Instituto de Estudios Turolenses (CSIC): 1993), vol. 2, 727-747 (original) (raw)

I used a corpus of several hundred of Latin epitaphs from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, to classify and comment the basic elements of its structure (consecration, name, age, date, deposition, dedicator, circumstances), Ingredients and expressions: imprecation, responsum, invocation to the wayfarer, praise to the deceased, euphemisms. The traits of style, formulas, expressions and topics of inscriptions of the Antiquity compatible with the catholic faith are usually employed. In these epitaphs, most of them related to the city of Seville, I analyze the main rhetorical figures and the expressions used in ancient epitaphs; the elegiac couplet in front of medieval and romance meters; epigrammatic features; the coincidences and differences with respect to the classical and medieval epitaph; the practice and theory of the technique of composition of this genre; its sepulchral or literary character (in contests and collections), or its evolution from the simple classicist epitaphs of Italian influence in the 16th century to the extensive and overloaded baroque epitaphs. In contrast to other genres of Latin literature in progressive disuse, the cultivation of the Latin epitaph in Spain, as in the rest of Europe, persisted tenaciously until recently.