The Changing Face of Death Historical Accounts of Death and Disposal

The taboo on death is at last breaking down. There is far greater receptivity to informed discussion about death and dying. Dying with dignity is one major issue: euthanasia and the 'natural death movement' are the latest stages in a debate first stimulated by the hospice movement. Media treatment of the bereaved, especially after disasters, has attracted some adverse criticism, yet after the decline of traditional customs of mourning, people seek new models of acceptable behaviour at a time of death. The book argues that attitudes to death and to disposal are culturally formed and examines the factors in the formation and decline of such attitudes by analysing specific issues over four centuries of death.

Acknowledgements - Notes on the Contributors - Preface; M.Johnson - Introduction; P.C.Jupp - Expressions of Loss in Early Seventeenth-Century England; C.Gittings - 'A Kind of Lawful Adultery': English Attitudes to the Remarriage of Widows 1500-1800; S.Collins - The Funeral Trade in Hanoverian England 1714-1760; J.Litten - Memento Mori: the Function and Meaning of Breton Ossuaries 1450-1750; E.Musgrave - The Green Ground; J.Pinfold - Enon Chapel: No Way for the Dead; P.C.Jupp - The Origins and Progress of Cemetery Establishment in Britain; J.Rugg - The Professionalisation of the Funeral Industry; G.Howarth - Hindu Cremations in Britain; S.White - Changing English Attitudes to Death in the Two World Wars; A.Wilkinson - The Death of a King: Elvis Presley 1935-1977; C.King - Actuarial Visions of Death: Life, Death and Chance in the Modern World; L.Prior - Index