Death and Dying (Renaissance and Reformation)

Introduction

Beliefs and practices relating to death underwent profound transformations in the early modern period and continue to provoke the interest of widely disparate scholars. Once the purview of demographic, medical, and social historians, the subject of death and dying has also been given literary and art historical treatments as well as treatment from a range of other interdisciplinary and theoretical perspectives. As Philippe Ariès once noted, if the historian (and one might add the student) “wishes to arrive at an understanding” of what death meant in the past, he or she must “widen his field of vision” to encompass different historical approaches and methodologies—and even then the subject still eludes. (Ariès 1981, p. 16–17; cited under Attitudes and Mentalities). No study of death’s history can escape the shadow of Ariès, even if his two works relating to the theme of death have been criticized for the selectivity of their sources and sweeping conclusions about collective beliefs. But as with many such ambitious and problematic works—Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias are others whose field-changing books come to mind—the influence has been enormous. Working from the perspective of social history and the Annales school of French historians, Ariès tended to focus primarily on the cultural and attitudinal aspects of death, with most of the books in this article reflecting this approach. But the biomedical and demographic aspects are also important, particularly in the context of an age that witnessed a revolution in professionalized medicine and, according to many scholars, resulted in the medicalization and eventually the “secularization” of death. Historians have also been influenced by the contributions of anthropologists, such as Jack Goody on ritual, Victor Turner on liminality, and Arnold Van Gennep on rites de passage (rituals marking the life cycle), all of whom have deepened understandings of the very different approaches to death that people held in the premodern past. Many practitioners of “historical anthropology” thus explored cultural practices and collectively held symbolic systems, each of which carried extensive implications for the study of funerary rites, burial customs, or rituals of remembrance. Indeed, the anthropologist Robert Hertz made such endeavors possible in his own work on funerary rituals and the psychological connections between the living and the dead or between the individual and the community. Such perspectives were also animated by a related turn in the study of memory, with such notable exponents as Pierre Nora and his “sites of memory”; as a result the use of tradition and commemorative ritual as well as an interest in epigraphs and tomb monuments has been applied to the memorializing of the dead with productive results. Most of the sections in this article select works that reflect these different theoretical approaches as they describe how death in the early modern world was an intimate fact of life and one that was confronted communally and with a common, consolatory language and set of rituals, all of which was a healthier way, perhaps, to face death than the medicalized isolation that often surrounds it in the early 21st century.

General Overviews

Accounting for new directions in death studies, review essays and Historiographical Overviews continue to appear in journals and are useful as well as interesting in detailing the manner in which the history of thanatology intersects with the latest turn in social history, religion, or memory studies. Edited Collections are also important, for many of them reflect conferences and other arenas in which new ideas are applied to matters relating to death (or old approaches are criticized). They are also necessary in addressing areas neglected by the more sweeping histories of death, even if they too may bring in a broad historical and geographic perspective.

Historiographical Overviews

The study of death intersects with major historiographical trends in the 20th century, from the cultural history of Johan Huizinga through to the school of French historians centered on the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale (or Annales, cited under Journals). Anthropology and ritual, sociology and crime, and the (re)turn to religion as a motivating historical force have also influenced treatments of the subject. The essay Vovelle 1978, while dated, provides a still useful approach to the writing of death’s history and the interpretive difficulties involved, while Le Roy Ladurie 1979 offers another perspective, including an engagement with Michel Vovelle’s history, from an equally prominent historian. Mitchell 1978 also focuses on Philippe Ariès, with Strange 2000 and Beier 2005 offering a newer perspective. Students should also consult Edited Collections for more recent overviews.

Beier, Lee. “Dealing with the Early Modern Dead.” Journal of British Studies 4 (2005): 167–173.
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A review essay offering new perspectives on the field through the prism of books exploring the dead in England and France.
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Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. “Chaunu, Lebrun, Vovelle: The New History of Death.” Territory of the Historian (1979): 287–319.
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Analysis of three important Annales historians by another leading historian and the manner in which they approach the history of death from different perspectives and methods of research.
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Mitchell, A. “Philippe Ariès and the French Way of Death.” French Historical Studies 10 (1978): 684–695.
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A good introductory essay on Ariès and his contribution to social history, the study of beliefs and mentalities (the attitudes and belief systems of ordinary men and women toward everyday life), and his influence on conceptions of death; raises interesting perspectives in general on the place of death in specifically French historiography.
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Strange, Julie-Marie. “Death and Dying: Old Themes and New Perspectives.” Journal of Contemporary History 35 (2000): 491–499.
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A survey of books engaging with and critiquing the older ideas of Ariès and others.
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Vovelle, Michel. “The History of Mankind in the Mirror of Death.” Proceedings of the Western Society of French History 6 (1978): 91–109.
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A useful though somewhat dated overview of the historiography of death, including source and interpretive difficulties.
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Edited Collections

A large number of edited collections, some based on conferences, emerged in the 1990s and 2000s to address various facets of death and dying. Bassett 1992 explores the material conditions of death from an urban and civic-church space perspective, while the essays in Tetel, et al. 1989 focus solely on Florence. Houlbrooke 1989 provides a collection that ranges across themes of ritual and religious burial and bereavement, while Jupp and Gittings 2000 explores death in England, albeit across the centuries. Marshall and Gordon 2000 is one of the best overviews of the relatively recent scholarship on the subject of death and the afterlife and contains many important and insightful essays. Whaley 1981 provides an earlier comparative overview, and Watt 2004 contains many essays on subjects relating to suicide across Europe. Hogg 1987 also brings in a comparative focus, though its essays treat death in relation to such other notions as time and eternity.

Bassett, Steven, ed. Death in Towns: Urban Responses to the Dying and the Dead, 1000–1600. Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1992.
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A valuable urban perspective is brought to bear in this collection of wide-ranging essays with good representation of the early modern world in contributions examining cemetery planning, church burial, and medical and communal responses to public health and planning emergencies, such as the Black Death.
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Hogg, James, ed. Zeit, Tod und Ewigkeit in der Renaissance Literatur. 3 vols. Salzburg, Austria: Universität Salzburg, Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1987.
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A three-volume collection that traces different perceptions and treatments of death, time, and eternity with essays that include treatments of death and the passion in late medieval English devotional writings; John Lydgate’s danse macabre (dance of death); images of purgatory and the afterlife; sepulchral art and mausoleums in Germany; and concepts of time, death, and eternity in Irish mythology.
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Houlbrooke, Ralph, ed. Death, Ritual, and Bereavement. London: Routledge, 1989.
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The social processes of death, including the deathbed, burial, and the grieving process, are examined in this collection of wide-ranging essays by major scholars with good representation of the early modern period and the impact of Protestantism on death and conceptions of the afterlife.
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Jupp, Peter C., and Clare Gittings, eds. Death in England: An Illustrated History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000.
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A collection of essays providing a historical survey across the centuries, with Gittings, Philip Morgan, and Ralph Houlbrooke providing essays related to the early modern period.
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Marshall, Peter, and Bruce Gordon, eds. The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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An important collection of essays that range across countries and centuries, focusing on the physical, spiritual, and social aspects of death and the afterlife. Included in this volume are essays concerning death and the 1348 plague, popular beliefs about such matters as spirits and ghosts, Protestant and Catholic approaches to funeral rites and sermons, and the manner in which the dying directed others to commemorate them after they were gone.
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Tetel, Marcel, Ronald G. Witt, and Rona Goffen, eds. Life and Death in Fifteenth-Century Florence. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989.
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An interdisciplinary gathering of articles that explores death from 1348 to 1527, from the plague through to the 1530s. The deaths of the Medicis and Girolamo Savonarola are covered. Includes essays centering upon ordinary lives and deaths. Art historical, literary, and historical essays also inform this valuable work.
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Watt, Jeffrey Rogers, ed. From Sin to Insanity: Suicide in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.
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A comprehensive overview of suicide across western Europe with articles that cover the judicial treatment of insanity in Amsterdam, suicide and the body in Saxony, ambivalence toward suicide in early modern Spain, gender and suicide in Geneva, and the culture of manly self-sacrifice in Hungary.
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Whaley, Joachim, ed. Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death. Europa Social History of Human Experience. London: Europa, 1981.
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A collection of essays that examine different facets of the history of death across Western Christendom, including such topics as funerary monuments, war, and the expression of death in ritual forms.
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Reference Works

A number of valuable works provide the scholar with direction in a field that is overwhelming in its enormity and interdisciplinarity. Encyclopedias, for example, compete in the field of death and dying, though students will have to navigate through the bounteous entries on modern or American thanatology to get to the smaller though still helpful offerings relating to the early modern period. Similarly, the thicket of annotated Bibliographies on death can combine literary and historical studies as well and provide a useful guide to research.

Encyclopedias

While many reference works include sociological, medical, or modern perspectives, they also contain chapters relating to Europe in the early modern period. Bryant 2003 is one of the more comprehensive texts with an excellent overview of Philippe Ariès and the historiography of death. Students and scholars will also benefit from Kastenbaum 2003 and, in the realm of Suicide, Evans and Farberow 2003. Taylor 2000 provides a more world historical and cross-religious approach, while the entries in Bryant and Peck 2009 focus on death in relation to the human experience.

Bryant, Clifton D., ed. Handbook of Death and Dying. 2 vols. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2003.
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An excellent two-volume resource of research essays that includes subjects relating to early modern and historical aspects of death and dying. Useful bibliographies at the end of each entry and an overview by William Wood and John B. Williamson, “Historical Changes in the Meaning of Death in the Western Tradition.”
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Bryant, Clifton D., and Dennis L. Peck. Encyclopedia of Death and the Human Experience. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2009.
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A two-volume interdisciplinary and multinational work that explores the subject of death in relation to the human experience, cultural beliefs, rituals, literature, and social institutions.
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Evans, Glen, and Norman L. Farberow, eds. Encyclopedia of Suicide. New York: Facts on File, 2003.
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Over five hundred entries as well as an introductory essay with a modern focus, though references and bibliographies are included as they relate to historical matters.
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Kastenbaum, Robert, ed. Macmillan Encyclopedia of Death and Dying. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 2003.
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Multidisciplinary in scope and, like other references, primarily modern (and American) in orientation, this reference work nevertheless includes relevant entries and useful critical apparatuses.
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Taylor, Richard P., ed. Death and the Afterlife: A Cultural Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2000.
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Examines funerary customs, religious texts, afterlife beliefs, and other matters relating to the dead across world religions. Historical and European aspects of thanatology are covered.
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Bibliographies

Though the bibliographies in this section are huge and interdisciplinary in scope, substantial sections are devoted to the historical aspects of death and dying. Southard 1991 is an older overview of the literature, and Szabo 2010 is one of the more recent annotated works. For a more focused approach to historical works in British and Irish death history, the Bibliography of British and Irish History is a searchable resource of the latest (and oldest) scholarship. Simpson 1987 is a large bibliography of works related to dying and grief with some historical offerings. Bell 1994 provides citations of works relating to historical archaeology of cemeteries, and Interdisziplinäre Nordrhein-Westfälische Forschungsarbeitsgemeinschaft 1996 provides a greater international perspective.

Bell, Edward L. Vestiges of Mortality and Remembrance: A Bibliography on the Historical Archaeology of Cemeteries. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1994.
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Over nineteen hundred citations on matters pertaining to cemeteries, including grave markers and cemetery landscapes. Theoretical considerations on the subject are also treated covering a time period from the 15th century onward.
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Interdisziplinäre Nordrhein-Westfälische Forschungsarbeitsgemeinschaft. Sterben und Tod: Annotierte Auswahlbibliographie. Forschungsberichte des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen/Fachgruppe Geisteswissenschaften 3252. Opladen, Germany: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996.
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Annotated interdisciplinary bibliography of works relating to death and dying, including their historical aspects.
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Royal Historical Society and the Institute of Historical Research. Bibliography of British and Irish History.
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A subscription-only searchable database of thousands of sources on Brepols Publishers Online, updated annually.
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Simpson, Michael A., ed. Death, Dying, and Grief: A Critical Bibliography. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987.
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An annotated bibliography of over seventeen hundred works published since 1979 compiled by one of the more noteworthy scholars of the subject. Includes historical works and useful author and subject indexes as well as critical treatments of each entry.
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Southard, Samuel. Death and Dying: A Bibliographical Survey. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1991.
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An interdisciplinary inventory of thanatological literature, including introductory essays, guides to trends in the field, and historical material.
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Szabo, John F. Death and Dying: An Annotated Bibliography of the Thanatological Literature. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2010.
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A comprehensive bibliography of over twenty-two hundred monographs relating to death and dying, with most books focused on nonhistorical (and non-European) works. Very good overview, however, on the historical aspects of suicide.
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Primary Source Collections

The study of death, at least from a social history perspective, requires an interdisciplinary approach to the sources, which can range from funeral sermons through wills and testaments (for which see Samuel K. Cohn’s Oxford Bibliographies: Renaissance and Reformation article Last Wills and Testaments) as well as visual evidence from tomb monuments and epitaphs. Literary sources, including ars moriendi (art of dying) handbooks and poetic genres, such as the elegy, are also useful, at least in revealing attitudes of the elite. The section is a highly selective list of printed sources that covers some of the more common points of study in the study of death and in the books throughout this bibliography. Sharpe 1889–1890 and Darlington 1967, while oriented toward the urban perspective of Paris and London, respectively, are good starting points for the study of wills and what they reveal about attitudes toward death and the afterlife in addition to demographic trends. Atkinson 1992 is a more in-depth exploration of attitudes (or, rather, prescriptions) in its collection of ars moriendi handbooks, and Bayard 1999 provides another account for the Continent. The Medieval Memoria Online is an excellent source for research in memoria relating to the Netherlands until 1580, while Boge and Bogner 1999 is a guide to funeral sermons from the late Reformation period in Germany. Sehling 1902–1977 also is a huge compendium of sources relating to ritual practices and death. For wills, Bertram 1991 presents a good offering from late medieval Bologna and Tuetey 1880 for Paris.

Atkinson, David, ed. The English Ars Moriendi. New York: Lang, 1992.
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A collection of primary texts in the ars moriendi tradition with extensive coverage of works through the Protestant Reformation.
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Bayard, Florence. L’art du bien mourir au XVe siècle: Étude sur les art du bien mourir au bas moyen âge à la lumière d’un ars moriendi allemand du XVe siècle. Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1999.
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A study of the ars moriendi and other death-related literature; includes a facsimile and translation of the Bilder ars.
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Bertram, Martin. “Bolognese Testamente: Zweiter Teil; Sondierungen in den Libri memoriali.” Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken 71 (1991): 195–240.
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Italy is represented in this summary of and guide to notarized wills and testaments (including the Libri memoriali) from late medieval Bologna.
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Boge, Birgit, and Ralf Georg Bogner. “Katalog deutschsprachiger katholischer Leichenpredigten in Einzeldrucken 1576–1799 aus den Beständen der Stiftsbibliothek Klosterneuburg und der Universitätsbibliothek Eichstätt.” In Oratio Funebris: Die katholische Leichenpredigt der frühen Neuzeit; Zwölf Studien. Edited by Birgit Boge and Ralf Georg Bogner, 353–844. Chloe Beihefte zum Daphnis 30. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.
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A comprehensive (though not completely reliable) catalogue of German funeral sermons that extend from the later Reformation into the modern period.
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Darlington, Ida, ed. London Consistory Court Wills 1492–1547. London: London Record Society 3, 1967.
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Covering 246 London wills from the 15th and 16th centuries with testators represented by parish priests, tradespeople, crafts people, and other nonelites. Students should consult these wills for what they reveal about changing beliefs concerning the afterlife (purgatory, prayers) as well as virgins, saints, and bequests to the church.
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Medieval Memoria Online.
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Organized by Utrecht University in collaboration with the Humanities Faculty of VU University Amsterdam and the University of Groningen, this website provides a database and other research tools for those undertaking research in various aspects of memoria in the Netherlands from the Middle Ages through the Reformation.
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Sehling, Emil, ed. Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des 16. Jahrhunderts. 15 vols. Leipzig: Reisland, 1902–1977.
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A huge collection of church documents containing useful information on ritual practices relating to death and burial.
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Sharpe, Reginald, R., ed. Calendar of Wills Proved and Enrolled in the Court of Husting, London, A.D. 1258–A.D. 1688: Preserved among the Archives of the Corporation of the City of London, at the Guidhall. 2 vols. London: J. C. Francis, 1889–1890.
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A huge and definitive inventory of wills, primarily from London, with very good representation of continuities between the medieval and the early modern periods. The reader should be forewarned of some editing on the part of Sharpe.
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Tuetey, Alexandre, ed. Testaments enregistrés au Parlement de Paris sous le règne de Charles VI: Collection des documents inèdits. Paris: Imprimere Nationale, 1880.
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Testaments covering the period from 1380 to 1422 in Paris.
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Journals

In addition to the generalized scholarly journals that contain frequent articles on death-related subjects, the journals in this section are also useful for their more specialized and interdisciplinary approaches. Annales d’histoire économique et sociale is the founding journal of the field, while the Journal of Social History also extends across a wide reach of history and territory. Social History of Medicine is useful for articles on the medical-social aspects of death in the past, and Death Studies focuses solely on the subject though not from an entirely historical perspective. The Journal of Economic History is also informative for its coverage of demographic history.

Annales d’histoire économique et sociale. 1929–.
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The premier journal of French social history and the forum for the development of the history of death with interdisciplinary articles and reviews essays.
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Death Studies. 1985–.
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An interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal that covers all areas of thanatology, from dying and death through bereavement, including their historical aspects.
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Journal of Economic History. 1941–.
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Published by Cambridge University Press, this interdisciplinary journal also covers demographic history and its social dimensions.
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Journal of Social History. 1967–.
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Articles applying a sociohistorical approach to all areas and periods of history in addition to western Europe. Published by George Mason University.
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Quaderni Storici. 1966–.
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Important journal with authoritative articles by leading scholars that center upon social history, microhistory, and special topics, including those related to death.
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Social History of Medicine. 1988–.
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Published by Oxford University Press, this journal offers many articles on the subject of death and dying in addition to health and disease.
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Late Medieval Legacies

As Huizinga 1972 reminds us, death was ever present in the Middle Ages, in war, disease (including the Black Death), and the constant exhortations of priests that believers were to meditate upon the question of mortality. Cadaver tombs, iconography, prayers, and handbooks of dying all reinforced these fears and preoccupations. As a result scholars must engage in an interdisciplinary approach to capture all the facets of what has been called a deeply Catholic culture of death. While the subject of death in the Middle Ages thus yields an enormous number of studies, the classic texts in this section are representative of a few such facets, especially as they convey a worldview that would be transformed in the age to come. In the area of theology, Le Goff 1984 remains a vital study of purgatory and its evolution into doctrine, while Bynum 1995 provides a survey of resurrection theories and notions of the physical body in the afterlife. Boase 1972 offers a short survey of attitudes toward death in the Middle Ages, with Binski 1996 exploring the various representations of death and the afterlife. For a more varied range of sources and material artifacts relating to death, see Alexandre-Bidon 1998. Aberth 2001 focuses on death through the experience of famine, war, and plague, with Cohn 2002 providing a definitive treatment of plague and its treatment during this period. In the realm of art and literary texts, Tenenti 1957 is one of the more important studies of how painters, sculptors, and writers in the early modern period chose to represent death. For a more extensive bibliography on the plague itself, see Samuel K. Cohn’s Oxford Bibliographies: Renaisssance and Reformation article Plague and Its Consequences.

Aberth, John. From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague, and Death in the Later Middle Ages. New York: Routledge, 2001.
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Divided into sections corresponding to the four “horsemen” of the apocalypse (war, famine, plague, and death), Aberth’s work provides a synthesis and readable survey not only of the age’s catastrophes but of the late medieval preoccupation with death as reflected in transi (cadaver) tombs and other material expressions of mortality.
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Alexandre-Bidon, Daniele. La mort au moyen age: XIIIe–XVIe siècle. Paris: Hachette, 1998.
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Working from gravesites and tombs, wills and probate inventories, literary texts, and other sources, Alexandre-Bidon uncovers the experience, rituals, devotions, and logistics of death in the medieval and early modern periods, including the changing manner in which the living related to their dead.
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Binski, Paul. Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996.
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Analyzing the many facets of a “medieval death culture,” beginning with the template of Christ’s death and Resurrection, Binski looks at memorials, death rituals, artistic depictions of the dead, and texts relating to the afterlife.
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Boase, T. S. R. Death in the Middle Ages: Mortality, Judgment, and Remembrance. London: McGraw-Hill, 1972.
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A small but much-cited book that reconstructs the harsh reality of death in the Middle Ages and its expressions in tomb art, dance of death iconography, the ars moriendi (art of dying), and other facets of mortal concern. Beautifully illustrated plates.
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Bynum, Caroline W. The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
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Masterfully tracing the intellectual tradition of resurrection theology through the writings of patristic and medieval theologians, Bynum focuses specifically on the material fate of the body in the afterlife, including questions of decay, physical fragmentation, purity, gender, and identity.
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Cohn, Samuel K. The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
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Engaging with burial records, contemporary testimony, wills and testaments, epidemiological evidence, and other sources, Cohn argues that the plague of 1348 differed from modern assumptions about its causes and development.
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Huizinga, Johan. The Waning of the Middle Ages. Translated by F. Hopman. London: Penguin, 1972.
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One of the most important works of medieval scholarship in the 20th century and significant here for Huizinga’s discussion of the manner in which death became the overarching theme of the later Middle Ages, manifesting itself in an array of religious, visual, and literary expressions.
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Le Goff, Jacques. The Birth of Purgatory. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
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The seminal work that definitively and imaginatively explores the development of the doctrine of purgatory in the Middle Ages and the manner in which mentalities and beliefs relating to purgatory and the afterlife affected the formal structure and practices of the church and even everyday life in society.
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Tenenti, Alberto. Il senso della morte e l’amore della vita nel Rinascimento (Francia e Italia). Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 1957.
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A learned and cross-national exposition on the theme of death in the early modern period ranging widely across writers (Petrarch, Michel de Montaigne, Desiderius Erasmus) and artists (Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Hans Holbein). Richly illustrated in accordance with its ultimate focus on the iconography of death.
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Attitudes and Mentalities

The study of mentalités, or the attitudes and belief systems of ordinary men and women toward everyday life, was perceived as synonymous with the school of French historians centered upon the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale (or Annales; cited under Journals), even though mentalités represented only one facet of the “total history” they sought to construct. They also did not intend for mentalités to denote psychological conceptions divorced from social structures or economic processes, which many scholars (especially of death) have assumed. Nevertheless, the study of mentalités adapted itself very well to the history of psychologized attitudes toward death, even if scholars such as Johan Huizinga or Jacob Burckhardt had explored the subject as well (and also shared with French scholars a problematic tendency to extrapolate “collective” psychology from texts). Ariès 1974 is a distillation of the huge and seminal study that culminated in Ariès 1981. Vovelle 1983 is equally ambitious and far more quantitative, while Chartier 1976 is a valuable quantitative and interpretive survey of the ars moriendi (art of dying) texts. Also moving beyond Philippe Ariès are Wilhelm-Schaffer 1999, which incorporates a broader range of approaches, and Wollgast 1992, working from the German perspective. Burke 1984, working from a narrower geographic base, looks at textual evidence of death beliefs in Renaissance Italy, arguing in favor of continuity in Christian beliefs concerning the dead.

Ariès, Philippe. Western Attitudes toward Death from the Middle Ages to the Present. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1974.
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Based on four lectures and offering a more historically limited but no less ambitious approach than The Hour of Our Death (Ariès 1981), this work offers the same theory of “stages” as the bigger book and provides a more concise overview of Ariès’s argument in general.
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Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. Translated by H. Weaver. New York: Knopf, 1981.
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The classic text on the history (or five historical “stages”) of death, covering over one thousand years and working from a huge and diverse range of literature that revealed individuals’ and communities’ attitudes and approaches toward death. No student writing of the history of death can ignore this text, though it has also been criticized and revised over the years. Reprinted in 1991.
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Burke, Peter. “Death in the Renaissance, 1347–1656.” In Dies Illa: Death in the Middle Ages. Edited by Jane H. M. Taylor, 59–71. Liverpool, UK: Francis Cairns, 1984.
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Working from autobiographies, contemporary wills, and other sources, Burke investigates the meanings of death in Renaissance Italy, concluding that Christian notions of the afterlife continued to be robustly held—an argument contrary to that of Jacob Burckhardt and others, who asserted that the period witnessed instead a new kind of pagan glorification of the past.
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Chartier, Roger. “Les arts de mourir, 1450–1600.” Annales d’histoire économique et sociale 31 (1976): 51–75.
DOI: 10.3406/ahess.1976.293700Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A quantitative approach to books and manuscripts related to the art of dying, or ars moriendi, including their publishing history and circulation. Chartier also applies an interpretive reading to a few representative texts and themes, such as fear or the importance of the priest in the dying ritual.
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Vovelle, Michel. La mort et l’Occident: De 1300 à nos Jours. Paris: Gallimard, 1983.
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A sweeping and important survey of the centuries with the early modern period represented as a turning point in attitudes toward death, not only with the Reformation but with humanist “sensitivities” toward death and the individual. The baroque 17th century merits another chapter in a work that attempts to draw in the “biological” and demographic as well as cultural aspects of the subject.
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Wilhelm-Schaffer, Irmgard. Gottes Beamter und Spielmann des Teufels: Der Tod in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit. Cologne: Böhlau, 1999.
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A highly interdisciplinary treatment of the history of death incorporating theology, historical sociology, and folklore and centering upon such themes as eschatology, the “theologized fear of death,” popular beliefs, the idea of judgment, and the state of the soul after death.
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Wollgast, Siegfried. Zum Tod im späten Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit. Sitzungsberichte der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, Philologisch-historische Klasse 132.1. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1992.
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Treating the subject of death in the late medieval and early modern periods, focusing primarily on the German evidence.
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Death and the Soul

The state of the soul after death generated intense preoccupation in the early modern period and was accompanied on a related level by concern about the nature of personal identity after life. Though the issue was not new to the age, in the early 16th century Pietro Pomponazzi’s explosive series of lectures on the soul, conducted at the University of Padua, applied a new reading of Aristotle to argue against the soul’s immortality in the sense that the soul was now a part of the body and died with it. The controversy is examined in Pine 1986, with Di Napoli 1963 also discussing Pomponazzi in addition to other contemporaries, such as Marsilio Ficino (who was in favor of the soul’s immortality). Kristeller 1979 discusses the manner in which the doctrine was affected by Renaissance notions of the nature of humans, while Thiel 2011 contributes to understanding how 17th-century thinkers regarded personal identity in relation to life and death. For an overview of the debates that were animated by the doctrine, see Blum 2007.

Blum, Paul Richard. “The Immortality of the Soul.” In The Cambridge Guide to Renaissance Philosophy. Edited by James Hankins, 211–233. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL052184648XSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An excellent overview of the debates that emerged in the Renaissance over the doctrine of the soul’s immortality, including the medieval antecedents and early modern philosophers and theologians through the 17th century.
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Di Napoli, Giovanni. L’immortalità dell’anima nel Rinascimento. Turin, Italy: Società Editrice Internazionale, 1963.
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Examines the doctrine of immortality among Renaissance Platonists and Aristotelians with special attention paid to Pietro Pomponazzi and the controversy over his denial of the soul’s immortality.
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Kristeller, Paul Oskar. “The Immortality of the Soul.” In Renaissance Thought and Its Sources. Edited by Paul Oskar Kristeller and Michael Mooney, 181–196. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.
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A thoroughgoing investigation of concepts of immortality written by the leading scholar of the Renaissance in the 20th century. Kristeller connects ideas of immortality to emerging notions of the dignity of humans, the cult of fame, and the “pervasive individualism” of the era, among other emerging and contemporary intellectual influences. Marsilio Ficino is given special attention for his upholding of the soul’s immortality against Pomponazzi’s position.
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Pine, Martin. Pietro Pomponazzi: Radical Philosopher of the Renaissance. Padua, Italy: Antenore, 1986.
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Argues against some readings of Pomponazzi as a figure who viewed his endeavor as a philosophical game when in fact he actually did believe in the teachings of the church regarding the immortality of the soul. Pine, however, makes the case that Pomponazzi “accepted the death of the soul pure and simple” (p. 103).
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Thiel, Udo. The Early Modern Subject: Self-Consciousness and Personal Identity from Descartes to Hume. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199542499.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An exploration of human subjectivity in early modern philosophy with discussions of the doctrine of life after death as a theological issue of the 17th century. The personality of the soul in the afterlife, the material consistency between the body in life and death, and the condition of the soul after death are a few of the issues discussed.
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National Perspectives

One of the problems with Philippe Ariès was his tendency to range too widely in a geographic sense and to come to conclusions that did not often account for national difference. The works in this section take a closer albeit no less ambitious perspective, with Chaunu 1978 working from (and quantitatively tracking) Parisian testaments to uncover evolving attitudes toward death in the early modern period. Gittings 1984 is one of the most important studies of death in early modern England, and Harding 2002 explores Paris and London, utilizing more recent approaches. Koslovsky 2000 (cited under Death and the Protestant and Catholic Reformations) considers the transformation of traditional beliefs in Reformation Germany, while Hatje explores death and the plague in Basel.

Chaunu, Pierre. La mort à Paris: XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Paris: Fayard, 1978.
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An important work that quantitatively examines Parisian testaments and larger themes surrounding Christian approaches toward death, including attitudes regarding resurrection, purgatory, and the judgment of the soul.
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Gittings, Clare. Death, Burial, and the Individual in Early Modern England. London: Croom Helm, 1984.
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Encompassing the end of the Middle Ages through the 18th century, this work surveys popular attitudes toward the dead and dying, particularly as they were affected by the Reformation and its abolition of the doctrine of purgatory. The increasingly elaborate and commercialized ceremony of the funeral is also examined as well as the treatment of paupers’ deaths.
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Harding, Vanessa. The Dead and the Living in Paris and London, 1500–1670. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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A rich comparative study of the social and material aspects of death, from matters of identity and community remembrance to the administration of the dead by the church and its parishes, city and town planners, and grave diggers. The poor, including the anonymous dead, merit particular attention, as do the elite and their ceremonials, which were increasingly subject to an emerging culture of consumption and profit.
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Hatje, Frank. Leben und Sterben im Zeitalter der Pest (Basel im 15. bis 17. Jahrhundert). Basel, Switzerland: Helbing and Lichtenhahn, 1992.
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A social history of death and the plague from the 15th through the 17th centuries in Basel drawing on sources from chronicles, monastic and hospital archives, and government records.
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Tait, Clodagh. Death, Burial, and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550–1650. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
DOI: 10.1057/9781403913951Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A detailed examination of death practices in Ireland among Protestant and Catholic cultures. The art of dying well (and badly) is explored, as is the disposal of property and other posthumous considerations or lack thereof in the “bad” deaths wrought by war or disease. The rituals and superstitious lore that accrued around death and the differences between Protestant and Catholic funeral practices also merit analysis.
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The Hour of the Death and the Ars Moriendi

Studies that focus solely on the moments preceding death tend to reference the tradition of the ars moriendi, or the body of literature related to the theme of the art of dying. Though originating in the Middle Ages, the rituals and literary tradition that it conveyed and represented continued well into the early modern period, albeit with adjustments made in light of the Reformation, the theme of Reinis 2007. A very large literature exists on the ars moriendi, though O’Connor 1942 and Falk 1890 remain formative studies of the genre’s origins or, in the case of Falk 1890, its continued existence in the age of print. Lee 1970 traces its continuation through the early modern period. Wunderli and Broce 1990 is an investigation into popular belief centered on the “moment before death” and the potential salvation for those who held a correct state of mind, with Schwob 1998 providing a similar perspective and Guthke 1990 exploring last dying words.

Falk, Franz. Die deutschen Sterbebüchlein von der ältesten Zeit des Buchdruckes bis zum Jahre 1520. Cologne: Bachem, 1890.
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A still useful examination that traces the art of dying book as well as many death-related devotional and confessional books in the age of print.
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Guthke, Karl S. Letzte Worte: Variationen über ein Thema der Kulturgeschichte des Westens. Munich: Beck, 1990.
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A cultural history of last dying words, particularly as they were intended to advance the art of dying in a state of grace.
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Lee, Nancy. The Craft of Dying: A Study of the Literary Tradition of the Ars Moriendi in England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970.
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A readable history of the continuation of the ars moriendi tradition through the 17th century with a particularly astute analysis of Catholic texts (with Robert Persons) as well as Anglican (Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Dying).
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O’Connor, Mary C. The Art of Dying Well: The Development of the Ars Moriendi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1942.
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Still one of the better studies of the 15th-century handbook on how to die the good death, providing a literary history and followed by a valuable list of extant manuscripts and printed editions.
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Reinis, Austra. Reforming the Art of Dying: The Ars Moriendi in the German Reformation (1519–1528). Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007.
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Tracking the fate of the ars moriendi tradition in early modern reformed German states, Reinis explores its reimagining through the contributions of handbooks written by Martin Luther and others, who offered their own thoughts on questions of salvation and the afterlife.
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Schwob, Ute Monika. “Sorge um den ‘guten Tod’: Angst vor dem ‘jähen Tod’; Religiös-moralische Mahnungen und Reaktionen von seiten der Gläubigen.” In Du guoter tôt: Sterben im Mittelalter; Ideal und Realität. Edited by Markus J. Wenninger, 11–30. Schriftenreihe der Akademie Friesach 3. Klagenfurt, Austria: Wieser Verlag, 1998.
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Explores attitudes and psychological responses to death on the part of believers, from a desire to die a good death to a fear that sudden death will prevent the necessary preparations in dying correctly before God and the church.
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Wunderli, R., and G. Broce. “The Final Moment before Death in Early Modern England.” Sixteenth-Century Journal 20 (1990): 262–266.
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An interesting elucidation of the popular (and not theologically sanctioned) belief that the state of mind immediately preceding death determined an individual’s salvation or damnation. Shared by Catholics as well as Protestants, the attitude represented an optimistic turn in offering the potential of salvation to everyone.
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Death and the Protestant and Catholic Reformations

The Reformation not only affected liturgical ceremonies, funeral customs, burials, and monument epitaphs but also severed the vital connection that had existed between the living and the dead when purgatory and prayers for the dead were abolished. The changes in Catholicism brought on by the Council of Trent, however, also reinterpreted traditional themes that had cohered for centuries around notions of death and dying. For Protestantism, Houlbrooke 1998 traces the impact on families and other social structures in England. Koslovsky 2000 explores the impact of the Reformation on ritual and funeral practices in the German territories. As Marshall 2002 demonstrates, the decline of purgatory and other doctrines did not necessarily lead to a gradual secularization of the dead as scholars once claimed but rather created a reconfigured and still very Christian notion of what death and the afterlife were to entail. Individuals, however, continued to adhere in many cases to Catholic beliefs and practices when it came to the dead, as Duffy 2005 demonstrates with England. Eire 2002, however, provides the best account of the impact of the Counter-Reformation on collective beliefs regarding death in early modern Spain, with Châtellier 1987 encompassing a wider range of countries in its discussion of confraternities. Cohn 1988 also describes the manner in which beliefs and practices relating to death were transformed by the Counter-Reformation and other early modern developments, while Gregory 1999 traces the impact of Protestant and Catholic confessions on the phenomenon of martyrdom.

Châtellier, Louis. L’Europe des dévots. Paris: Flammarion, 1987.
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A wide-ranging study that extends across Catholic Europe from the 16th through the 19th centuries, important in this context for its discussion of the impact of the Counter-Reformation on confraternities devoted to comforting or memorializing the dead. In English translation, The Europe of the Devout: The Catholic Reformation and the Formation of a New Society, translated by Jean Birrell (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
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Cohn, Samuel K. Death and Property in Siena, 1205–1800: Strategies for the Afterlife. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.
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Working from wills and testaments as well as literary and other sources, Cohn provides a history of “peasants, artisans, and notables” and their beliefs and values with regard to death from the end of the Black Death through the early modern period. Important here, in a work that applies to other areas of pursuit as well, is Cohn’s discussion of the impact of the Council of Trent on new forms of piety, on women, and on new forms of social morality.
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Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580. 2d ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.
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A seminal book. Duffy argues for the persistence of a vibrant Catholicism extending well into the 16th century and through the (Protestant) reign of Edward VI. Among these beliefs and practices were a continued attachment to purgatory (chapter 10) and to alms and prayers for the dead and other practices relating to “last things” (chapter 9).
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Eire, Carlos M. From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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Working from testamentary sources and addressing the “formation of collective attitudes [toward dying] at various levels” of Spanish society (p. 12), Eire explores the “model” deaths of Philip II, Teresa of Avila, and ordinary Spaniards (primarily Castilians). The continued embrace of purgatory, Catholic soteriology, and distinctly “Spanish” beliefs toward the dead and in the wake of the Council of Trent are also examined at length.
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Gregory, Brad. Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
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A cross-confessional, transnational exploration of Christian martyrdom in early modern Europe with primary themes of the willingness to die (and to kill) for the faith and the attempt to shape the memory of the dead through the prism of “true” or “false” martyrdom.
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Houlbrooke, Ralph. Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
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A large and important contribution to the social history of death emphasizing the decline of Catholic beliefs and practices and the Reformation’s impact on funerary practices and theologies of the hereafter. The medical and demographic aspects of death are touched upon, but the volume is most important for the extent of its research and sociocultural and religious conclusions.
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Koslovsky, Craig. The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000.
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Arguing that “the Protestant Reformation transformed the Christian funeral more radically than it affected any other ritual of the traditional church” (p. 81), Koslovsky examines the meaning of death for ordinary men and women in Germany, tracing the influence of reformers on beliefs and practices related to the funeral ritual, burial, and the afterlife (including the “death of purgatory”).
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Marshall, Peter. Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198207733.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An important book that explores the impact of the Reformation and particularly the “death of purgatory” on religious attitudes and practices toward the dead in 16th- and 17th-century England. The changed, postpurgatorial relationship between the living and the dead gave way, in Marshall’s narrative, to a new culture of commemoration in the continued yet also more elaborate form of endowed charities and epitaphs.
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The Rituals of Death

The application of anthropology to historical studies in the 1970s gave rise to an interest in ritual, whether in the form of rites of passage and the life cycle, carnival and charivari, or equally important the processes of death and dying. Early works, such as Giesey 1960, explored the ritual aspect of royal funerals, for example, but it was not until the 1980s and with the additional influence of Mikhail Bakhtin that the field exploded, reaching its height in the 1990s and beyond. Strocchia 1992 provides a perspective from Florence, while Cressy 1997 offers one of the best accounts of ritual in England across the life cycle, including death. Woodward 1997 and Litten 1991 apply ritual analysis to ordinary and royal funeralization, respectively. Illi 1992 examines funerary and burial rituals primarily through the lens of Zurich.

Cressy, David. Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
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A major study of ritual and social performance with a long section on death, including burial customs and the slow impact of Protestantism on approaches toward death. The manner in which death practices and beliefs were subject to local and historical influences is emphasized throughout.
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Giesey, Ralph E. The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France. Geneva, Switzerland: Droz, 1960.
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A pioneering study of the royal funeral centered upon that of Francis I and tracing its late medieval origins through to its evolving ceremonials, its constitutional questions, and the matter of the evisceration and embalming of royal bodies. Ritual processions, effigies, and the function of the heir in all this are all explored. With illustrations and full critical apparatus.
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Illi, Martin. Wohin die Toten gingen: Begräbnis und Kirche in der vorindustriellen Stadt. Zurich, Switzerland: Chronos, 1992.
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An account based on archaeological and other historical sources of burial places and funeral rituals in premodern cities, most notably Zurich. The increasing displacement of death practices from public and civic life and the development of the morgue and cremation are also examined.
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Litten, Julian. The English Way of Death: The Common Funeral since 1450. London: Hale, 1991.
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A heavily illustrated study of the developing practices and customs of funerals in the early modern period, including burial etiquette, processions, embalming, lying in state, and other modes of laying the dead to rest.
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Strocchia, Sharon T. Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
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A multisourced investigation of death rites in Florence beginning with the plague of 1348 and continuing through to 1527. The legal, political, civic, familial, and gendered aspects of funeral processions and other rituals are treated at length, particularly as they reflected historical transformations of a republican city-state.
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Woodward, Jennifer. The Theatre of Death: The Ritual Management of Royal Funerals in Renaissance England, 1570–1625. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1997.
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Arguing that royal funerals were “performance processes” subject to changing political, social, and ideological motivations, Woodward explores such rituals especially as they were affected by Protestantism or shifting notions of sacred kingship.
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Corpse and Burial

The logistical and material aspects of death, stripped of their ritual and religious accretions, have been the subject of studies examining the development of public space and cemeteries (for which see Bassett 1992, cited under Edited Collections). But the body, or corpse, has also merited interesting monographs, eliciting new methodologies as well. Daniell 1997 discusses skeletal evidence and the potential of DNA technology to understand premodern dead bodies and disease, with Tarlow 2010 offering innovative approaches to bodies through the perspective of historical archaeology. Kammeier-Nebel and Fischer 1995 takes a more social historical approach in exploring funeral practices through the prism of the family in post-Reformation Germany, while Luria 2001 looks at cemetery burials across confessional divides in early modern France.

Daniell, Christopher. Death and Burial in Medieval England, 1066–1550. London: Routledge, 1997.
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An enlightening monograph exploring the rituals of death and burial and the changing conceptions of dying and the afterlife from the late Middle Ages through the Reformation. Includes a particularly interesting chapter on skeletal evidence and the application of new technology, including DNA recovery for understanding illnesses and other mortuary issues of the premodern past.
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Kammeier-Nebel, Andrea, and Norbert Fischer. “Familie, Tod und Trauerkultur: Sozialgeschichtliche Überlegungen zum Wandel von Gefühlsstrukturen im nachreformatorischen Deutschland.” In “Denken heißt Grenzen überschreiten”: Beiträge aus der sozialhistorischen Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung. Edited by Elke Klainau, Katrin Schmersahl, and Dorion Weickmann, 65–83. Hamburg, Germany: von Bockel, 1995.
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An investigation of family funeral practices in post-Reformation Germany.
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Luria, Keith. “Separated by Death? Burials, Cemeteries, and Confessional Boundaries in Seventeenth-Century France.” French Historical Studies 24 (2001): 185–222.
DOI: 10.1215/00161071-24-2-185Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A compelling examination of the manner in which Huguenots and Catholics buried their dead in common cemeteries in the French region of Poitou, reflecting one example of a confessional divide that was crossed.
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Tarlow, Sarah. Ritual, Belief, and the Dead Body in Early Modern Britain and Ireland. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
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A contribution that utilizes a range of sources and disciplinary approaches, including folklore and archaeological evidence, to explore disparate beliefs about the dead body and its materiality in early modern England and Ireland.
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Death, Demography, and the Medical Body

Though social and cultural attitudes toward death (as well as borrowings from social history) are nearly inseparable from the “biomedical” approach to death, it is important to isolate the manner in which death was affected solely by the early modern revolution in medical theory and practice. Foucault once argued that the greatest shift in understandings of life and death occurred in the late-18th-century natural sciences, and while the historical underpinnings of his thought have been subject to critique, the early modern period undoubtedly witnessed a greater medical management of life and death in accordance with the increasing professionalization and state-controlled licensing of the field. This section is an incomplete but somewhat representative sampling of various works that discuss, at least in part, this “medicalization” of death and the implications for society. Mortimer 2009 is one of the more recent accounts of the medical revolution’s impact on health, illness, and death, while Cohn 2009 explores not only how medical thought was changed by new encounters with the plague but also how the plague was managed by those practitioners (and the state). Lindemann 2010 also offers an assessment of the profession and its influence on notions of disease and death, as does Dobson 1997, which brings in demographic analysis as well. Mortality rates are addressed by essays in Webster 1979 with its focus on the 16th century and its periodic demographic crises.

Cohn, Samuel K. Cultures of Plague: Medical Thought at the End of the Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
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Drawing upon a range of academic, popular, literary, and statistical sources, including Milanese death books, Cohn addresses the attempts of physicians and those outside the profession to confront and change their thinking in accordance with the outbreak and pathology of plague as it occurred in 16th-century Italy.
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Dobson, Mary J. Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511581847Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An exhaustive study of mortality in Southeast England, including death rates and other demographic trends and the medical causes behind them in the 17th and 18th centuries.
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Lindemann, Mary. Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe. 2d ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
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A comprehensive introductory synthesis with critical apparatus that offers guides for further research into the study of death and its relation to the medical field. Rates of death, including infant mortality, are also discussed, as is the treatment of the old and the dying.
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Mortimer, Ian. The Dying and the Doctors: The Medical Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2009.
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Basing much of its evidence on a huge number of probate accounts, this study explores the range of changing practices adopted by the gravely ill or dying in a time of medical transformation.
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Webster, Charles, ed. Health, Medicine, and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
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A wide-ranging collection of essays, including Paul Slack’s examination of the period’s high mortality rates, particularly as they relate to famine or other crises. See also Roger Schofield and E. A. Wrigley’s discussion of infant and child mortality rates and Thomas Forbes’s exploration of the causes of death among the populace of early modern London.
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War and Death

Though all studies of war consider the inescapable matter of death, a study that focuses solely on changing early modern perceptions of death in relation to war has yet to be written. The new military history, with its focus on the experience of the soldier, has contributed, however, to our understanding of the imminence and terror of death for the fighting person (and for civilians unwittingly drawn into the battle). Carlton 1992 is a good sample of such studies, bringing the experience of death into intimate detail. Cunningham and Grell 2001 also explores the military death, albeit at a farther range and through the prism of apocalyptic beliefs. The rhetoric of war accounts, which were saturated with death imagery, is given a detailed treatment in Theibault 1993, with Wilson 2009 providing a larger narrative and context for the death toll of the Thirty Years’ War.

Carlton, Charles. Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638–1651. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
DOI: 10.4324/9780203425589Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A detailed if occasionally problematic, in terms of a few factual inaccuracies, work that intimately explores the experience of death on the battlefield by soldiers and civilians during a particularly bloody conflict.
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Cunningham, Andrew, and Ole Peter Grell. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Famine, and Death in Reformation Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
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An excellent capitulation of the impact of war, epidemics, and famine in the early modern period and their relationship to a pervasive apocalyptic worldview. The section on war includes a very good exploration on the impact of new forms of weapons and warfare and the experience of death on the battlefield.
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Theibault, John. “The Rhetoric of Death and Destruction in the Thirty Years War.” Journal of Social History 27 (1993): 271–290.
DOI: 10.1353/jsh/27.2.271Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A study of the social impact of the Thirty Years’ War through narratives that described the effect death had on ordinary men and women. As Theibault writes, the “vocabulary of despair . . . spread through different genres and became available to diverse authors and audiences” who responded with a language that strained to equal “the magnitude of events” (p. 285).
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Wilson, Peter H. The Thirty Years’ War: Europe’s Tragedy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
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A vivid account of the most destructive military conflict of the early modern period and the death toll it exacted using recent sources and interpretations. Though the subject of death is relatively tangential to the larger narrative of the war, the place of loss and memory is considered.
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The Criminal Death

The criminalized death, namely, in the form of Homicide and Suicide, which in the premodern period was also homicide, has merited its own historiographical field in which attitudes toward death comprise only one facet. Homicide on its own, as separate from larger studies of crime or from microhistorical approaches, has received only one late-20th- or early-21st-century English-language treatment. Suicide, on the other hand, continues to thrive as a busy field of study despite the many problems it presents in terms of the sources. The drama of punishment has also been treated extensively, particularly in terms of the ritualized aspects of execution and the scripted speeches that criminals were expected to proclaim as they redeemed themselves in the crowd’s eyes by dying a “good” death.

Homicide

The history of crime has benefited in the late 20th and early 21st centuries from approaches drawn from anthropology, mentalities (mentalities), and sociology, and the murder story has long inspired monographs. But with the exception perhaps of works on infanticide, surprisingly few studies have been devoted solely to the history and significance of homicide in early modern Europe, with the exception of Spierenburg 2008, which extends into modernity. The works in this section represent an incomplete list, though they contain substantial discussions of death by murder through the prism of mentalités, gender, or society. Female murderers, including those who committed infanticide, have merited a great deal of interest, with Rublack 1999 offering a particularly good sample of analysis. Perhaps reflecting interest in masculinities, Carroll 2006 offers the opposite perspective in his analysis of male crime and specifically the duel, while Muir 1993 presents a picture of murderous death (against animals too) in his exploration of the vendetta in Renaissance Italy. In examining crime in England, Gaskill 2000 applies the methodologies and analyses of mentalités as well as print culture to the study of homicide, while Martines 2003 provides a vivid account of one of the most notorious assassination attempts in early modern Florence.

Carroll, Stuart. Blood and Violence in Early Modern France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199290451.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The often lethal violence between noblemen is the subject of this excellent monograph centering on the duel from the 15th through the 18th centuries. Contrary to the myth of the increasing “civilization” of the aristocracy, vindictive feuds continued to taint the age as a brutal and murderous one.
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Gaskill, Malcolm. Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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A study of the mentalités and cultural contexts that shaped and underlay crime and its prosecution in early modern England with a substantial chapter devoted to homicide, or “crimes of blood.” Legal approaches toward homicide are discussed, as is the role of print and oral culture in disseminating and shaping attitudes toward stories of murder.
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Martines, Lauro. April Blood: Florence and the Plot against the Medici. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
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A masterful reconstruction of the 1478 Pazzi plot to kill Lorenzo de’ Medici and his brother during a high mass and the gruesome punishments meted out to the conspirators as a result. Particularly good in exposing (and connecting) the violence and ruthless politics that underlay the achievements of Renaissance Florence.
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Muir, Edward. Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta in Renaissance Italy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
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Placing the vendetta in its social, political, familial, and ritual context, Muir uncovers the violence of homicidal revenge by the Friulian elites, especially as it culminated in the 1511 Fat Tuesday slaughter.
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Rublack, Ulinka. The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
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Murderous women, primarily in cases of infanticide, constitute one aspect of a larger study concerning female crime in early modern Germany. Seeking to uncover the cultural meaning of murder, Rublack explores its gendered aspects and the legal intolerance displayed toward homicidal women in comparison to previous centuries.
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Spierenburg, Pieter. A History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present. Malden, MA: Polity, 2008.
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A work of synthesis exploring centuries of homicide with a good exploration of the early modern period. Included in the pertinent chapters are murder resulting from male fighting, murders of and by women (including infanticide), and the shift in perceptions of some murders as being symptomatic of madness rather than sin.
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Suicide

A major constraint in studying early modern suicide rests with the question of whether a death was actually a suicide (did he fall or did he jump?) and how one can navigate frequently difficult sources that do not always provide the answer. Émile Durkheim’s pioneering sociological work on suicide, first appearing in 1897, ushered in a renewed interest in the subject, even if historians (including Philippe Ariès) rarely mentioned the topic until the 1980s, when Durkheim’s theories were already being questioned. For a longer historical perspective that reaches into the Middle Ages, Murray 2000 provides the best account. While the 18th century has elicited the most studies of suicide, as evidenced by Minois 1999, substantial early modern examinations exist, with Macdonald and Murphy 1993 representing one of the most influential examinations of suicide through the prism of attitudes and religious beliefs, even if the latter gave way to an increasing “secularization” and lenient treatment of suicide. Jansson 1998 also argues that secularization carried a strong impact on suicide rates, at least in Sweden, though Lederer 1997 makes a claim for the persistence of dishonor and shame in popular perceptions of self-killing. Houston 2010 takes the perspective of the law and the purposes it served in punishing suicides, which Bernardini 1994 also traces through the 18th century. Watt 2001 provides a comprehensive approach to death records, concluding with Durkheim that many of these suicides had a social rather than a physical or a purely psychological basis. Garavini 1989 discusses the treatment of suicide as a more personal and less theological matter, as argued by Michel Montaigne.

Bernardini, Paolo. “Dal suicidio come crimine al suicido come malattia: Appunti sulla questione suicidologica nell’etica e nella giurisprudenza europea tra Sei e Settecento.” Materiali per una storia della cultura giuridica 24 (1994): 111–131.
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Traces the changes in ethics and jurisprudence in approaches to suicide across the 17th and 18th centuries.
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Garavini, Fausta. “Montaigne et le suicide: A propos de Essais 3, ‘Coustume de l’Isle de Cea.’” Travaux de littérature 2 (1989): 69–82.
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An analysis of the Essais’ most problematic chapter, which is not an apology for suicide, as many have interpreted it, but the expression of an ethical quest relating to personal conscience, as the self battles against the self and contemplates the courage needed to live and die.
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Houston, R. A. Punishing the Dead? Suicide, Lordship, and Community in Britain, 1500–1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
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Focusing on the law of forfeiture or the just disposal of goods, Houston brings in the case of Scotland as well as England to explore how suicide, as a legal crime of self-slaughter, served to benefit relatives, communities, and other interested parties. Punishment of suicide, particularly as it advanced social exclusion, is treated in the second half of the book.
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Jansson, Arne. From Swords to Sorrow: Homicide and Suicide on Early Modern Stockholm. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1998.
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A detailed examination of Sweden’s homicides, which declined in the early modern period, and its suicides, which rose. Jansson connects the two, however, as violence against others was increasingly directed against the self in accordance with a secularizing age that denuded self-murder of much of its previous association with the gravest sin.
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Lederer, David. “The Dishonorable Dead: Elite and Popular Perceptions of Suicide in Early Modern Germany.” In Das Konzept der Ehre in der Frühen Neuzeit. Edited by Sibylle Backmann, Hans-Jörg Künast, B. Ann Tlusty, and Sabine Ullmann, 347–363. Augsburg, Germany: Wiley-VCH Verlag, 1997.
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A study of attitudes toward suicide as a matter of honor, dishonor, or shame as well as the factors—the church or popular culture—that shaped such perceptions. Includes related matters, such as despair and contemporary views of burial practices.
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Macdonald, Michael, and Terence R. Murphy. Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993.
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An influential work that tracks the late-17th-century shift from approaching suicide as a legally felonious and punishable act to one treated as a scientifically explainable medical problem whose opprobrium also came to be lessened by local communities and their insistence on preserving relationships against the intrusions of the church and the state.
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Minois, Georges. History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
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Though Minois focuses primarily on the 18th century, substantial attention is directed toward early centuries, particularly in England and France. Minois’s introductory discussion of the problem of evidence and interpretive difficulty is also illuminating for any student of the subject. Original French version published as Histoire du suicide: La société occidentale face à la mort volontaire (Paris: Fayard, 1995).
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Murray, Alexander. Suicide in the Middle Ages. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
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Though these volumes relate primarily to the Middle Ages, they nevertheless provide a larger context in understanding the motives and circumstances as well as the laws, religious injunctions, and social conventions that reside behind suicide. Judicial records, saints’ lives, and didactic treatises are some of the sources that provide evidence for this large and important study.
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Watt, Jeffrey. Choosing Death: Suicide and Calvinism in Early Modern Geneva. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2001.
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Working from government records, Watt documents 404 cases of suicide in Geneva from 1536 to 1798, exploring them through the lens of gender, class, and occupation and placing them within their larger religious and political contexts. Watt argues that Calvinism restricted the rates of suicide in its first centuries, though the decriminalization and secularization of the 18th century witnessed an increase in self-murder.
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Capital Punishment

The last moments before death by capital punishment were always viewed as crucial, even if the “good gallows death” might have served the interests of everyone other than the criminal whose salvation was supposedly at stake. Studies of executions are vast in number and contentious regarding the agency of the criminal or the role of the state and the crowds. This section, however, presents works that explore the behavior of dying criminals before they met their end and the fates of their bodies after death. Sharpe 1985 is a seminal article exploring the importance of the “last dying speech,” with Nicholls 1988 providing a good sample of the heavily religious aspects of early modern executions. Covington 2009 explores the relationship between consolers and priests at the gallows in England, while Falvey 1988 approaches the topic from the Italian perspective. Evans 1996 examines capital punishment in Germany, Ciabani 1994 and Zorzi 1993 in Florence, and Spierenburg 1984 across western Europe.

Ciabani, Roberto. Torturati, impiccati, squartati: La pena capitale a Firenze dal 1423 al 1759. Florence: Bonecchi, 1994.
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A historical investigation of penal practices and the rituals of capital punishment over centuries in Florence, including the changing manner in which they were perceived.
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Covington, Sarah. “Consolation on Golgotha: Comforters and Sustainers of Dying Priests in England, 1580–1625.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History (2009): 270–293.
DOI: 10.1017/S0022046907002527Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Examines the phenomenon of consoling laypeople and hidden priests appearing in crowds to comfort dying priests and Jesuits in Elizabethan and Stuart England. The afterlife of the priest’s body, and specifically his relics, are also discussed.
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Evans, Richard J. Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600–1987. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
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A magisterial study by the foremost historian of early modern Germany spanning four centuries of capital punishment and engaging with the theories of Philippe Ariès, particularly concerning attitudes about death, cruelty, and the law.
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Falvey, Kathleen C. “An Investigation into the Imaginative and Dramatic Context of the Italian ‘conforteria’: The Practice of Comforting Condemned Criminals up to the Moment of Death.” Fifteenth-Century Studies 13 (1988): 535–541.
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Seeks to uncover the purpose of comforters and comfort societies or confraternities in the early modern period and their role in the ritual of capital punishment.
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Nicholls, David. “The Theatre of Martyrdom in the French Reformation.” Past and Present 121 (1988): 49–73.
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Exploring the “three-act drama” of 16th-century heresy executions—public penitence, processions through the street, and execution—Nicholls traces the manner in which authorities sought to symbolically expel the heretic from the community before undertaking “total obliteration” (p. 121) of that heretic. Calvinist attitudes toward death and martyrdom are also examined in this earlier contribution to studies of the “theatre of martyrdom.”
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Sharpe, J. A. “Last Dying Speeches: Religion, Ideology, and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century England.” Past and Present 107 (1985): 144–167.
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A now-standard essay by the leading historian of crime examining different aspects of the convention of the “last speech” in public executions.
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Spierenburg, Pieter. The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
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A detailed study of executions in Amsterdam between 1650 and 1760 with extensive treatment of the victim on the scaffold as he or she approached death.
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Zorzi, A. “Le esecuzioni delle condanne a morte a Firenze nel tardo Medioevo tra repressione penale e ceremoniale pubblico.” In Simbolo e realta della vita urbana nel tardo medievo: Atti del V Convegno storico italo-canadese, Viterbo 11–15 meggio 1988. Edited by Massimo Miglio and Giuseppe Lombardi, 153–253. Rome: Vecchiarelli, 1993.
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A much-cited article that explores the meanings that underlay public executions of criminals in late medieval Florence, including such punishments as hangings and their relation to the social and civic public sphere.
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Remembrance and the Afterlife

The dying, or at least the elite among them, often attempted to shape how they would be remembered by anticipating and fashioning their own monuments and tombs. But memory often escaped their control, in the process revealing more about the people and communities that were left behind. One of the central questions raised by historians has rested upon the fate of the early modern dead with the Protestant abolishment of purgatory and its attendant memory-perpetuating prayers. Most agree that commemoration, however, only assumed different forms, including a continued Protestant belief in ghosts that could also assert the presence of the departed. The explosion in the late 20th and early 21st centuries of the study of memory, both collective and individual, has also deepened these explorations, just as studies of bereavement have advanced understanding of how the dead were remembered through family manuscripts or the literary genres of the epitaph and elegy.

The Afterlife

It was not simply beliefs and practices relating to the dead that underwent a transformation in the early modern period; so too were notions of the afterlife overturned, as purgatory and limbo, for example, were rendered entirely fictitious products of an unbiblical and false teaching. Protestants, however, adhered to their own heavens and hells, many of which shared distinct features with their Catholic equivalents. Marshall 2010 discerns some real differences in the “reformation of hell,” whereas Camporesi 1991 discusses the shifting tropes and images of the infernal afterlife in post-Tridentine Catholicism. Freytag 2001–2002, meanwhile, traces continuities and disruptions in thinking about heaven, hell, and purgatory over the late medieval and early modern periods, and Van Bueren 2005 provides a series of essays on the hereafter and other topics in the late medieval through early modern periods. Thomas 2009 discusses contemporary understandings of the afterlife and the individual’s place in it.

Camporesi, Piero. The Fear of Hell: Images of Damnation and Salvation in Early Modern Europe. State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991.
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Discusses not only hell but the Eucharist in early modern Western Christendom but particularly in Counter-Reformation Italy, arguing for the baroque era’s increasing comparisons of hell to recognizable if grotesque real-world images and metaphors as well as its secularization in the 18th century.
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Freytag, Hartmut. “Jenseitsvorstellungen im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit.” Jahrbuch der Oswald von Wolkenstein Gesellschaft 13 (2001–2002): 45–59.
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Discusses notions of the afterlife in the medieval and early modern periods, including heaven, hell, and purgatory.
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Marshall, Peter. “Catholic and Protestant Hells in Later Reformation England.” In Hell and Its Afterlife: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Edited by Isabel Moreira and Margaret Toscan, 89–102. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010.
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Argues that Catholic and Protestant writings about hell, while on the surface the most “solidly consensual of all doctrinal productions” (p. 100), also reflected deep theological differences that would in turn shape larger group solidarities and identities between the confessions.
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Thomas, Keith. The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
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An exploration of the manner in which people sought fulfillment as they understood it from the Reformation through the Enlightenment. Relevant here is the final chapter, “Fame and the Afterlife,” which investigates understandings of heaven and hell, the soul’s fate after life, the nature of human fulfillment in heaven, and the incentive to seek a posthumous fame.
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Van Bueren, Truus, ed. Sorge für das Diesseits und das Jenseits die funktion der kunst in der memoria in Mittelalter. Amsterdam: Brepols, 2005.
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A collection of essays that explores the hereafter and the memorialization of the dead in the Middle Ages with essays devoted to wills, material culture, genealogies, monuments, liturgical remembrance, memorial books, funeral regulations, and other topics.
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Ghosts and Restless Spirits

Most Protestants had no problem in believing, with Catholics, that the dead could return in the form of ghosts and wandering spirits—a belief that was shared on the level of elite as well as popular culture. Literary critics, including Stephen Greenblatt, were the first in the late 20th century to look at the “early modern” ghost, in William Shakespeare and specifically Hamlet most famously. Historians followed suit, with the works in this section representing a sampling of this subfield. Finucane 1996 provides a good cross-national overview, while the classic work Thomas 1997 discusses ghosts alongside other beliefs in 17th-century England. Lederer 2002, by contrast, discusses the manner in which both high and low culture embraced a more personal “early modern” ghost. From the perspective of Italy, Cavazza 1994 discusses not ghosts but the unquiet souls of unbaptized infants and the troubling issues they raised for the living. The essays in Newton 2002 provide a fine overview of the field, particularly emphasizing the somewhat blurred boundary that existed between Catholics and Protestants when it came to the matter of ghosts.

Cavazza, Silvano. “Double Death: Resurrection and Baptism in a Seventeenth-Century Rite.” In History from Crime: Selections from Quaderni Storici. Edited by Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, 1–31. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
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An interesting article that explores the question of the souls of unborn infants and the resurrection cult that emerged to address such unquiet souls.
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Finucane, Ronald C. Ghosts: Appearances of the Dead and Cultural Transformation. New York: Prometheus, 1996.
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An exploration of ghosts through the ages with particular emphasis, in the author’s words, on how “the dead have been perceived in Western European traditions” (p. 1). The early modern period and the impact of the Reformation on perceptions of ghosts merit extensive treatment.
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Lederer, David. “Living with the Dead: Ghosts in Early Modern Bavaria.” In Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits: Traditional Belief and Folklore in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Kathryn A. Edwards, 25–54. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University, 2002.
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A penetrating essay that investigates popular, elite, and even clerical beliefs in ghosts as beings that were individual, personal, and perceived as very real in conveying their voices from the ream of purgatory. For Lederer, ghosts “were a deadly serious matter in early modern Europe, integral to supernatural beliefs and, therefore, a fundamental component of a rational cosmology” (p. 26).
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Newton, John, ed. Early Modern Ghosts: Proceedings of the Conference Held at St John’s College, Durham University, on 24 March 2001. Durham, UK: University of Durham, 2002.
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A good interdisciplinary sampling of essays ranging from analysis of Lutheran poems to the relationship of ghosts and Providence through folkloric beliefs in revenants. Peter Marshall’s essay on the apparitions of Old Mother Leakey in 1634 evolved into his monograph Mother Leakey and the Bishop: A Ghost Story (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
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Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
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A seminal work that spends a substantial chapter on the subject of ghosts (and fairies) and the functions (protection, revenge) they served for the living. For Thomas, however, while beliefs in ghosts persisted through the Reformation, it was also a “shibboleth” that distinguished Catholic from Protestant as surely as “Mass or Papal Supremacy” (p. 589) did.
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Mourning the Dead

The present-day work of medical sociologists and psychologists, such as Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, Barney Glaser, and Anselm Strauss, brought the subject of bereavement into greater public awareness, with Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief becoming part of the modern lexicon. While scholars of early modern Europe avoid applying such terms to their era, mourners are nevertheless viewed as central in upholding memory and in revealing aspects of themselves and their world. In the process of studying these mourners, certain assumptions are also challenged. Helt 2003, for example, portrays widows not as silent and hidden but as active agents in overseeing their husbands’ deaths and in shaping the memory of those husbands. In exploring the larger contexts and commemorative text(s) behind the death of one eight-year-old Venetian child, King 1994 refutes older claims that affection toward children in the premodern period was limited if not negligible. Linton 2008, meanwhile, also explores parental grief in Lutheran Germany, while Tarlow 1999 applies the approach of historical archaeology to uncover the relationships at work in the process of commemoration. McClure 1991 examines the consolatory writings of the Italian humanists for what they reveal about loss, friendship, and other related topics.

Helt, J. S. W. “Memento Mori: Death, Widowhood, and Remembering in Early Modern England.” In Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Allison Levy, 39–54. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003.
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An examination of the manner in which widows served as “sites of memory,” as “guardians of property and wealth,” and as “active participants in the ritual performance of remembering” (p. 39). The widow’s role in shaping remembrance occurred in her aiding in her husband’s dying a “good death,” in her preparation of the body and the funeral, or in domestic rites following the funeral.
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King, Margaret L. The Death of the Child Valerio Marcello. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
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A detailed investigation of the impact of one boy’s death on his 15th-century Venetian family. The child’s death and the manuscript that memorialized him are shown to be revealing of political, psychological, and familial motivations as well as attitudes toward children and toward death itself.
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Linton, Anna. Poetry and Parental Bereavement in Early Modern Lutheran Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
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A study of the consolatory literature produced in Lutheran Germany by authors, clergy, poets, and laypeople. The neglected genre of the funeral poem receives the most attention and is placed within its larger historical, theological, and philosophical contexts.
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McClure, George W. Sorrow and Consolation in Italian Humanism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.
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Focusing on the consolatory literature of the early modern period, including the related works of Petrarch, Coluccio Salutati, Marsilio Ficino, and a range of lesser writers, McClure examines such themes as self-presentation and friendship, treatments of reason and sorrow, Christian and classical approaches to loss and death, and the soul and questions of immortality.
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Tarlow, Sarah. Bereavement and Commemoration: An Archaeology of Mortality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
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Providing archaeological, literary, and historical perspectives, particularly in the study of mortuary monuments, Tarlow explores the process of bereavement from the Reformation through modernity, arguing that changing attitudes toward the dead were dependent above all on questions of identity and personal relationships.
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Monumental Tombs

Tomb sculptures and monuments were the physical embodiment of the death obsession in the Middle Ages, though they continued to proliferate among the elite through the Renaissance, albeit with variation according to religious and social allegiances. Studies of tomb sculptures and monuments have been the purview of art and church historians, though Johan Huizinga, Philippe Ariès, and others have dwelled at length on their beauty and significance. Panofsky 1964 provides a series of lectures by the great art historian on death and its representation through tomb sculptures, with Cohen 1974 focusing specifically on the transi (cadaver) tomb, which continued through the early modern period. Llewellyn 2001 is a study of monuments in England through the 17th century, Sherlock 2008 applies work in memory studies to the funeral monuments and their relation to commemoration, and Althoff 1984 examines the commemorating strategies of noble and royal families toward their own. This very commemoration, however, and the idolatrous aspects of the monument in general, could lead to contention, as Lindley 2004 demonstrates.

Althoff, Gerd. Adels- und Königsfamilien im Spiegel ihrer Memorialüberlieferung: Studien zum Totengedenken der Billunger und Ottonen. Münstersche Mittelalter-Schriften 47. Munich: Fink Verlag, 1984.
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Explores the means by which royal and aristocratic families were commemorated after death not only through tombs and monuments but also through donations made to churches and confraternities in memory of the dead.
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Cohen, Kathleen. Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol: The Transi Tomb in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.
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An examination of over two hundred transi images, or “representation[s] of the deceased as a corpse, shown either nude or wrapped in a shroud” (p. 9), and the manner in which their meanings changed, particularly over the course of the 15th and 16th centuries. A work of iconography and art history, this volume is also supplemented by a range of literary and historical sources.
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Lindley, Philip. “Disrespect for the Dead? The Destruction of Tomb Monuments in Mid-Sixteenth-Century England.” Church Monuments 19 (2004): 53–79.
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An interesting essay that discusses the motives behind destructive campaigns against tomb monuments, particularly those with offensive (Catholic) imagery and inscriptions. Attempts on the part of authorities to save the monuments against these iconoclastic campaigns are also discussed.
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Llewellyn, Nigel. Funeral Monuments in Post-Reformation England. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
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An important and influential work that explores a range of English funeral monuments between the Reformation and the Civil War, arguing that monuments above all reflected the values of the ruling classes or aspirants to that class.
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Panofsky, Erwin. Tomb Sculpture: Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini. London: Thames and Hudson, 1964.
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Four lectures, heavily illustrated, by the leading iconologist on the art of the tomb across the ages and the manner in which such art revealed existing notions of death and the afterlife. The last essay focuses on the early modern period and includes a discussion of Michelangelo’s plans for the tomb of Pope Julius II and Gian Bernini’s tomb of Alexander VII.
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Sherlock, Peter. Monuments and Memory in Early Modern England. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008.
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An important contribution to the study of funeral monuments and their relationship to the memory of the dead. Inscriptions of monuments are examined as well as their architecture and materiality, thereby granting greater insight into how the dead had understood their world and had wished themselves to be conveyed to posterity.
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Death and Literature

The importance of the elegy in conveying grief for the dead and the use of the elegiac form by writers such as Spenser or Donne have long been recognized and examined by historians, with Kay 1990 tracing the tradition as it shaped a “community of mourners” through the 17th century and modernity. Tomb inscriptions and epitaphs have also enjoyed a resurgence of interest, particularly for their literary qualities, with Petrucci 1998 representing one such study and Scodel 1991 placing the epitaph in the context of the high (and low) English literary tradition. Valentinitsch 1990 brings a German perspective to the subject. On the broader subject of death and literature, DuBruck 1964 examines French death-related poetry from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, while Martineau-Génieys 1978 also treats French literature, albeit more broadly. Fichte 1986 examines the dialogue by Johannes von Tepl, Der Ackermann aus Böhmen (1401) and its many-faceted presentation of death, with Haas 1989 providing an account of individual and collective notions of death in medieval German literature.

DuBruck, Edelgard E. The Theme of Death in French Poetry of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Studies in French Literature 1. The Hague: Mouton, 1964.
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Explores the manner in which death was represented in late medieval and early modern French literature with special attention paid to the influence of the danse macabre (dance of death) tradition and 15th-century death lyrics on later Renaissance literary developments.
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Fichte, Joerg O. “Der Ackermann aus Böhmen: ‘Experience’ Becomes Art; A Poetic Response to Death.” In Intellectuals and Writers in Fourteenth-Century Europe. Edited by Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, 178–190. Tübinger Beiträge zur Anglistik 7. Tübingen, West Germany: Gunter Narr, 1986.
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An examination of Der Ackermann aus Böhmen, a work composed by Johannes von Tepl in 1401 relating a dialogue between Death and a Ploughman regarding the death of the latter’s wife.
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Haas, Alois M. Todesbilder im Mittelalter: Fakten und Hinweise in der deutschen Literatur. Darmstadt, West Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989.
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Though the focus of this study rests primarily on the Middle Ages, Haas provides a deeper background to writings on death in German literature, particularly in the distinction made between individual and collective experiences of death.
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Kay, Dennis. Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.
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An exemplary study that traces the literary tradition of the funeral elegy and its adoption by major poets of the 16th and 17th centuries. The genre’s relationship to a “community of mourners” and its position within larger political and cultural frameworks is also examined.
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Martineau-Génieys, Christine. Le thème de la mort dans la poésie française: De 1450 à 1550. Paris: Champion, 1978.
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A well-documented discussion of the 16th-century déplorations funébres (funeral lamentations) and the literary productions of Marguerite de Navarre and François Rabelais, making the argument throughout that poetic treatments of death reached their fullest clarity in the Renaissance in terms of acceptance of the subject matter.
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Petrucci, Armando. Writing the Dead: Death and Writing Strategies in the Western Tradition. Translated by Michael Sullivan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.
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A brief exploration by a noted paleographer of tomb and cemetery inscriptions, medieval necrologies, and graveyard literature. The Renaissance is represented by an examination of epigraphical writers, such as Mazzocchi and Schrader.
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Scodel, Joshua. The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991.
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A work that “narrates the rise and fall of the English poetic epitaph as a vital literary genre” and one that “called into question prevailing conceptions of who and what was high and low, major and minor, central and marginal, in life, death, and poetry” (p. 5). Ben Jonson, John Donne, and Robert Herrick are some of the writers representing the 17th century.
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Valentinitsch, Helfried. “Grabinschriften und Grabmäler als Ausdruck sozialen Aufstiegs im Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit.” In Epigraphik 1988. Edited by Walter Koch, 15–25. Denkschriften der Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse 213. Vienna: Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1990.
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Explores inscriptions on tombs and graves in the late medieval and early modern periods, particularly as a form of social promotion and memorialization.
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Death on the Stage

Though early works such as Theodore Spencer’s Death and the Elizabethan Tragedy (1936) treated the subject of death on the stage, the work of Philippe Ariès and the new historicists led to a surge of literary scholarship on the subject beginning in the 1980s. Best 1981 takes the action back further, however, to the Dutch Everyman plays. DeBruck 1999, meanwhile, contends with Jesus’s death in late medieval theater. Titzmann 1983 brings the subject up through the Reformation, and Cameron 1989 focuses on last dying speeches on the stage. Spinrad 1987 concentrates on the “summons of death” idea. For French theater, Jondorf 1990 is a good survey that touches on themes of death, as does McKendrick 1989 for Spain.

Best, Thomas W. “Heralds of Death in Dutch and German Everyman Plays.” Neophilologus 65 (1981): 397–403.
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Explores the allegorical figure of Death in such Everyman plays as Peter van Diest’s morality Elckrlijc (1536; Homulus or Everyman in its English translation) and the psychological and theological functions it served for late medieval and early modern audiences.
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Cameron, Michael. This Action of Our Death: The Performance of Death in English Renaissance Drama. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989.
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An incisive study that focuses primarily on the death speech as a projection of the heroic self, which could also carry with it layers of psychological complexity. The tragedies of William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe and early Stuart revenge dramas constitute the primary focus of analysis concerning the representation of death.
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DeBruck, Edelgard. “The Death of Christ on the Late-Medieval Stage: A Theater of Salvation.” In Death and Dying in the Middle Ages. Edited by Edelgard E. DuBruck and Barbara I. Gusick, 355–375. Studies in the Humanities 45. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.
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An essay by a leading scholar of the subject examining theatrical representations of Christ’s death in the Middle Ages and its carrying forth a larger message of salvation.
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Jondorf, Gillian. French Renaissance Tragedy: The Dramatic Word. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511470370Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A good overview that directs the reader to further sources and also tangentially investigates the meaning of and attitudes toward death as reflected in 16th-century French tragedies.
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McKendrick, Melveena. Theatre in Spain, 1490–1700. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
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Discusses the theme and metaphor of death, including its pairing with love, in early modern Spanish theater and particularly in the work of Lope de Vega.
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Spinrad, Phoebe S. The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance English Stage. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987.
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A study of a period when “death walked the stage in many guises, constantly reminding Renaissance man and woman that all endings were one end” (p. x). Spinrad, however, traces continuities from death-related iconography and practices of the Middle Ages at the same time that she demonstrates the impact that Calvinism, humanism, and other developments had on the summons of death idea.
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Titzmann, Michael. “Der Tod als Figur im Drama der deutschsprachigen Gebiets im 16. Jhdt.: Implikationen und Transformationen.” In Interpretation: Das Paradigma der europäischen Renaissance-Literatur. Edited by Klaus W. Hempfer and Gerhard Regn, 352–393. Wiesbaden, West Germany: Steiner, 1983.
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Examines the transformations in the allegorical character of death in the German-speaking territories of the 16th century.
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Death in Art

The visual culture of death persisted through the early modern period despite occasional Protestant iconophobia. Originating in the late Middle Ages—though its origins have been debated—the danse macabre, or dance of death, in which skeletons mocked the living, was one of the most striking visualizations of life’s fragility and the imminence of death. Mâle 1898 is by one of the foremost authorities on the tradition in the late Middle Ages, but as Clark 1950 demonstrates, the image continued through the Renaissance, even among Protestant artists, such as Hans Holbein. The essays in Invernizzi and Della Casa 1995 take the image up through modernity, though the Renaissance is well represented in Eckart 1983 and Davis 1956, which traces the influence on Holbein’s depictions of death. Binion 2005, meanwhile, argues that the tradition began not in France, as many maintained, but in Germany. Freybe 1972 examines the memento mori tradition, while Llewellyn 1997 investigates the expression of death not only through visual works but in everyday material culture.

Binion, Rudolph. Past Impersonal: Group Process in Human History. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005.
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A multidisciplinary work that examines collective behavior in different historical contexts. Relevant here is chapter 2, which argues for the origins of the danse macabre in Germany rather than France.
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Clark, James M. The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Glasgow: Jackson, 1950.
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A general account of the dance of death in literature and art down through the work of Holbein with theories concerning the motif’s origins.
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Davis, Natalie Zemon. “Holbein’s Pictures of Death and the Reformation in Lyon.” Studies in the Renaissance 3 (1956): 97–130.
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Relates the pictures of death composed by Holbein in 1536 in Basel to the danse macabre tradition, particularly in its religious and satirical aspects. The theological shifts brought on by the Reformation are also analyzed within the context of Holbein’s art.
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Eckart, Wolfgang. “Die Darstellung des Skeletts als Todessymbol in der Sinnbildkunst des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts.” In Studien zur Thematik des Todes im 16. Jahrhundert. Edited by Paul Richard Blum, 21–47. Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 22. Wolfenbüttel, West Germany: Herzog August Bibliothek, 1983.
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Traces continued developments of the skeleton as a symbol of death in artistic representations of the 16th and 17th centuries.
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Freybe, Albert. Das memento mori in deutscher Sitte, bildlicher Darstellung und Volksglauben, deutscher Sprache, Dichtung und Seelsorge, 1909. Wiesbaden, West Germany: Sändig, 1972.
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An older but still useful work that explores the memento mori tradition and its representations of death not only in text but in image with a focus on German works of art and iconography.
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Invernizzi, Guglielmo, and Nicoletta Della Casa, eds. Immagini della danza macabra nella cultura occidentale dal Medioevo al Novecento. Como, Italy: Nodolibri, 1995.
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A short and sweeping catalogue collection of essays that extends from the Middle Ages through the 20th century, with fine illustrations and explanatory material.
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Llewellyn, Nigel. The Art of Death: Visual Culture in English Death Ritual c. 1500–c. 1800. London: Reaktion, 1997.
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An extensively illustrated and important study of the material and visual culture of death, including art, monuments, furniture, and artifacts. Not only death but the preparation of the dying is emphasized, as is the social rank that funeral ceremonies reinforced and the connection between spiritual and political order in rituals of death.
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Mâle, Emile. L’art religieux de la fin du moyen âge en France. Paris: Leroux, 1898.
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A classic work that traces changing styles in French art and iconography from the 13th through the 15th centuries with the motif of the danse macabre traced, according to Mâle, to theatrical representations of the late 14th century.
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Death on the Eve of Modernity

The 18th century provided a key moment in the history of death, with most historians agreeing that something shifted, even if that shift was not toward a full embrace of the secularized, medicalized death. McManners 1981 is an exhaustive account of all facets of death in 18th-century France, as is Favre 1978. Etlin 1984 traces the transformation of cemeteries in Paris, and Porter 2001 brings in an introduction to death in the context of the medical world. Binion 1986 argues that Christian themes nevertheless continued in a “postsecular” age, particularly in matters relating to death.

Binion, Rudolph. After Christianity: Christian Survivals in Post-Christian Culture. Gettysburg, PA: Logbridge-Rhodes, 1986.
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Though this work relates its themes to a “post-Christian” world, the author argues that while the 18th century witnessed the “collapse” of Christianity, it remained in different guises in the centuries that followed, including such areas as the afterlife and the Last Judgment.
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Etlin, Richard A. The Architecture of Death: The Transformation of the Cemetery in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.
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An architectural investigation of the attitudes and beliefs that transformed the location and design of the cemetery in the 18th century. Etlin argues that the “reform” movement expressed increasing aversion toward the traditionally macabre motifs of death and a mounting public health concern over decaying corpses in the heart of the city, all of which contributed to the transformation.
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Favre, Robert. La mort dans la littérature pensée françaises au siècle des lumières. Lyon, France: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1978.
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A heavily documented work that primarily works in 18th-century sources from memoirs and correspondences through the writings of the Enlightenment. Favre refutes Pierre Chaunu’s argument that the 18th century “turned its back” on thanatological concerns, asserting instead that the age held death at the forefront of its literary, scientific, social, and political concerns.
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McManners, John. Death and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.
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Based exclusively on an analysis of France, this work utilizes social and demographic history and a huge range of sources to survey death in the 18th century. Ideas about death and the afterlife are discussed in addition to disease, funerals, the philosophes on death, the decline of hell, and shifts in attitudes away from the purely religious and toward an alternate spirituality. A huge bibliography is included.
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Porter, Roy. Bodies Politic: Disease, Death, and Doctors in Britain, 1650–1900. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001.
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A well-illustrated introductory survey by the leading medical historian of the long 18th century with discussions throughout on death and the medical marketplace.