Locum sepulturae meae ...elegi: Property, Graves, and Sacral Power in Eleventh-Century Germany

"Locum sepulturae meae ... elegi: Property, Graves, and Sacral Power in Eleventh-Century Germany," Focusing on the well-documented story of the eleventh-century Rhenish Count Palatine Ezzo and his family, this article reexamines the premise that monasteries were founded on family lands to function as burial sites expressing family solidarity in "dynastic" terms, Such a theory is based on the assumption that self-perception among European aristocratic families changed after the turn of the millennium, when loose, horizontally linked kin groups presumably began to identify themselves as vertically aligned patrilineages, Rotondo-McCord argues that although such a nascent dynastic consciousness may be observable for the eleventh century, it was not the chief factor in determining the location of noble graves, Instead, personal and highly variable concerns in siting burials on family property could take precedence over the goal of noble self-expression in the form of a "dynastic" necropolis, The example of the graves of the Ezzonids at Brauweiler demonstrates that the choice of a final resting place could be affected by the conflicting agenda of a range of parties, including both family members and family "outsiders," In this story, the latter were quarrelling ecclesiastics, who in the end may have done more than family members themselves to foster the notion of a "dynastic self-consciousness,"