Speaking to the dead

"in the [elaborate] medieval [Latin burial] service at the moment of committal of the corpse, the priest addressed the dead person directly, whereas in the Prayer-Book rite the minister turned instead to the living mourners round the grave and spoke about the dead only in the third person. . . ."

     Eamon Duffy, "Preface to the new edition," The stripping of the altars:  traditional religion in England 1400-1580 (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2022), xvi.  Cf. p. 475 of the first edition:

The theology behind the 1549 book [of common prayer] was well advanced towards reformed teaching, and there was an evident unease about prayers which implied that intercession might effect any change in the state of the dead.  Yet the funeral service of 1549 did contain prayers for the dead, and emphasized their community with the living, 'they with us and we with them'.  That sense of the continuing presence of the dead among the living was vividly expressed in the Sarum funeral rite and in the 1549 prayer-book by the fact that at the moment of the committal of the body to the earth the priest turned round to the corpse, scattered earth on it and, in Cramer’s translation, said 'I commend thy soule to God the father almighty, and thy body to the grounde, earth to earth, asshes to asshes, dust to dust.'  The dead could still be spoken to directly, even in 1549, because in some sense they still belonged within the human community.  But in the world of the 1552 book the dead were no longer with us.  They could neither be spoken to nor even about, in any way that affected their well-being.  The dead had gone beyond the reach of human contact, even of human prayer. 

Cf. also "The burial of the dead:  from medieval to modern perceptions," Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain 1 (1986):  1-13.