Life and Death Mirrored on Funerary Inscriptions in Moldavia before 1859

Medieval inscriptions, in their great majority, were of religious character. They were written in the cultural languages of the time, in prose or in verse, and they reflect certain mentalities and prove the education of the people who ordered them. The funerary inscriptions do not reveal data which could be compared in importance to those offered by the narrative and diplomatic documents of the time, but the precision of the biographical and genealogical details is greater. According to these, the child and juvenile mortality was higher, but there were also examples of uncommon vitality, some persons lived even for 100 years. Even more, the funerary texts illustrate special circumstances in which the protagonists were the lost ones due to the consideration they received in the community. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]