In this fourth pandemic year it is poignant to read the editors’ dedication of this volume to healthcare workers and those who died in “the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020.” How little we all knew then. This book is a welcome addition to what was already a flourishing subfield of medieval and early modern studies, and one that is likely to attract greater scholarly attention in years to come. It will provide an accessible introduction to readers who are approaching historical death studies for the first time, and the breadth of topics and sources treated in the fifteen essays means that experienced scholars are also likely to find new things. There is some repetition, which can get annoying when reading chapters sequentially, but which also means that any chapter could be used as a starting point.
The editors’ introduction provides a solid overview of historical studies of death and dying among Christians in late medieval and early modern Europe. Most chapters contribute directly to the volume's stated goal of demonstrating continuity in many areas of Christian beliefs, practices, and cultural responses to death ca. 1300–1700, against older tendencies to view the Black Death and Protestant Reformation as moments that ushered in dramatic change.
The chapters in the first half concern beliefs about death and the afterlife and practices related to dying and burial. Elizabeth Tingle's opening essay is a lucid overview of changes and continuities in Christian theological beliefs about heaven, hell, and purgatory in fourteenth- to seventeenth-century Western Europe that could be used in undergraduate teaching. The next three chapters concentrate on preparations for death and deathbed rituals among Latin Christians in the later Middle Ages. In the last of these, Anna M. Duch provides a fascinating case study of late medieval English royal funerals, arguing that they were more elaborate versions of the same Christian funeral pattern that was common across late medieval Western Europe, using much greater financial resources to address the same concerns as ordinary Christians. The next two chapters turn to changes and continuities in death and burial practices among Protestants and Catholics in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. These are followed by a pair of essays that describe Orthodox Christian beliefs and practices about death during the entire period under consideration in a manner that is highly accessible for readers who are more familiar with Western Europe.
The second half of the volume concerns cultural and emotional responses to death. Several contributions focus on artistic and literary representations of death, from tomb monuments to ghost stories. Ralph Dekoninck's essay on the early modern iconography of martyrdom pairs nicely with Freddy C. Domínguez's contribution on relics and saints, which includes discussion of early modern Catholic commemorations of recent martyrs. Christopher Ocker situates visual and literary depictions of grief and mourning in the context of medieval and early modern scholarly understandings of grief as a motion of body and soul. A strong two-part chapter on funeral preaching and the Reformation would have been further enhanced with more discussion of medieval traditions of funeral preaching. The geographical and confessional focus is narrower here, with no contributors treating Orthodox Christian sources, suggesting an obvious direction for future comparative research.
Most of the contributors are affiliated with British universities, and most essays display a definite bias towards sources from Northern Europe, especially England, France, and Germany. The Iberian Peninsula receives surprisingly little attention, given the existence of a strong tradition of historical studies of death and dying from Spanish and Portuguese scholars, which the editors recognize in their introduction. European colonies were consciously excluded, which is understandable, given space constraints, but means that readers are deprived of the knowledge that there is a decades-long tradition of historical study of death and dying in colonial Latin America that builds on the same historiographical traditions as this volume. Dekoninck and Domínguez's contributions are notable for acknowledging early modern European colonial and missionary activities. Apart from Gordon D. Raeburn's brief mention of the Sámi, religious minorities’ interactions with Christians in Europe when it came to death, burial, and remembrance are also passed over in silence.
Anyone hoping to do research in these areas will find this volume an invaluable resource for comparative work.
