Introduction

Abstract

Abstract Death has a history. The ways people die have changed over the centuries; beliefs about death and burial customs have changed even more profoundly. Massive epidemics and periodic famines have disappeared from the western world; they have been replaced by the slaughter of world war and by genocide. Individuals seldom die in the prime of their lives, struck down by fevers and infections; most of us perish in old age, succumbing to diseases of the heart. That is why the killers that do not respect age, cancer and AIDS, are so terrifying. When mortality rates were very high, in the medieval and early modern period, death was accepted as a part of life-’Tame Death’, Philippe Aries called it. The dying tried to end their lives well, observing customary rituals; the survivors played their parts, too, as participants in the rites of dying and later in the rites of burial. Dying was an art. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, less and less emphasis was placed on the hour of death. The art of dying became more dependent on the art of living, living as a good Christian.