The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

by Edited by Bruce Gordon , Peter Marshall

• ISBN13: 9780521642569
• ISBN10: 0521642566
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-02-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This volume of essays provides a comprehensive treatment of a very significant component of the societies of late medieval and early modern Europe: the dead. It argues that to contemporaries the 'placing' of the dead, in physical, spiritual and social terms, was a vitally important exercise, and one which often involved conflict and complex negotiation. The contributions range widely geographically, from Scotland to Transylvania, and address a spectrum of themes: attitudes towards the corpse, patterns of burial, forms of commemoration, the treatment of dead infants, the nature of the afterlife and ghosts. Individually the essays help to illuminate several current historiographical concerns: the significance of the Black Death, the impact of the protestant and catholic Reformations, and interactions between 'elite' and 'popular' culture. Collectively, by exploring the social and cultural meanings of attitudes towards the dead, they provide insight into the way these past societies understood themselves.

Author Biography

James M. Boyden is Associate Professor of History at Tulane University, New Orleans Clive Burgess teaches in the History department at University College London Nancy Caciola is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego Samuel K. Cohn Jr is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Glasgow Will Coster is Senior Lecturer in History at De Montford University, Bedford Bruce Gordon is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Associate Director of the St Andrews Reformation Studies Institute Vanessa Harding is Senior Lecturer in History at Birkbeck College, London J. S. W. Helt is Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan-Flint Peter Marshall is Lecturer in History at the University of Warwick Graeme Murdock is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Birmingham Penny Roberts is Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Warwick Philip M. Soergel is Associate Professor at Arizona State University, Tempe Andrew Spicer teaches at Stonyhurst College and is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen Larissa Juliet Taylor is Chair and Associate Professor of History at Colby College

Table of Contents

Preface

1. Introduction: placing the dead in late medieval and early modern Europe Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall

2. The place of the dead in Flanders and Tuscany: towards a comparative history of the Black Death Samuel K. Cohn Jr

3. 'Longing to be prayed for': death and commemoration in an English parish in the later middle ages Clive Burgess

4. Spirits seeking bodies: death, procession and communal memory in the middle ages Nancy Caciola

5. Malevolent ghosts and ministering angels: apparitions and pastoral care in the Swiss Reformation Bruce Gordon

6. 'The map of God's good word': geographies of the afterlife in Tudor and early Stuart England Peter Marshall

7. Contesting sacred space: burial disputes in sixteenth-century France Penny Roberts

8. 'Defyle not Christ's kirk with your carion': burial and the development of burial aisles in post-Reformation Scotland Andrew Spicer

9. Whose body?: a study of attitudes towards the dead body in early modern Paris Vanessa Harding

10. Women, memory and will-making in Elizabethan England J. S. W. Helt

11. Death, prophecy and judgement in Transylvania Graeme Murdock

12. Funeral sermons and orations as religious propaganda in sixteenth-century France Larissa Juliet Taylor

13. The worst death becomes a good thing: the passion of Don Rodrigo Calderó

n James M. Boyden

14. Tokens of innocence: infant baptism, death and burial in early modern England Will Coster

15. The afterlives of monstrous infants in Reformation Germany Philip M. Soergel.