The work of the dead : a cultural history of mortal remains
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Bibliographic Information
The work of the dead : a cultural history of mortal remains
Princeton University Press, c2015
- : hardback
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 559-678) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
The Greek philosopher Diogenes said that when he died his body should be tossed over the city walls for beasts to scavenge. Why should he or anyone else care what became of his corpse? In The Work of the Dead, acclaimed cultural historian Thomas Laqueur examines why humanity has universally rejected Diogenes's argument. No culture has been indifferent to mortal remains. Even in our supposedly disenchanted scientific age, the dead body still matters--for individuals, communities, and nations. A remarkably ambitious history, The Work of the Dead offers a compelling and richly detailed account of how and why the living have cared for the dead, from antiquity to the twentieth century. The book draws on a vast range of sources--from mortuary archaeology, medical tracts, letters, songs, poems, and novels to painting and landscapes in order to recover the work that the dead do for the living: making human communities that connect the past and the future. Laqueur shows how the churchyard became the dominant resting place of the dead during the Middle Ages and why the cemetery largely supplanted it during the modern period.
He traces how and why since the nineteenth century we have come to gather the names of the dead on great lists and memorials and why being buried without a name has become so disturbing. And finally, he tells how modern cremation, begun as a fantasy of stripping death of its history, ultimately failed--and how even the ashes of the victims of the Holocaust have been preserved in culture. A fascinating chronicle of how we shape the dead and are in turn shaped by them, this is a landmark work of cultural history.
Table of Contents
Preface ix Acknowledgments xv Introduction: The Work of the Dead 1 Part I The Deep Time of the Dead 29 1 Do the Dead Matter? 35 2 The Dead Body and the Persistence of Being 55 3 The Cultural Work of the Dead 80 Part II Places of the Dead 107 4 The Churchyard and the Old Regime 112 The Development of the Churchyard 114 Language 117 Place 121 The Church and Churchyard in the Landscape 121 Necrogeography 123 Necrobotany 133 Necrotopology and Memory 137 The Life and Afterlife of the Churchyard in Literature 141 The Passage of the Dead to the Churchyard 145 Law 148 Exclusion from the Churchyard 148 The Claims of the Dead Body on the Parish Churchyard 151 The Claims of the Parish on the Dead Body 153 The Economics of Churchyard Burial 155 The Right to Burial and the Crisis of the Old Regime 161 Enlightenment Scandals 182 Voltaire 189 David Hume 203 5 The Cemetery and the New Regime 211 The Danger of the Dead and the Rise of the Cemetery 215 Genealogies of the New Regime 238 Imagination: Elysium, Arcadia, and the Dead of the Eighteenth Century 238 Cimetiere du Pere-Lachaise 260 Distant Lands and the Imperial Imagination 265 The Age of the Cemetery 271 Novelty 272 Necrogeography and Necrobotany 279 Cemeteries and Capitalism 288 Religious Pluralism in the Age of the Cemetery 294 Reform, Revolution, and the Cemetery 305 Class, Family, and the Cemetery 309 Putting the Dead in Their Place: Pauper Funerals and Proper Funerals, Burials and Reburials 312 Disrupted Bodies 336 Part III Names of the Dead 363 6 The Names of the Dead in Deep Time 367 Names of the Dead in Times of War 375 Names of the Dead in Times of Peace 382 7 The Rise of the Names of the Dead in Modern History 388 8 The Age of Necronominalism 413 Names over Bodies 415 Names and the Absent but Present Body 417 Monumental Names 421 Names of the Vanished Dead 431 9 The Names of the Great War 447 Part IV Burning the Dead 489 10 Disenchantment and Cremation 495 11 Ashes and History 523 Different Enchantments 524 Ashes in Their Place 542 Afterword: From a History of the Dead to a History of Dying 549 Notes 559 Image Credits 679 Index 681 Plates follow page 408
by "Nielsen BookData"
