Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T18:55:34.776Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

NEW LIFE IN THE MODERN CULTURAL HISTORY OF DEATH

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2018

HANNAH MALONE Open the ORCID record for HANNAH MALONE [Opens in a new window]
HANNAH MALONE*
Affiliation:
Freie Universität Berlin
*
Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, Koserstr. 20, 14195 Berlin, Germany[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay presents a critical overview of recent literature in English on the modern cultural history of death. In order to locate new developments, it charts the evolution of the field from the 1970s until today and distinguishes between French and Anglophone strands in the historiography. A selection of studies published between 2005 and 2015 exemplifies a revival in recent scholarship that hangs on four main innovations: the abandonment of grand narratives of modernization and secularization; an interdisciplinary integration of political, cultural, and intellectual history; greater attention to the individual; and the expansion of the field beyond Europe and North America. Thus, today, the history of death is both local and global, public and private, personal and universal.

Type
Historiographical Reviews
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 62 , Issue 3 , September 2019 , pp. 833 - 852
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I am grateful to Andrew Arsan and the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on this essay.

References

1 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, Le territoire de l'historien (Paris, 1973), i, pp. 393–403Google Scholar; McManners, John, ‘Death and the French historians’, in Whaley, Joachim, ed., Mirrors of mortality: studies in the social history of death (London, 1981)Google Scholar; Carnevale, Diego, ‘Dalla morte pensata alla morte vissuta. La storiografia sulla morte dall’“età dei classici” all’“esplosione” odierna’, ilPalindromo, 9 (2013), pp. 75–91Google Scholar, at p. 77.

2 Vovelle, Michel, Piété baroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe siècle. Les attitudes devant la mort d'après les clauses de testaments (Paris, 1973);Google Scholar idem, Mourir autrefois: attitudes collectives devant la mort aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1974); idem, La mort et l'Occident de 1300 à nos jours (Paris, 1983).

3 Ariès, Philippe, Western attitudes toward death from the middle ages to the present (Baltimore, MD, 1974)Google Scholar; idem, L'homme devant la mort (Paris, 1977); English translation: The hour of our death (New York, NY, 1981). See also: Ariès, Philippe and Stannard, David E., Death in America (Philadelphia, PA, 1976)Google Scholar; Ariès, Philippe, Images de l'homme devant la mort (Paris, 1983)Google Scholar; English translation: Images of man and death (Cambridge, MA, 1985).

4 Mitchell, Allan, ‘Philippe Ariès and the French way of death’, French Historical Studies, 10 (1978), pp. 684–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Foucault, Michel, Naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regard médical (Paris 1963)Google Scholar; idem, The birth of the clinic: an archaeology of medical perception, translated by A. M. Sheridan (London, 1976), pp. 124–48; Ariès, The hour, p. 632.

6 Hutton, Patrick H., ‘Of death and destiny: the Ariès–Vovelle debate about the history of mourning’, in Homans, Peter, ed., Symbolic loss: the ambiguity of mourning and memory at century’s end (Charlottesville, VA, 2000), pp. 147–70Google Scholar; idem, Philippe Ariès and the politics of French cultural history (Amherst, MA, 2004), pp. 113–28.

7 McManners, John, Death and the Enlightenment: changing attitudes to death among Christians and unbelievers in eighteenth-century France (Oxford, 1981), pp. 1–3Google Scholar; Bertrand, Régis, ‘L'histoire de la mort, de l'histoire des mentalités à l'histoire religieuse’, Revue d'histoire de l’Église de France, 86 (2000), pp. 551–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 554.

8 Jalland, Patricia, Death in the Victorian family (Oxford, 1996), pp. 7–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Strange, Julie-Marie, Death, grief and poverty in Britain, 1870–1914 (Cambridge, 2005), p. 18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Bertrand, ‘L'histoire’, p. 559. See, for example, McManners, Death, p. 2; Etlin, Richard A., The architecture of death: the transformation of the cemetery in eighteenth-century Paris (Cambridge, MA, 1984)Google Scholar.

10 Jalland, Death; Wolffe, John, Great deaths: grieving, religion, and nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar; see also Strange, Death, pp. 18–19.

11 Joachim Whaley, ‘Introduction’, in Whaley, ed., Mirrors, pp. 8–9; Dollimore, Jonathan, Death, desire and loss in Western culture (London, 1998), p. 121Google Scholar.

12 The Great War is briefly mentioned in Vovelle's La mort (pp. 72–30) and Ariès's L'homme (p. 577), but there is no entry for ‘war’ in the index of Ariès's book.

13 David Cannadine, ‘War and death, grief and mourning in modern Britain’, in Whaley, ed., Mirrors, pp. 187–242, at pp. 188–9, 217, 230; Cannadine's influence is evidenced by the fact that this quote appears in at least eight major historical studies that were published between 1999 and 2016.

14 Cannadine, ‘War’, pp. 194, 218; Freud, Sigmund, ‘Thoughts for the times on war and death’, in The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Freud (1914–1916) (London, 1957), p. 291Google Scholar.

15 Capdevila, Luc and Voldman, Daniele, eds., War dead: Western societies and the casualties of war (Edinburgh, 2006), pp. xi–xvii and 180–1Google Scholar.

16 Winter, J. M., Sites of memory, sites of mourning: the Great War in European cultural history (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 1, 10, 115Google Scholar.

17 Fussell, Paul, The Great War and modern memory (Oxford, 2013; first published in 1975), pp. 38, 338–40Google Scholar; Winter, Sites, pp. 5 and 8; also Smith, Leonard V., ‘Paul Fussell's The Great War and modern memory: twenty-five years later’, History and Theory, 40 (2001), pp. 241–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 244; McLoughlin, Kate, ‘The Great War and modern memory’, Essays in Criticism, 64 (1 Oct. 2014), pp. 436–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 See, for example, Capdevila and Voldman, eds., War dead, pp. xi–xvii and 180–1; Goeschel, Christian, Suicide in Nazi Germany (Oxford, 2009), pp. 4–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Betts, Paul, Confino, Alon, and Schumann, Dirk, eds., Between mass death and individual loss: the place of the dead in twentieth-century Germany (Oxford, 2011), p. 5Google Scholar.

19 Cannadine, ‘War’, p. 227.

20 Mosse, George L., ‘National cemeteries and national revival: the cult of fallen soldiers in Germany’, Journal of Contemporary History, 14 (1 Jan. 1979), pp. 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Fallen soldiers: reshaping the memory of the world wars (New York, NY, 1990). See also Cannadine, ‘War’, p. 230; Betts, Confino, and Schumann, eds., Between mass death, pp. 8–9.

21 Brown, Vincent, The reaper's garden: death and power in the world of Atlantic slavery (Cambridge, MA, 2008), p. 5Google Scholar; Dollimore, Death, pp. ix–xxxii; Faust, Drew Gilpin, This republic of suffering: death and the American Civil War (reprint edn, New York, NY, 2009; first edn 2008), p. 30Google Scholar.

22 Morris, Jeremy, ‘The strange death of Christian Britain: another look at the secularization debate’, Historical Journal, 46 (2003), pp. 963–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Martin, David, On secularization: towards a revised general theory (Farnham, 2005)Google Scholar; Morris, Jeremy, ‘Secularization and religious experience: arguments in the historiography of modern British religion’, Historical Journal, 55 (2012), pp. 195–219CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Saler, Michael, ‘Modernity and enchantment: a historiographic review’, American Historical Review, 111 (2006), pp. 692–716CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lee, Raymond L. M., ‘Modernity, mortality and re-enchantment: the death taboo revisited’, Sociology, 42 (2008), pp. 745–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Walsham, Alexandra, and, ‘The Reformation “the disenchantment of the world” reassessed’, Historical Journal, 51 (2008), pp. 497–528CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Jenkins, Richard, ‘Disenchantment, enchantment and re-enchantment: Max Weber at the millennium’, Max Weber Studies, 1 (2000), pp. 11–32, 29Google Scholar; Bossy, John, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 153–72Google Scholar.

25 Martin, On secularization, 130; Walsham, ‘The Reformation’.

26 Sung Ho Kim, ‘Max Weber’, The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Winter 2017), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/weber/ (accessed 27 Nov. 2017).

27 For instance, see Gordon, Bruce and Marshall, Peter, eds., The place of the dead: death and remembrance in late medieval and early modern Europe (Cambridge, 2000)Google Scholar.

28 Walter, Tony, The revival of death (London, 1994), p. 23Google Scholar; Walsham, ‘The Reformation’, p. 521.

29 Watkins, Carl, The undiscovered country: journeys among the dead (London, 2014), p. xviGoogle Scholar.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid., pp. 13 and xvii.

32 Ibid., pp. 75 and 143.

33 Winter, Sites.

34 Watkins, The undiscovered country, p. 258.

35 Ibid., p. 143.

36 Ibid., p. 12.

37 Ibid., p. 577, and personal communication with Carl Watkins on 18 Jan. 2017.

38 For instance Laqueur, Thomas W., ‘Cemeteries, religion and the culture of capitalism’, in Garnett, Jane and Matthew, Colin, eds., Revival and religion since 1700 (London, 1993), pp. 183–200Google Scholar; idem, ‘Memory and naming in the Great War’, in John Gillis, ed., Memory and commemoration (Princeton, NJ, 1993), pp. 150–67; idem, ‘Places of the dead in modernity’, in Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman, eds., The age of cultural revolutions: Britain and France, 1750–1820 (Berkeley, CA, 2002); idem, ‘The deep time of the dead’, Social Research, 78 (2011), pp. 799–820.

39 Laqueur, Thomas W., The work of the dead: a cultural history of mortal remains (Princeton, NJ, 2015), p. 17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Ibid., p. 8. See also Laqueur, ‘The deep time’, p. 801.

41 Laqueur, The work of the dead, p. 31.

42 Ibid., p. 604, and personal communication with Thomas Laqueur on 16 Feb. 2016.

43 Ibid., p. 101.

44 Ibid., p. 184; for a comparison, see McManners, Death.

45 See also Faust, This republic, pp. 61–2.

46 Warner, Marina, ‘Back from the underworld’, London Review of Books, 39 (17 Aug. 2017), p. 19Google Scholar.

47 Laqueur, The work of the dead, p. 448; idem, ‘Memory’, p. 152.

48 Laqueur, The work of the dead, p. 54.

49 Lomnitz, Claudio, Death and the idea of Mexico (paperback edn Brooklyn, NY, 2008; first edn 2005), p. 13Google Scholar.

50 Ibid., pp. 13, 20.

51 Ibid., pp. 264–8.

52 Ibid., pp. 15–17.

53 Ibid., 13.

54 Ibid., p. 57.

55 Ibid., pp. 58–9.

56 See, for instance, ibid., pp. 36, 63.

57 Strange, Death, p. 20.

58 Ibid., pp. 264–73.

59 Ibid., pp. 268–9.

60 Laqueur, ‘Cemeteries’, p. 185.

61 Laqueur, Thomas W., ‘Review of Death, grief and poverty in Britain, 1870–1914’, Journal of Modern History, 80 (2008), pp. 650–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 Strange, Death, p. 11.

63 Ibid.

64 Ibid., p. 25.

65 Faust, This republic, p. 2.

66 Ibid., p. 268.

67 Ibid., p. xviii.

68 Fussell, The Great War, pp. 150–1; Faust, This republic, p. 267.

69 Faust, This republic, p. 194.

70 Laqueur, Thomas W., ‘Among the graves’, London Review of Books, 30 (2008), pp. 3–9Google Scholar; idem, The work of the dead, p. 653.

71 Faust, This republic, p. 30; Strange, Death, p. 213.

72 Brown, The reaper's garden, p. 256.

73 Verdery, Katherine, The political lives of dead bodies: reburial and postsocialist change (New York, NY, 1999)Google Scholar.

74 Ibid., pp. 28–30, 108–10; for instance: Laqueur, The work of the dead, p. 564; Black, Monica, Death in Berlin: from Weimar to divided Germany (Cambridge, 2010), p. 97Google Scholar.

75 Brown, The reaper's garden, p. 258.

76 Ibid., p. 4; Laqueur, The work of the dead, p. 561.

77 Brown, The reaper's garden, p. 10.

78 Ibid.

79 Black, Death in Berlin, p. 1.

80 Ibid., p. 177.

81 Ibid., p. 7.

82 Ibid., p. 87.

83 Ibid., p. 40.

84 Ibid., p. 62.

85 Ibid., p. 79.

86 Ibid., p. 126.

87 Ibid., p. 104.

88 Ibid., p. 151.

89 Ibid., p. 153.

90 Ibid., p. 189.

91 Ibid., p. 106.