Modern cemeteries in Europe and North America

Abstract

Between the 1740s and the 1850s, changes in burial customs within Europe and North America had far-reaching consequences for funerary architecture. Those changes first emerged in France, Sweden, Italy, Scotland, and in the American state of Louisiana, as new legislation prohibited burial in urban settlements and put an end to Christian traditions of church interment that persisted since the Middle Ages. Protestantism gave rise to a limited number of extramural cemeteries as early as the sixteenth century. However, in most European countries, the dead continued to be buried within churches and overcrowded urban graveyards until the late eighteenth century, when reform prompted the construction of new cemeteries on the outskirts of cities. Those cemeteries constituted a new architectural type and were fundamentally different from earlier burial grounds in that they were suburban, secular, public, and multidenominational.