cerement

From French cirement (“waxing, wax dressing”), from cirer (“to wax, wrap”).

cerement (plural cerements)

1. A burial shroud or garment.
2. Cerecloth.

• c. 1600, Shakespeare, Hamlet

  Why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death, have burst their cerements.

• 1834, Lydia Sigourney, Poems, Barzillai the Gileadite, page 26:

  Oh! when his sacred dust
  The cerements of the tomb shall burst,
  Might I be worthy at his feet to rise,
  To yonder blissful skies,
  Where angel-hosts resplendent shine,
  Jehovah!—Lord of Hosts, the glory shall be thine.

• 1919, Ronald Firbank, Valmouth, Duckworth, hardback edition, page 77

  "Who is the woman in the cerements?", she inconsequently wondered.

• 1921, Sir James George Frazer, Apollodorus: The Library (Loeb Classical Library), volume I, Introduction, § 1: “The Author and His Book”, page xxvii:

  The cerements still cling to their wasted frames, but will soon be exchanged for a gayer garb in their passage from the tomb to the temple.

• 1971, Anthony Burgess, M/F, Penguin, published 2004, page 62:

  Her red robe billowed, all in wood, except where the great phallic spike of her martyrdom had called forth blood to tack the cerement to her body.

• winding clothes
• winding sheet
• pall

• cementer, re-cement, recement