OBITUARIO. – A register for paraliturgical use, widely disseminated in the Middle Ages and surviving to the present day, containing the date of death, the name, and the rank of the deceased whose commemoration is observed by religious communities (chapters, monasteries, collegiate churches, parishes) on the anniversary of their death. For this purpose, the date was most often limited to indicating the name and the day of death, omitting the year; in more recent times, information on the life and merits of the deceased has been added to these schematic data.
OBITUARIO - The Martyrologium benefactorum Basilicae Vaticanae (13th–14th centuries), edited by P. Egidi, Rome 1908, p. 280 - Vatican City, Archivio capitolare di S. Pietro, 56 H. f. 185.
The use of suffrages for the dead, attested from the earliest times of the Church, had one of its liturgical manifestations in the daily reading of the diptychs (v.), which nevertheless began to disappear toward the 5th century. No documents survive from the immediately following period, but it is logical to suppose that the diptychs were replaced by similar lists. Later, Sacramentaries are found that bear in the margins and between the lines of the Canon certain obituary notes, whose number gradually increased as the commemoration was extended to other deceased persons. This circumstance had already led, around the middle of the 8th century, to the transformation of the collective commemorations, by then almost always performed without the reading of the names, into individual commemorations, distributed according to the anniversary dates. From that time there began the practice (which continued for a long time: cf. as a characteristic example the Martyrologio dei SS. Ciriaco e Niccolò in Via Lata in Rome [Bibl. Vallicelliana, ms. F. 85: beginning of the 11th century; obituary notes until the beginning of the 15th century]) of adding obituary notes either to Martyrologies (v.), often giving rise to interpolations perpetuated from copy to copy, or to calendars. Finally, around the 9th century, the need was felt to create special books for lists of the dead, the o. properly so called, which, like the Martyrologies of which they most often constituted a supplement, took the form of calendars.
The term o., which prevailed in the modern period together with « necrologio », is rather rare in the Middle Ages: more often one finds liber obituum, necrologium, liber defunctorum, or even, though improperly, martyrologium, kalendarium; also common is the designation liber regular, because in monasteries the Martyrology and o. were read during the recitation of « prima », together with a chapter of the rule. It seems unlikely, however, that the term liber vitae refers to an o. (cf. the one added to the Sacramentario sublacense of the 11th century: Rome, Bibl. Vallicelliana, ms. B. 24), which was more likely intended to designate, like the libri confraternitatis, a list of the living.
The nominal lists of the o. included, alongside illustrious personages (ecclesiastical and political authorities) and the deceased members of the community, benefactors, and often also members of other communities linked to the first by a system of spiritual association through which they mutually communicated (by means of the literae confraternitatis) the names of deceased confraternity members, with the aim of extending suffrage to them. This practice, already in use in the 8th century, spread especially from the 10th century onward. Principally from the 12th century, monasteries, in order to supplement the lists already transmitted, adopted the so-called « rotoli dei morti », which a monk (rotularius or also baiulus, tabellarius, etc.) carried around among the confederated monasteries. At the top, the rolls bore notice of the death; afterward, the person in charge at each monastery recorded the date on which the communication was received and often added a prayer or a brief eulogy of the deceased (cf. M. Schrott, De confraternitatibus a canonia Neocellenis cum aliis monasteriis initiis, in Ordo canonicus, I [1946], pp. 117-41). The lists of benefactors, on the other hand, were connected with the numerous donations pro anima, made with the precise aim of obtaining suffrages.
The o., of which very many remain unpublished, constitute a documentary source of the first order for local history, the development of religious communities, topography, chronology, and the dating of liturgical codices.