The Place of the Dead

Although it has few explicit references to the history of medicine, this excellent collection of articles, on the social and cultural history of death and of funerary and commemorative practices from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries, is of great interest for historians interested in medical practice and public health in this period. Focusing on regions from Scotland to Tuscany to Transylvania, the essays, both individually and collectively, sketch out an impressively nuanced and textured account of the changing ways in which local communities negotiated the ongoing relationship between the living and the dead. Using a wide range of sources—including testaments, theological treatises, parish records, saints' lives, and funeral orations—the authors explore such topics as the nature of individual and family identity, the variety of ways in which the dead could torment or succor the living (by returning as ghosts or possessing spirits, or by intervening on their behalf with God and the saints), and the ways in which the living attempted to commemorate and appease the dead. Roughly half the [End Page 362] essays deal with Catholic or pre-Reformation practices, while the rest treat Protestant communities; in both cases, however, the authors pay careful attention to the complicated interactions between popular belief, which tended to accept the reality of ghosts and revenants (particularly in the case of those who had died "badly"), and official church doctrine, which attributed phenomena such as possession and ghostly apparitions to nonhuman entities such as angels and demons

Aesthetics · Art · Doctrine · Genealogy · Identity (music) · Political science · Possession (linguistics) · Protestantism · Sketch · Classics · Death, Funerary Practices, and Mourning · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law · Philosophy