Heart-burial

Heart-burial, or the burial of the heart in a place separate from that in which the body is laid, seems to have been once practised by the ancient Egyptians. In European countries it was most common in the 12th and 13th centuries, though instances have occurred in all centuries down to and including the 19th. The practice undoubtedly arose out of the special veneration in which the heart was held as the seat of the affections and of certain of the higher virtues, as courage, piety. Besides the heart, other parts of the body, such as the viscera, were sometimes honoured with separate burial. It has been suggested that this distribution of the body for sepulture was prompted by a wish to secure the prayers of more than one congregation for the soul of the deceased. In other instances, where the deceased has died abroad and his heart has been carried home for burial, the motive is simpler to understand. The persons who have been honoured with separate burial for the heart have been for the most part men and women of royal birth and ecclesiastics of high rank. Amongst royal personages may be enumerated Henry I. and Richard I. of England, whose hearts were interred at Ronen; Henry III., whose heart was buried at Fontevraud in Normandy; Eleanor, wife of Edward I., at Lincoln; Edward I. himself, whose heart was sent to Jerusalem for burial, as was that of Robert Bruce (q. v.); the French kings, Louis XII., XIII., and XIV., Francis I. and II., and Henry II. and III.; the Emperor Leopold of Austria; and James II. of England, whose heart was entombed in St Mary of Chaillot near Paris. The heart of Anne de Montmorency, constable of France, was interred at Les Célestins; that of Lord Edward Bruce at Culross Abbey in Perthshire, his body in Bergen-op-Zoom in Holland; and that of Sir William Temple at Moor Park near Farnham. The viscera of the popes from Sixtus V. (1590) onwards were interred in SS. Vincenzo and Anastasio, the parish church of the Quirinal. Daniel O'Connell's heart is buried at Rome; Shelley's ('eor cordium') at Bournemouth; and that of the French marshal, Kellermann, on the battlefield of Valmy. The practice was prohibited by Pope Boniface VIII. (1294-1303); but the prohibition was removed by Benedict XI., at all events so far as the French royal family was concerned. The Marquis of Bute's heart was carried to Jerusalem and buried on the Mount of Olives in November 1900. See Pettigrew, Chronicles of the Tombs (1857), pp. 249 et seq.