This chapter charts soldiers’ journeys across the Western Front. Drawing on the concept of ‘place attachment’, it explains how men developed an emotional relationship with Belgium and France. Beginning with their arrival by boat, it narrates their experiences in ports, bases, and camps and from there through the countryside and towns to the frontlines. It follows this journey, investigating the processes by which English infantrymen explored and were exposed to the war zone. This allowed them to internalise and reconceptualise Belgium and France. Subtle psychological processes allowed men to familiarise the sights, sounds, and scents that they encountered. These were both conscious and unconscious products of both purposeful action and unconscious psychological mechanisms. Repeated exposure habituated soldiers to the sights, sounds, and scents that confronted them, even in the frontlines. Elsewhere, men made use of language to craft new narratives and to normalise the violence and death that surrounded them. They developed very personal relationships with landscapes, spaces, and places. The Western Front became the locus of important life experiences and memories and was littered with graves that represented personal and collective loss. The landscapes of Belgium and France became a metaphysical space as their features were increasingly associated with ideas of duty, German barbarity, and sacrifice.

The chapter discusses ancient and modern treatments of Alexander’s death. It describes the omens said to foretell his death and their cultural and historical background, treating ancient versions of what led to Alexander’s death and attempts by historians and scientists to detect the working of poison, conspiracy, or less-violent and sinister causes. The rest of the chapter focuses on Alexander’s so-called last plans, their authenticity, the reasons for their rejection, and the contentious history of his body and burial.

As soon as newspapers, catering to England’s new urbane peoples, began describing common executions, the crowds attending them were seen as indifferent to their moral message. By the middle of the eighteenth century, execution rituals seemed equally problematic. Critics perceived hangings to be so frequent, so large-scale and so brutalizing to an even minimally refined sensibility as to defeat their deterrent purpose. In 1783, London officials sought to redress these problems by devising a new execution ritual, staged immediately outside the prison and courthouse. Within four decades, this quintessentially urban execution ritual had been adopted in almost all other English counties, even as cities on the continent pointedly moved executions outside urban centres. Yet still executions seemed ineffective. Following a particularly intense crisis in the 1780s, England’s traditional ruling elites sought to preserve the “Bloody Code” by reducing the scale of hangings to historically low levels.

The Murder Act of 1752 imposed post-mortem dissection as the primary punishment for all people convicted of that crime. Recent historians have viewed this statute as strikingly regressive. In fact, its purposes and effects were notably humane. It dramatically reduced the number of dissections imposed on criminal bodies in London. By almost entirely confining dissection to murder alone, it substantially ended riots at executions. And, in ensuring a legal supply of “subjects” to anatomists, it helped make surgery as swift as possible in an age before reliable anaesthesia. On the other hand, public anatomization of dead killers was so uncommon that it seems likely to have inspired fascination rather than deterrent horror. And, in failing to supply enough “subjects,” the Act inspired epidemical levels of grave robbery, finally coming undone when enterprising monsters resorted to murder itself in meeting the needs of anatomists, who now seemed complicit in such crimes.

Although the execution crowd is a common mind’s-eye image of Victorian England, we still have much to learn or to reconsider about nineteenth-century executions. The Whig governments of the 1830s are rightly seen as far more restrained in using the gallows than their Tory predecessors, but they in fact sustained a surprisingly vigorous, residual “Bloody Code” – centred on violent crimes against property – until 1837. The prevailing conviction amongst historians that the removal of executions within prison walls in 1868 averted a move towards the complete abolition of execution is not supported by the actual character of the attempts to achieve this in parliament. The change of 1868 really did stem from concerns about the execution crowd and the complicity of urbane elites in their extent. To an under-appreciated degree, however, journalists kept the work of the gallows before the public eye through the turn of the twentieth century.

Dying Abroad starts from the premise that death and its attendant rituals prove an important window into the socioeconomic and political orders and hierarchies that structure human life in the twenty-first century. It argues that states, families, and religious communities all have a vested interest in the fate of dead bodies – including where and how they are disposed of and commemorated – and demonstrates that end-of-life decisions and practices are connected to larger political struggles over the boundaries of nation-states and the place of minoritized groups within them. At a time when a growing chorus of politicians lambast the failures of multiculturalism and call for the fortification of territorial borders, this book elucidates how posthumous practices anchor minority claims for inclusion and challenge hegemonic ideas about the nation.

Chapter 9 considers end-of-life matters and reports the efforts made by The Farm and its members to make their own and their loved ones’ final years and death as peaceful and comfortable as possible. Discussing issues such as advanced care planning, facilities for the aged population, and alternative burials and commemorations, this chapter demonstrates, once again, the hippie tendency to do things somewhat differently. It also suggests that their lifelong values and beliefs made them slightly less fearful of death than older adults who were not part of the hippie movement.

Milton’s Sonnet XVIII (‘On the Late Massacre in Piedmont’) propounds a familiar opposition between the ‘pure’ religion of Protestants and a corrupt Catholicism obsessed with material objects and images (‘stocks and stones’). Yet this ostensibly anti-Catholic poem veers brazenly and repeatedly into the language of relic veneration. Beginning with the poignant spectacle of the Waldensians’ bones scattered on the mountainsides, the sonnet goes on to weaponize human remains and grants them sacred force in the form of ‘martyred blood and ashes’ to be sprinkled over Italy. This chapter explores historical, confessional, and literary contexts for Sonnet XVIII’s surprising investment in human remains, both as objects arousing pity and as capable of a kind of material efficacy. Milton’s poem is situated within an extensive tradition of English Protestant poets and preachers, including Michael Drayton, John Donne, and Richard Crashaw, who had wrestled with the question of relics and the problem of scattered bones.

This chapter looks at an unexpected text of the twelfth century and explores its engagement with ancient literature, specifically the Medea, Hippolytus and Bacchae of Euripides and the Rhesus, no longer thought to be by him. The text is the Christos paschon, a composite tragedy and Virgin’s lament, with prooimion, two prayers and a colophon, which tells the story of the Easter weekend in three plays of a trilogy by means of a Euripidean cento. The chapter proceeds source text by source text to indicate what passages are used and why. It then compares the reading of each source text in the Christos paschon with more modern receptions. The use of the source texts is then compared to painting as it is either dotted or sloshed on to the canvas. It can also be seen as polyphony as each source text enters in turn and interacts with the others. The trilogy’s reading of Euripides is examined and its possible performance context in the twelfth century. Finally, the text’s credentials as commentary are tested against criteria arrived at by recent students of classical commentary: it is certainly reception, possibly appropriation or emulation – and conceivably commentary.

Tepecik-Çiftlik, until now the only tell site excavated in volcanic Cappadocia, was occupied between the beginning of the 8th to the middle of 6th millennium and provides a profound amount of data for the Neolithic and early Chalcolithic periods. Rich and diverse environmental conditions allowed groups in this region to establish flourishing societies. Due to its location close to the Göllüdağ obsidian sources, the site seems to have played an important role in controlling the sources through production and exchange of raw materials and tools. These activities caused the appearance of extroverted and communicative societies, who had interests in and ties to distant territories, to “other worlds,” eventually culminating in a migration of parts of the society to territories situated in the north. To find out what was encouraging this migration, further research in volcanic Cappadocia will be crucial.