Heart-shaped lead urn with an inscription identifying the contents as the heart of Toussaint Perrien, Knight of Brefeillac (photo by Rozenn Colleter, Ph.D./INRAP)
Five heart-shaped lead boxes dating to the 16th and 17th centuries were exhumed from the basement of the Convent of the Jacobins in Rennes, France. When opened, they revealed that the symbolic shape represented their contents: five human hearts. Archaeologists this month announced that the hearts have health conditions that remain problematic today, while representing the long memorial tradition of heart burial.
The five heart-shaped lead urns (photo by Rozenn Colleter, Ph.D./INRAP)
As presented this month at the meeting of the Radiological Society of North America in Chicago, archaeologists with the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research in collaboration with researchers at the Molecular Anthropology and Synthesis Imaging and the Institute of Metabolic and Cardiovascular Diseases, used the hearts as a rare opportunity to examine organic matter from 400 years ago.
After carefully removing the embalming material, the hearts were scanned with both MRI and CT, with three revealing atherosclerosis, a condition where plaque builds up in the heart’s arteries. As the organization’s abstract notes, “until now, no radiological examination of archeological hearts was described in the literature data.”
Beyond the vital health data which could help study heart conditions today, the hearts are incredibly preserved examples of this obscure burial practice. Study author Fatima-Zohra Mokrane stated in a release that it “was common during that time period to be buried with the heart of a husband or wife. This was the case with one of our hearts. It’s a very romantic aspect to the burials.”
Archaeologist Dr. Rozenn Colleter excavating the fifth heart-shaped lead urn (photo by Gaétan LeCloire/INRAP)
Earlier this year, researchers examined the remarkably preserved mummy of Louise de Quengo, Lady of Brefeillac, still wearing her dress, shoes, and other funereal clothing, found in the same Rennes crypt. (The Jacobin convent is undergoing work to transform it into a congress center.) Near her body was one of the five heart urns, which when cleaned revealed an inscription stating it was the heart of Toussaint Perrien, Knight of Brefeillac, her late husband.
Heart burial had its peak in the 12th and 13th centuries, when the Crusades took many Europeans far from their homes, and often just their hearts were sent back upon death. Yet it never entirely faded from fashion — Frankenstein author Mary Shelley kept what she believed as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s heart in a silk bag in her desk, while neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova’s heart was interred in a huge marble pyramid in Venice (his hand was also enshrined at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia).
Around the time the five hearts were extracted and buried in Rennes, another elaborate heart monument was created in France by sculptor Ligier Richier at the Church of St. Étienne in Bar-le-Duc. Memorializing the late René de Chalon who died suddenly in 1544, it has a rotting skeleton holding a heart aloft. This organ was once de Chalon’s real heart contained in a heart-shaped box, although after being destroyed in the French Revolution it’s now just a replacement. Like the five Rennes hearts, these heart burials all demonstrate a sentimental attachment to our life-sustaining organ, as well as reflect the symbolic visuals for its romance and power that have endured over time.
Lead heart-shaped lead urns unearthed at the excavation site (photo by Rozenn Colleter, Ph.D./INRAP)
Read “Imaging Yields Evidence of Heart Disease in Archeological Find” at the Radiological Society of North America.
h/t Reuters
I cringe when I read stories like this. Burial sites are sacred…but in situations like this, are treated as curiousities. I am sure any of the deceased and their familes would not be in favor of any exhumation. Sad.
I completely agree that burial sites are places to be respected, and outside of my work at Hyperallergic I’m a cemetery tour guide and advocate for places of memorial. However, as I mention in the piece, this is a crypt that is being transformed as a congress center is being built above. Unfortunately it’s impossible to keep all the burial sites in the world intact, as with Washington Square Park or Bryant Park. You can read more about the archaeological dig at this place here, but as four centuries go by it is interesting to look back at burial practices through the excavations and see how they can impact our current health research and contrast to our own burial traditions: http://www.inrap.fr/preventive-archaeology/Press-release/p-15445-lg1-An-Antique-temple-is-discovered-under-the-Jacobins-convent-in-Rennes.htm
I realize that you really beleive that people are sent somewhere when they die. but if you knew the history of France and the Jacobins few of them have survived after the French Revolution..
Davey Jones ?
The photos put me in mind of Mary I lamenting the loss of Calais and her husband, “When I am dead and cut open, they will find Philip and Calais inscribed on my heart”.