Death in the Western world: Michel Vovelle's ambivalent epic La mort et l'Occident, de 1300 à nos jours

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Steven Kaplan, Farewell, Revolution: The Historians' Feud, France 1789/1989 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 144 – 165 offers a critical but generally positive assessment of Vovelle's work on the commission. Roy Porter, “The Hour of Philippe Ariès,” Mortality 4 (1999): 83 – 91. For a brief comparison of Ariès and Vovelle see Thomas Kselman, “Death in Historical Perspective,” Sociological Forum 2 (1987): 591 – 597. Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Towards Death from the Middle Ages to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); idem, The Hour of Our Death (New York: Knopf, 1981). Ralph Houlbrooke, for example, ignores Vovelle's work when he comments that Ariès was “the only writer to attempt to create a long-term historical framework for the evolution of Western attitudes to death.” Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480 – 1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 1. A briefer version of the Introduction to La mort, where Vovelle lays out his agenda, has been translated as “On Death” in Michel Vovelle, Ideologies and Mentalities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 64 – 80. For the influence of Vovelle see S. K. Cohn, Death and Property in Siena, 1205 – 1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 2 – 4. Wills continue to be a crucial source for historians of death and religion; see Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family; Cohn, Death and Property in Siena; Rudolf Schlögl, Glaube und Religion in der Säkularisierung. Die Katholische Stadt – Köln, Aachen, Münster, 1700 – 1840 (München: Oldenbourg, 1995). For a fuller discussion see Thomas Kselman, “The Dechristianisation of Death in Modern France,” in The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750 – 2000, Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 145 – 162; Louis Chatellier, ed. Religions en transition dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2000). This, I now realize, was also the pattern I used in my Death and the Afterlife in Modern France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Roy Porter makes a similar point when he writes that “[c]loser integration of the medical aspects of death with its religious, cultural and social dimensions remains an urgent desideratum.” “The Hour of Philippe Ariès,” pp. 88. Additional informationNotes on contributorsThomas Kselman Biographical noteThomas Kselman teaches in the History Department at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana). He is the author of Miracles and Prophecies in Nineteenth-Century France (1983) and Death and the Afterlife in Modern France (1993). His current interests include Jewish–Christian relations, and the role of Catholicism in the French empire.