuguese settlers, who perpetuated these burials in American lands. With the establishment of Brotherhoods and Third Orders in the various captaincies, and specifically in Minas, burials occurred not only in the churches, considered as holy territory, but also in the cemeteries of the confraternities, located, in most cases, in the population centers. If, on the one hand, the practices of so-called "intramural" burials spread through the captaincies throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, on the other hand, medical and chemical treatises emerged that warned of the dangers of proximity between the living and the dead. In the course of the seven hundred European treatises, such as that of the Italian Scipio Piatolli entitled Saggio in the 17th century, and the re-reading of the same by the French Vicq d'Azir, Essai sur les lieux et les dangers des sepultures, discussed the evils resulting from this contact with dead bodies to health and public health. The law of October 1st, 1828, which established a new regiment for the municipal councils, was in its third title, "Police Postures," article 66, paragraph 2, on the need to establish cemeteries outside the temple compound; for that, it would be up to the municipal powers, from their positions, to determine how the construction of the cemeteries would take place.