The last two chapters of this volume, appropriately, deal with endpoints in the form of tombs in ancient China and ancient Rome. Both chapters, however, make it abundantly clear that tombs should also be studied as points of beginning, namely, as sites where, through the performance of funerals and other rituals, the living renegotiated their own social relationships after a death in their community. Tian Tian’s contribution has a laser-sharp focus on burial money. Starting in Western Han, burial money featured prominently among other grave goods: huge quantities of money were hauled to the burial site – she speaks of two cartloads full in case of one elite tomb – to be subsequently, after a public reading of the funerary-objects lists, buried in the tomb. In Rome, burial coins spread together with the Roman empire, but never in quantities as large as in the case of Han tombs. Moreover, interpreting Roman burial coins remains difficult given that the explanation provided in literary sources (that the deceased needed one coin to successfully cross the River Styx to the underworld) is unsatisfactory to account for the richness of the archaeological record. (For Han China, the funerary-objects lists that were placed in the tomb really help when it comes to categorizing and interpreting the burial coins.) In the Roman case there is little evidence that money played a role in the way families sought to display their wealth and status as they publicly remembered their dead; in contrast, in Han China (and beyond) gifts of money by individuals or other families to the family of the deceased in order to defray funeral expenses were a prominent way to create and confirm communities; as Tian Tian reveals, local villagers even formed private associations (dan) especially for that purpose.

Chapter 9 considers how Augustine features some of the most extreme expressions of the spiritual resurrection and of hope for the fleshly resurrection as Christians approach their bodily deaths and handle those of others. Augustine’s teaching and preaching on Christian dying, celebrating the Christian martyrs, handling Christian funerary and commemorative practices, and consoling Christian survivors serve to highlight the embodied spiritual life and activities of Christians whose souls have already been resurrected and whose bodies will eventually be resurrected, hopefully to eternal life. Among these discussions, Augustine acknowledges that Paul, the martyred apostle of the resurrection, provides some of the deepest theological insights not only into the mystery of the resurrection, but also into the interim condition of the human person after physical death and before fleshly resurrection. Despite the personal brokenness of death, Augustine sees that the continuity of human identity always remains in the hands of God.

In Part II, the death arts cover the post-mortem period from funerals to commemoration, completing the death-cycle initiated by Part I with its emphasis on the pre-mortem period and preparation for death. England’s protracted Reformation complicated this latter set of death arts. The relationship of worshippers to the dead underwent substantial reorientation on account of Protestantism’s elimination of the doctrine of Purgatory. Modernized and annotated excerpts, taken from a diversity of genres – including chronicles, the Book of Common Prayer, and consolation – reflect the changes not only to the Church’s burial rites but also less ritualized remembrance, which increasingly manifested itself through epitaphs, funeral elegies, and funeral sermons. Similar confessional and political tensions may be seen in the excerpts on Protestant and Catholic martyrs. Excerpts also represent a range of more secular commemorative acts from remembering traitors, regicide, and the ideal courtier, to a mother’s elegies for her infant son and a pamphleteer’s mourning of the unnamed masses killed by the plague.

While the Toleration Act provided significant legal protection that made the lives of Dissenters much easier, it also sparked a new and difficult process whereby differing parties jostled to secure their place in public religious life. The greater confidence of Dissenters in expressing their religion publicly, combined with the desire of Church interests to limit Dissenting influence, served to stimulate contests over religion on a local level. Chapter 2 explores the key effects of this on print, parish politics, attitudes to the physical presence of meeting houses, and inter-denominational relations at funerals and burials. Ultimately, disputes over the place of Dissent within the public religious landscape resulting from the settlement of 1689 acted to keep issues of religious difference alive in new ways, even as the embers of Restoration persecution burned out. As the concluding section of this chapter emphasises, considering the prominence of such disputes may help us to reconsider the place of the first half of the eighteenth century within longer narratives of the privatisation of belief.

The book closes with an account of the sudden death of one of the Legae brothers and his fiancée, their funeral, and the conflicts that subsequently arose within and between each of their families. Using the trajectory of this tragic event to reflect on and bring together the major themes explored across the book, the final section draws conclusions about the role of conflict and crisis in kinship and self-making, and their implications for understanding the effects of HIV and AIDS and the interventions made in response.

Death has traditionally been regarded in China as something to be prepared for, not as something to be feared, a taboo subject. As age came on grandmothers prepared for their end. If the family did not have a graveyard they arranged a grave site. They had a coffin made, of the most expensive wood they could afford. They ordered a set of grave clothes. The set aside money for the funeral. The division of property was done by customs; wills were not legal documents but moral exhortations to descedents.

In the Mao Era most of these practices were considered feudal and outlawed, in favour of cremation without ceremony. In the Reform Era many have come back, though cremation is encouraged. The dead live on. In the past they joined the ancestors. Now the focus is on commemorating individuals. At the Qingming Festival families remember the dead and provide them with paper replicas of what they may need in the afterlife.

In a breach with tradition, neither of China’s twentieth-century leaders has been buried. Mao Zedong lies in the centre of Tiananmen Square. Chiang Kai-shek is in a coffin in Taoyuan (Taiwan), waiting to be buried in his home town.

Looks forwards to the shipping container, a universally recognisable box crucial to the networks and infrastructures of contemporary capitalism. This ubiquitous object, a box with a standardised form, has transformed the global movement of stuff. The box of all boxes, this icon of modernity is a reminder that the way we live continues to be constrained by material things. Summarises how the book as a whole has told the story of the early modern precursors to this object, a dynamic range of boxes that enfranchised ways of being, thinking, and writing.

Discusses ritual, using the concept of pragamemes to discuss idiomatic eulogies in Taiwanese funerals. The analysis looks specifically at how religious beliefs influence the construction of Buddhist and Christian phrases, with important difference in the conceptual metaphors the idioms employ.

Attention in this final chapter is directed to the private passions of church personnel as revealed in the executors’ accounts of deceased canons, and in particular Jacques de Houchin, remarkable for his bibliophilic sophistication and (apparently) private music-making. Houchin’s book collection at death ran to more than 300 volumes, including large numbers of classical texts, making him one of the most significant private bibliophiles of his age. He also possessed a large number of music books and musical instruments. Centred on this one man’s proclivities, the chapter paints a picture of private music-making within the confines of the church and its cloister, involving canons, vicars and choirboys.