The Politics of Disinterment
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23473377 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Clodagh Tait (0000-0003-3621-1013, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2002 |
| Pages | 85-96 |
| Publication date | 2002-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550-1650 (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1057/9781403913951_5 |
| OpenAlex | W2471390536 |
| ISBN | 9781403913951 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 7 |
In his will of 1600, Sir John Bellew asked that should he die and be buried at Duleek, his second wife, Ismay Nugent, should be buried beside him. All very well, until we realise that she was already dead, and had been interred, probably in Dundalk, in the early 1590s. What Bellew was proposing was that she be exhumed and reburied in the new grave. 1 While today, as one anthropologist points out, we are ‘horrified at the disturbing of bodies’, other societies have not always had the same qualms. 2 In early modern Ireland, for example, incidents involving the disinterment of corpses were documented surprisingly often, and there seems to have been much less control over the phenomenon than in England. 3 Given that, as we have seen, the settlement of churches and churchyards reflected and recreated the community in death, it becomes obvious that the movement of a corpse following burial involved a symbolic re-evaluation of one’s position in that community. 4 Motivations for exhumations varied, ranging from attempts to honour those connected with the corpse (a family, a monastery, an order, or a religious grouping), to efforts to demean and dehumanise that individual and all connected with them. Accounts could also have political and didactic purposes or undertones. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Archaeology · Genealogy · Honour · Order (exchange) · Phenomenon · Political science · Politics · Settlement (finance) · Sociology · Wife · Death, Funerary Practices, and Mourning · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |