Reviewed by: Death in Towns: Urban Responses to the Dying and the Dead, 100–1600 Darrel W. Amundsen Steven Bassett, ed. Death in Towns: Urban Responses to the Dying and the Dead, 100–1600. Leicester, U.K.: Leicester University Press, 1992. x + 258 pp. Ill. $69.00. In 1989, the Urban Research Committee of the University of Birmingham (England) began hosting a biennial international conference to review recent progress in premodern urban research. This volume is the fruit of their second conference. One’s heart cannot help but go out to the volume’s editor, who laments in the book’s preface that a written version of “Aeternaliter in Urbe: A Summing-up,” which “brought the 1991 conference to such a memorable end” (p. vii) was never submitted. Perhaps the derelict scholar, whose promise to transform that presentation into “a wide-ranging introductory discussion for the volume was enthusiastically taken up by the Committee” (p. vii), was so preoccupied that he never even got around to procrastinating. But when publication could be delayed no longer, the editor elicited the help of two colleagues to write a short, synthetic “Introduction” (pp. 1–7). This introduction is the successful fruit of three desperate scholars’ efforts to weave together into the semblance of a pattern some disparate strands from the diverse essays contained in this volume. The first essay (“The Palaeopathology of Urban Infections,” by Keith Manchester), which is an attempt, as the author so poignantly expresses it, “to apply clinicopathological concepts and palaeopathological evidence to the palaeoepidemiology of infectious disease in urban contexts” (p. 13), and the concluding paper (“Dispersal or Concentration: The Disposal of the Winchester Dead over 2000 Years,” by Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle), which argues that “In the last century and a half the pattern of burial at Winchester has come full circle, reverting to the [End Page 149] Roman practice” (p. 245), have only this in common: they cover an even greater span than the temporal purview of this volume. The intervening essays are arranged chronologically. Essays 2 through 5 deal with the Roman imperial period. John Patterson (“Patronage, Collegia and Burial in Imperial Rome”) explores “the relationships between the funerary and burial practices of non-elite Romans and the political and social structures in which they were enmeshed” (p. 16). Simon Esmonde Cleary (“Town and Country in Roman Britain?”) determined that, at least in Roman Britain, settlement types did not significantly influence burial types. Theya Molleson (“Mortality Patterns in the Romano-British Cemetery at Poundbury Camp near Dorchester”) provides paleopathological analyses of the skeletal evidence from a Romano-British cemetery. In “Death and the Dead in the Late Roman West,” Jill Harries explores the effect of the cult of martyrs on generally held views about the dead. The remainder of the essays deal with the Middle Ages and slightly beyond. Alan Morton (“Burial in Middle Saxon Southampton”) concludes that “the role of the Church is not clearly reflected” by such evidence as there is for burial practices there: “Indeed it is tempting to argue that the urban corpse was, figuratively as well as actually, a piece of rubbish—but archaeology is the wrong discipline to support such an interpretation” (p. 76). In “Urban Cemetery Location in the High Middle Ages,” Julia Barrow discusses the significance of cemetery locations for social history. Roberta Gilchrist (“Christian Bodies and Souls: The Archaeology of Life and Death in Later Medieval Hospitals”) argues that while “the incidence of hospitals [sc. the medieval sense of that word] is one criterion for indicating a hierarchy of medieval towns . . . such figures [also] act as a scale of urban deprivation and need” (p. 101). In “Burial Choice and Burial Location in Later Medieval London,” Vanessa Harding discusses the motivations for, and the significance of, the choice of type and location of burial. John Henderson (“The Black Death in Florence: Medical and Communal Responses”) seeks to determine “the relationship between physicians’ beliefs about the causes, nature and methods of transmission of plague and the policies adopted by city governments” (p. 136), especially that of Florence. In “Death and Rebirth in Late Medieval Bury St. Edmunds,” Robert Dinn attempts “to reconstruct funeral rituals” in order to “decode the...
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