Death
DEATH
David G. Troyansky
Death is a phenomenon both universal and profoundly personal. Its history takes many forms. It may be written in terms of a familiar presence in people's lives, a series of catastrophes resulting from epidemics and wars, a challenge to be overcome by science and medicine, a private event giving meaning to life, and an occasion for religious or secular ritual. It is about humanity at its most vulnerable and life at its most meaningful—and meaningless. Approaches range from historical demography and family history to the history of disease, religion, and the state. Histories of death tell tales of horror, medical triumph, continuity and discontinuity of religious belief, and shifts in the relationships between individuals, families, and communities.
In the last three decades of the twentieth century, social historians and historical demographers contributed mightily to the body of knowledge on certain aspects of the history of death. Much of the quantitative work, illustrating a remarkable demographic triumph over mortality, is summarized in Jean-Pierre Bardet and Jacques Dupâquier's three-volume Histoire des populations de l'Europe (1997–1999), from which some of the demographic data in this essay is drawn. The field of the history of death, however, has been dominated by two French historians whose writings of the 1970s and early 1980s combined social and cultural history and remain the only European-wide overviews from the late Middle Ages to the contemporary era. The better-known work remains that of Philippe Ariès, but perhaps more influential among specialists, both in terms of argument and method, is the scholarship of Michel Vovelle. Ariès told a story of growing individualism and large-scale sociocultural change. Vovelle identified changes in mentalities associated fundamentally with secularization. Historians working in the 1980s and 1990s have developed variations on those themes. This essay addresses those fundamental works as well as the themes raised by a generation of social-historical scholarship. It first provides an overview of demographic knowledge of death since the Renaissance.
DEMOGRAPHY
The most notable demographic feature in the long history of death from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century is the reduction in mortality rates and the increase in life expectancy from birth. Death rates in sixteenth-century cities fluctuated around 35 to 46 per thousand, exceeding 100 in periods of epidemic disease. In 1996 the rate for most European countries was between 8 and 11 per thousand. The timing of the mortality change varied from place to place, but the most dramatic improvements occurred from 1880 to 2000. Some reduction in mortality was seen beginning in the eighteenth century, but even then rates of death fluctuated in a range that was reminiscent of medieval conditions; and in the contemporary period, for reasons that have to do with politics and warfare, it would be fair to say that Europe's history has been played out against a background of death.
Beginning in the 1340s the Black Death decimated the European population. Even a century later, Europe was without one third of its preplague population, having fallen from 73.5 million inhabitants in 1340 to 50 million in 1450. Plague mortality in England ranged from 35 to 40 percent. Its 1310 population of 6 million was not seen again until 1760. Cities were devastated. Hamburg lost 35 percent of its master bakers and 76 percent of its town councillors in the summer of 1350. Florence lost 60 percent of its population, Siena 50 percent. The population of Paris fell from 213,000 in 1328 to 100,000 in 1420–1423, that of Toulouse from 45,000 in 1335 to 19,000 in 1405. People fled the cities, but large areas of the countryside were touched as well. Upper Provence saw a 60 percent decline in numbers of households from 1344 to 1471; eastern Normandy lost 69 percent of its households from 1347 to the middle of the fifteenth century; and Navarre lost 70 percent from the 1340s to the 1420s. Most villages in some territories of the Holy Roman Empire were deserted.
Population decline was actually multicausal, with increased mortality documented even before the arrival of the Black Death, but plague was terrifying, as it hit rich and poor, young and old. Historians disagree about the cultural impact of the Black Death. Some describe a religious turn, others document a release in sensuality, but the next wave of plague in the 1360s seems to have led to a morbid literary and visual culture. Fear led to assault on those considered "other," especially Jews. Survivors saw an increase in per capita wealth and a weakening of feudalism in western Europe. Some historians describe the plague as putting an end to a demographic and economic deadlock and forcing the renewal of intellectual and spiritual life.
Recovery began in the period 1420–1450 and was even more dramatic after 1500; but until the eighteenth century, plague was endemic in Europe, and it joined famine and warfare as a major cause of death. Several outbreaks decimated local populations and terrorized survivors. The 1651 plague in Barcelona was particularly well documented. Nonetheless, Europeans had learned a lesson from the Black Death and limited population growth to a generally manageable level. They lived in greater equilibrium with the environment than they had done in the late Middle Ages.
Such equilibrium did not rule out great demographic shocks. Early modern Europe was characterized by broad fluctuations in mortality due especially to epidemic disease. Mortality rates (per thousand) in England in the mid-sixteenth century provide a good example (Table 1). In the eighteenth century, fluctuations were less dramatic, and gradual improvement was evident in the nineteenth (Table 2). Famines still occurred in the early modern period (and as late as the 1840s in Ireland, and even later in Russia), but they tended to be local and often prompted by war. There was not a year without war in Europe from 1453 to 1730. The Wars of Religion of the sixteenth century and the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) were particularly deadly, but even then more people died of disease than of battle wounds. Movement of troops across Europe spread disease with alarming speed and destroyed crops and homes. An army of fewer than ten thousand could cause more than a million deaths by plague.
Population growth stagnated during the various crises of the seventeenth century but then continued in a significant way after 1720. From 1400 to 1800 the European population tripled, from 60 to 180 million inhabitants. Indicative of that progress is the emergence of scientific thinking about mortality and life expectancy in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. John Graunt and Edmund Halley in the seventeenth century and Nicolaas Struyck, Willem Kersseboom, and Antoine Deparcieux in the eighteenth were among the founders of the modern demographic study of mortality; their work gave the lie to the early modern truism, appearing in many testaments, that the moment of death is completely unpredictable.
Before the demographic transition, or Vital Revolution, as some historians describe it, life expectancy at birth ranged from 25 to 35 years. It was higher in northern and western Europe than southern and eastern Europe. Until the eighteenth century, 40 to 50 percent of children did not reach the age of 5. Rates of survival varied geographically. In the 1750s life expectancy at birth was 28.7 in France, 38.3 in Sweden; the difference was narrower at age 10: 44.2 in France, 46.7 in Sweden. "National" figures, however, are misleading, as regional variation was striking. Within France, among those born between 1690 and 1719, 61 percent of children in the southeast failed to reach age 10, while the figure was only 46 percent in the southwest. Mary Dobson (1997) finds great mortality differences among southeastern English parishes separated only by ten miles and by elevations of four and five hundred feet. Even as late as the 1870s, infant mortality ranged from 72 per thousand in a rural area of Norway to 449 per thousand in the most deadly districts of urban Bavaria.
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During the demographic transition, the greatest shift in death rates concerned infants and children. The farming out of babies to wetnurses often had disastrous consequences. Among infants kept by their mothers, mortality was lower for those who were breast-fed than those who were fed by bottle, but the choice of method sometimes depended upon the mother's work environment or upon regional and cultural patterns that are still poorly understood. In the nineteenth century, central and northern German mothers tended to nurse, while Bavarians often had recourse to the bottle. Religion was one of the factors at work, and higher infant mortality rates were often found among southern European Catholic populations than among their northern European Protestant counterparts. Some historical demographers explain such divergences by positing a Catholic resignation about death and a more active Protestant, particularly Calvinist, pattern. But it would be hazardous to argue for such a simple explanation.
FROM A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR
And as I have written above, God took our little girl the day after her mother's death. She was like an angel, with a doll's face, comely, cheerful, pacific, and quiet, who made everyone who knew her fall in love with her. And afterwards, within fifteen days, God took our older boy, who already worked and was a good sailor and who was to be my support when I grew older, but this was not up to me but to God who chose to take them all. God knows why He does what He does, He knows what is best for us. His will be done. Thus in less than a month there died my wife, our two older sons, and our little daughter. And I remained with four-year-old Gabrielo, who of them all had the most difficult character. And after all this was over I went with the boy in the midst of the great flight from the plague to Sarrià to the house of my mother-in-law. I kept quarantine there for almost two months, first in a hut and then in the house, and would not have returned so soon had it not been for the siege of Barcelona by the Castilian soldiers, which began in early August 1651.
James S. Amelang, ed. and trans. A Journal of the Plague Year: The Diary of the Barcelona Tanner Miquel Parets, 1651. New York, 1991, p. 71.
Differential mortality rates resulting from social inequality were greater in cities than in the countryside. They would be dramatic in the era of industrialization, but they were already visible in the early modern period. Table 3 illustrates life expectancy at birth and at age thirty in Geneva according to the social status of the father.
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Industrialization in the nineteenth century made cities even more dangerous, particularly for the laboring classes. Insalubrious living conditions, inadequate nutrition, and dangerous workplaces, combined with unprecedented concentrations of people, increased mortality rates for a generation or two. Among the Danish working classes in the period 1820–1849, mortality rates in Copenhagen were 230 per thousand, in provincial cities 160 per thousand, in rural regions 138 per thousand. But eventually municipal authorities, often with the collaboration of the medical profession, addressed problems of drinking water and sewage.
DISEASE
Historians have debated the causes of the demographic transition, from general improvement in health resulting from greater nutrition and resistance to infectious diseases to medicine and public health measures. Quarantining populations worked effectively in responding to plague. Environmental factors and more effective provisioning may have caused the early decline in mortality in the period 1750–1790. Greater decline occurred from 1790 to the 1830s and 1840s, when the smallpox vaccine, discovered by the English physician Edward Jenner in 1798, had an important impact. There followed a period of stagnation until the 1870s and 1880s, with dramatic changes coming from Louis Pasteur's research into infectious disease in the 1880s. Still, different parts of Europe were on different schedules. Western and central Europe saw progress in the early part of the century, southern Europe registered change by the middle of the century, and eastern Europe entered the transition around the end of the nineteenth century.
For Europe as a whole, 1895–1905 represented a great turning point in infant mortality. But causes of death still varied geographically. Southern Europe had many deaths from diarrhea and gastroenteritis. In industrialized England tuberculosis was the more pressing problem. Historians have offered both ecological and climatic explanations and socioeconomic ones for the timing of the mortality change. Lower temperatures seem to have encouraged lower mortality. The turn of the century saw a combination of better climatic conditions and improvement in public and private hygiene.
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Causes of death shifted from infectious diseases to cardiovascular illness and cancer. The nineteenth century as a whole saw an epidemiological and sanitary transition. Plague was gone, smallpox was greatly reduced, and public health measures eventually dealt with epidemics of cholera, typhoid, measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, and gastroenteritis. Cholera coming from Asia reached central and eastern Europe in late 1830 and early 1831. It continued west to Poland, Germany, Scandinavia, and Great Britain, reaching Belgium and France in early 1832 and southern Europe by 1833. More pandemics hit in 1848, 1865, and 1883. Intervention by public health officials protected cities by the late nineteenth century. The great exception was the cholera epidemic of 1892 in Hamburg, the destructiveness of which, killing almost ten thousand in about six weeks, was a result of the failure of the municipality to filter the city's water. As presented in Richard Evans's massive study (1987), it was a classic example of resistance by the business class to medical intervention. Cholera affected young and old more than adults. It was a shock to European opinion, as Europeans imagined they no longer had to fear epidemic disease. The quick progress of the disease and its high rates of mortality were terrifying, and the experience of 1892 indicated the importance of clean water and effective sewer systems.
A major triumph for medicine was the defeat of smallpox, a disease of childhood that was painful to behold. Mandatory vaccination had its impact, yet as one disease was conquered, another seemed to take its place. Tuberculosis, the most deadly epidemic disease in the nineteenth century, became endemic, with cases doubling in cities in the first half of the century. Curiously, the disease took on a fashionable image in the European upper and middle classes, who portrayed its victims, slowly wasting away, as romantic sufferers. The reality was greater incidence among the working classes and the poor, who lived in crowded conditions and suffered from poor nutrition. Suburbanization and improved nutrition probably helped reduce the incidence of the disease at the end of the nineteenth century.
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: MASS DEATH AND A NEW VITAL REVOLUTION
The twentieth century began and ended with significant reductions in mortality. It might be said to constitute a second Vital Revolution, but the twentieth century also witnessed the death of 80 million Europeans as a result of war, deportation, famine, and extermination. World War I had at least 8 million victims, with another 2 million succumbing to the influenza epidemic of 1918–1919. World War II saw 43 million deaths in Europe and the Soviet Union, including 30 million civilians. The Soviet Union lost 26.6 million, 7.5 million of whom were soldiers. Poland lost 320,000 soldiers but 5.5 million civilians, including 2.8 million Jews. Germany lost 4.7 million people. The bloodletting was unprecedented, but declining mortality accelerated after the war. Progress was continuous in western Europe. In the east mortality rates actually went up after the collapse of communism.
Death took on a different meaning with the genocides of World War II. The ghettos, to which many Jews were confined, were already places of very high morbidity and mortality rates; then the Nazis moved to mass shootings and mass extermination by gas. Some 60 percent of Europe's Jews were killed. One third of the Roma (Gypsy) population was killed. The Eastern Front saw racial war, as 3.3 of 5.7 million Russians imprisoned by the Germans died in captivity. Central and Eastern Europe were more touched than the West. Poland lost 15 percent of its population. Whereas World War I had killed young men, World War II killed men and women of all ages.
Mass death—the influenza epidemic of 1918–1919, the Soviet famine of 1933, and, of course, the world wars—has been one of the major characteristics of the twentieth century. It was an essential part of the political processes of the era. The idea of the two world wars' constituting Europe's second Thirty Years' War brings to mind the way in which the events of 1618–1648 represented a major crisis in European history. The resolution of that war saw the achievement of stability and rationality. The resolution of the conflicts of 1914–1945, even if it took the rest of the century and a cold war, also represented the achievement of a kind of stability and, in the history of death, an unprecedented turn.
Mortality had declined in Europe since the eighteenth century, and the process accelerated in parts of Europe in the 1880s. The two postwar periods saw even greater progress, especially the antibiotic revolution after World War II. The most common age for dying was displaced. Death had always clustered in childhood and youth and then been fairly evenly distributed across the life course. By the second half of the twentieth century, it clustered in advanced age, and thus the image of death was transformed.
Life expectancies around 1900 still varied greatly from one part of Europe to another. Over the course of the twentieth century, they increased by 50 and even 100 percent, and by the end converged, for most of Europe, around ages in the late 70s and early 80s. Death rates were cut in half. Infant mortality fell from 190 per thousand in 1900 to 9 per thousand in 1996. Causes of death also changed. Respiratory infections were defeated by medicine, gastrointestinal ailments by public health measures, climatic change, and better nutrition. Tuberculosis had been a major killer of young people; it was surpassed after 1960 by violent death in traffic accidents. The emergence of AIDS proved that infectious disease was not thoroughly defeated.
It is clear that the medical triumph over death has left inequalities. Women's life expectancy continues to increase faster than men's. The female advantage, having disappeared completely for a time in some nineteenth-century cities, was 3 years in 1910, 5.1 years in 1960, and 8 years in 1995. Socioeconomic inequalities before death were noticeable in early modern cities but increased with industrialization. The spread of health insurance and public health measures reduced such inequality, but continued differences in standards of living, dietary habits, exercise, and the use of tobacco are among the factors encouraging inequality. Regional inequalities have evolved. At the start of the twentieth century, northwestern Europeans were used to living longer than southeastern Europeans, for the north and west had begun the sanitary transition relatively early. That distinction was reduced by 1960, but soon the major difference occurred between east and west, as life expectancy continued to increase in the west but stagnated in the east.
SOCIAL AND CULTURAL HISTORIES OF DEATH
The history of death requires measures of mortality, but numbers alone do not tell us how people faced death. The historical literature on death has examined a huge variety of sources and addressed a wide range of questions, from cultural representations and social attitudes to ritual, ceremony, and bedside practices. Ritual tends to resist change, but even traditional patterns undergo significant modifications over time and reveal social and cultural transformations.
Ariès's work on the history of death came after his influential history of childhood and before his project on the history of private life, and it shared a major concern of those works: an emphasis on individualism and its relationship to families and communities. He observed that contemporary European society, greatly influenced by developments in the United States, had increasingly serious problems dealing with death but could learn much from historical experience. He borrowed the English author Geoffrey Gorer's notion of the "pornography of death"—the idea that death replaced sex as the great taboo subject—and looked for the various ways premodern people seemed to face death more successfully. Of course, they had more experience with death, but for Ariès changes in mortality were not as important as changes in culture. In four essays (1974) that appeared before his magnum opus with individualism as his great theme, he laid out the argument that medieval and some fortunate modern people saw death as "tamed," something to be approached with equanimity and in public and to be managed comfortably by the dying individual surrounded by others. He used cultural representations of the deaths of knights and monks, along with an assortment of literary characters, to paint a picture of death as an event provoking little anxiety. Death then became less tame, and Ariès claimed that a new religiosity, beginning in the High Middle Ages but developing significantly in the era of the Reformation, encouraged a new focus on "one's own death."
Death, as Ariès saw it, came to be governed by religious concerns, by the struggle between God and the Devil, by a shift from a cultural focus on Final Judgment and the end of time to concern for the individual soul and its separation from the body. The cultural fascination with death prompted a widespread literature of the ars moriendi (art of dying). Guides for dying well proliferated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and indicated a new sense of individual fear and responsibility. Out of that individualism emerged a concern for the death of loved ones, what Ariès called "thy death." It included an eroticization of death as early as the Renaissance, but it developed more fully and in a more secular fashion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially in the culture of romanticism and a Victorian cult of death. A subsequent rejection of that cult followed, according to Ariès, and developed into a profound discomfort around reminders of mortality, the "forbidden death" that he thought marked the second half of the twentieth century.
Ariès's larger work employed the same basic argument as the four essays on death. Yet whereas the essays proceeded with elegant simplicity, the book amassed a weight of evidence demanding a more complicated structure. Archaeological sources, artistic, literary, religious, and philosophical representations, scientific and medical treatises, and sheer interpretive daring made The Hour of Our Death the benchmark against which subsequent works would be measured. Ariès's sometimes naive use of a limited sample of high cultural sources led him to propose cultural changes more dramatic than those subsequent scholars could identify, but his ideas have continued to appear in the scholarly literature.
Have people died comfortably or anxiously? Have they died alone or in public? Have they spent long periods of time in preparation for death? Have they been accompanied by religious or medical authorities? Have they been buried with great pomp or simplicity? Has the body been treated individually or buried in mass graves, the bones dug up and placed in ossuaries? All such questions sprang from the pages of his book, and his answers have served as hypotheses for subsequent historians of death.
BETWEEN RENAISSANCE AND ENLIGHTENMENT
The question of pomp versus simplicity and the related issue of secularization lay at the heart of Michel Vovelle's investigations into the history of death. His first major work (1973) was essentially a study of testaments in Provence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It took secularization or, as he put it, de-Christianization as its major theme and proposed a transition from a time of baroque piety to one of Enlightenment simplicity and secularism. It also represented a major methodological contribution to modern historiography, for it brought a "serial" method from social and economic history to the study of culture. Vovelle understood that Enlightenment thinkers doubted the received wisdom of religion and found medical and public health issues in the realm of death, but he wondered how far down in French and European society new ideas, beliefs, and practices might be found. The serial study of testaments permitted such analysis. The testament is a document that expresses religious faith and property concerns. Clauses invoking the Virgin Mary or the various saints went into decline, and religious bequests gave way to more secular directives, making the testament a more profane document in a world in which property took precedence over matters of the soul. By employing large numbers of wills that represented a broad area of Provence and a socially diverse population, Vovelle could trace the spread of new mentalities and social practices across space and time.
Vovelle had used archival traces of preparation for death to explore popular beliefs and practices, but his study of wills was limited to one part of southern France and one period, from the end of the Catholic Reformation to the end of the Old Regime. A literature developed concerning other times and places. Pierre Chaunu (1978) demonstrated a somewhat earlier cultural shift in Paris, Bernard Vogler (1978) explored differences between Catholics and Protestants in Alsace, and Jacques Chiffoleau (1980) discovered significant changes in the uses of wills in Papal territories in southern France in the late Middle Ages. Chiffoleau identified the creation of the culture of death that Vovelle saw unraveling. In other words, he wrote of the Christianization of death, describing residents of Avignon who, cut off from traditional village solidarities and family lineages, forged new ways of dealing with death. Against a background of developing trade and urban growth, people of Avignon spent their wealth on "flamboyant" funerals and religious bequests, the cultural practices that Ariès had called "one's own death." The most ambitious work on testaments was undertaken by Samuel Cohn, who in one book (1988) traced them over the course of six hundred years (1205–1800) in the city of Siena, finding dramatic changes in attitudes and practices, and in another (1992) compared testamentary practices in six Italian cities from the twelfth century to the fifteenth. In the Siena study, Cohn found late medieval testators dividing their wealth among pious causes, practicing a selfless religious devotion in preparation for death, until the second wave of plague in the fourteenth century, when they concentrated their donations and made long-term demands of their heirs. The dying were using their wealth to make a lasting impact on earth. Late Renaissance donations turned secular and familial, and subsequent Counter-Reformation and Enlightenment-era trends corresponded with some of Vovelle's findings. Vovelle's use of serial sources was also taken up by his own students, including Bernard Cousin (1983), who studied votice paintings of life-threatening events.
FROM THE WILL OF A SIXTEENTH-CENTURY SPANISH NOBLEMAN
I, Don Martin Cortés, Marquis of the Valley of Guaxaca, residing in this city of Madrid, beset by infirmities and lacking in health, but unaffected in my intellect, fearing that since death is a certainty but its hour an uncertainty, I might be taken while I am unprepared in those things that are necessary for salvation, and wishing to make perfectly clear to my wife and children how they are to inherit my belongings, so that there will be no discord or quarreling among them, do hereby order and execute this my last will and testament in the following manner.
Quoted in Eire, p. 19.
Critics of Vovelle, including Ariès, argued that he may have mistaken privatization of religious belief and practice for full-blown de-Christianization. Vovelle supplemented his work on long-term change with a study of de-Christianization in the French Revolution. He demonstrated the importance of sudden death and political death, and other scholars have followed that path. In his own synthetic study of death since the late Middle Ages, Vovelle offered a picture that was somewhat more complicated and more careful than that of Ariès, but, unlike the latter, it never had great impact on the broader public, perhaps because it never appeared in English translation. Both synthetic works told a story of secularization and individualism, but subsequent scholarship recognized no simple transition from medieval to modern attitudes.
The study of testaments was one approach to the topic of religion and death. Historians have also looked at the twists and turns of religious ritual, the idea of death as a rite of passage, and the ways in which Europeans faced death, disposed of the dead, and mourned. Some of those practices had to do with religious doctrine. Even during times when much evidence indicates change in religious attitudes, traditional religious practices provided solace.
Most Europeans for most of the period approached death with an arsenal of Christian ideas, beginning with the notion that death was the consequence of original sin. They learned to expect a separation between body and soul, to prepare for an individual judgment, and to hope for Final Judgment at the end of time. Catholics were encouraged to see the time before death as a trial, and the last rites, including prayer, anointing with oil, the administering of Communion (the viaticum), and the commendation of the soul, were essential parts of the process. Multiple editions of the Ars moriendi warned against the five temptations of the dying: unbelief, despair, impatience, spiritual pride, and excessive attachment to things of this world. Illustrations show competition between terrifying devils and an inspiring Christ. The passage from life to death involved changing patterns of emotional and financial investment by family and ritual behavior by community. Sharon Strocchia's study (1992) of Renaissance Florence described a double agenda for the death ritual, which recognized the honor of individuals and families, distinguishing them from others, and the need to reaffirm the community's sense of order. The funeral was the setting for demonstrating an individual's or family's power and status; the funeral procession demonstrated and legitimated the city's social hierarchy. Their increasing flamboyance revealed competition among old and new elites. On the other hand, the requiem was designed to bring people together. It affirmed communal and spiritual ties, as friends, neighbors, coworkers, kin, and public officials joined together in commemorating the dead.
The flamboyance of Renaissance funerals had social and political functions, but the culture of death evolved in religious contexts. Charitable bequests, processions, masses, and prayers eased the journey of the soul in Catholic Europe, as the actions of the living were thought to shorten the stay in purgatory and encourage the passage to heaven. Carlos Eire's book on sixteenth-century Madrid (1995) is the most detailed study of the testament, of ways of approaching death, and of cultural models for dying. Eire described how, when someone was thought to be dying, the notary and priest would be called for, kin and neighbors would arrive to help the dying person, and members of religious confraternities would attend. All those participants would help the dying person in the final battle. The testament itself narrates a process of identification before God and one's neighbors, supplication, meditations on death and judgment, profession of faith, deliverance into God's hands, and then instructions concerning the disposing of the body, the saving of the soul, and the dividing up of the estate. In sixteenth-century Madrid one was buried in a parish church, a monastery chapel, or occasionally a cloister. Clergy to be buried wore their religious garb, but so did many in the laity. The Franciscan habit was the most popular item of clothing for the dead laity in Madrid. Some even wore two habits and called explicitly for the advocacy of Francis. Early in the century the vast majority of testators provided detailed instructions for the funeral. Later many left the planning to their executors. A similar evolution had occurred a century earlier in Valladolid, and it might be interpreted as an increased codification of ritual by status rather than a loss of interest. The funeral procession began with the clergy; the coffin followed, with family, friends, and acquaintances next, and the poor and orphans, who were paid for their trouble, taking up the rear. Processions became more elaborate over the century; in the second half large numbers of mendicant friars joined the cortege, and participation by confraternities grew. Demands for masses in perpetuity (literally forever) increased as well. Eire concludes that people of Madrid pawned their earthly wealth to shorten their stay in purgatory.
Eire also presented two elite models of Catholic death: Philip II (1527–1598) and Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582). Philip, who built the Escorial as his place of death and as a gathering place for religious relics, taught a lesson in how to die. His was a slow, painful death, one that demonstrated publicly that even a king could not escape mortality; it affirmed also the centrality of the sacred in public life in Catholic Spain. The saintly paradigm was even more important than the royal one, and Saint Teresa of Ávila became the great exemplar of Counter-Reformation death. As a mystic she combined ecstasy and death. Her body after death was said to have become smooth as that of a child and to emit a healing fragrance. The buried body was associated with miracles. After nine months it was dug up and described as uncorrupted. But it was then cut up and parceled out for relics and the continued working of miracles. As the example of Saint Teresa suggests, Catholic approaches to death had grown more intense during a time when the Church was being challenged by Protestantism.
PROTESTANT DEATH
Protestantism rejected the Catholic emphasis on the last hours—the outcome had already been decided—but important elements of the "good death" carried over. Preparations mattered, and the behavior of the dying might indicate where the soul was headed, but confession, absolution, and extreme unction disappeared. The Protestant on his or her deathbed played an active role, offering good advice to family and demonstrating acceptance of the inevitable. The good death survived as a familial event for the bereaved. The Protestant Reformation, by eliminating purgatory, whose existence Martin Luther denied in 1530, focused attention on the faith of the dying individual and the grace of God, and Protestant thinkers claimed that the passage to heaven was immediate. It called into question and indeed placed limits on efforts by the living to intercede. Prayers for the dead would be of no use.
Such a dramatic change in doctrine had major repercussions for the ways in which people behaved when in mourning. As described in Craig Koslofsky's study (2000) of early modern Germany, a separation was made between the living and the dead both in terms of the decline of purgatory and the relegation of cemeteries to less populated areas. That process had to do with interpretation of doctrine but also the practical problems of residing in growing cities. The rejection of Catholic tradition, which Luther described as trickery, did not automatically result in the elaboration of a Protestant model. Radical Reformers buried their dead with utter simplicity, but Lutherans developed a new ritual that eventually included communal processions, funeral hymns, and honorable burial in a communal cemetery rather than a churchyard. Funeral sermons became the central element by 1550. Religious and secular authorities valued the use of ceremony to reinforce social hierarchies. Burial at night, reserved for criminals, suicides, or dishonorable people, or any burial without the participation of pastor and community was seen as irreligious. The possibility of denying Christian burial meant an emphasis on the individual's relationship to the living rather than to the dead. The sermon was the occasion to use the dead to honor the living.
The Lutheran model did not hold for all Protestants. Lutherans and Calvinists battled over matters of ritual, and by the late seventeenth century Lutheran nobles opted for nocturnal interment, which now was seen as honorable, and by candle-lit processions. Pietism and the preference for private devotion provided a context in which non-noble people also participated in nocturnal burial, which remained a common way of dealing with death throughout the eighteenth century. When daylight funerals once again became common in Germany, they retained a private, familial nature.
David Cressy (1997) has demonstrated that in England men and women maintained long-standing death rituals long after the Reformation. Traditional ways of dealing with the dead, such as sprinkling with holy water, wakes, the ringing of bells, and elaborate processions, continued in some parts of Protestant England into the seventeenth century; but vestiges of Catholic practice began to be seen as heathen superstition, and memories of purgatory may have survived in the form of belief in ghosts. Elaborate ceremony certainly continued, as the wealthy dressed and coffined their dead in more ostentatious fashion, but it may have been a necessary substitute for the older actions on behalf of the soul. What had previously been done for the dead had obviously functioned effectively for the grieving. The proliferation of individual graves provided new sites for such activities. Inscriptions had more to do with earthly memory than with old beliefs in resurrection. The era of the Protestant Reformation saw a separation of life-course ritual from participation by the entire community, an assertion of privacy. Ralph Houlbrooke's study (1998) of early modern English death demonstrated that family and neighbors replaced clergymen at the deathbed and, as ritual support diminished, had more to do. Some traditional practices, including of course rites and gestures associated with belief in purgatory, were strongly reaffirmed in Catholic Europe, but even there elites gradually moved away from a public culture of death. The poor were no longer invited. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, communal care for the dead in some places even began to give way to the professional services of undertakers, although their dominance would not come until the nineteenth century.
ENLIGHTENMENT
Seventeenth-century thought played on fears of damnation, but belief in hell fell into decline among significant numbers of Catholics as well as Protestants. In the eighteenth century, Enlightenment thinkers sought a non-Christian way of dying and ridiculed their fellows who opted at the last minute for a Christian exit. Stories circulated of the deaths of philosophes, the French Enlightenment thinkers and writers; Voltaire's managing to die (in 1778) "in the Catholic religion" but not of it and not as a Christian represented an Enlightenment triumph. Form and dignity mattered; serenity and the metaphor of sleep replaced the agony of the religious death; in response to the question of whether he recognized the divinity of Jesus Christ, Voltaire said, "Let me die in peace." Belief in a non-Christian Supreme Being, the emergence of a protoromantic cult of melancholy, the development of more secular funerary sculpture, and public health concerns about overcrowded urban cemeteries led to new ways of thinking about death. The pilgrimage to the tomb was itself an important activity even as faith in reunion after death was shaken. A late-eighteenth-century cult of death encompassed deists, agnostics, and Christians.
Posterity, an earthly form of immortality, replaced heaven in much Enlightenment thought. Practical contributions to society and expressions of public virtue would yield a post-Christian form of immortality. Serving the nation or even humanity became the new ideal. Late Enlightenment and French Revolutionary funereal architecture, with its neoclassical plans and structures, embodied a secular and often nationalized way of death. The draped urn, the willow, the broken column, and the veiled mourner were all part of the neoclassical vocabulary of death. Secular ceremonies honoring revolutionary martyrs replaced Christian practices in the 1790s; hymns, processions, and eulogies emphasized civic virtue rather than Christian spirituality. The citizen's political death provided a new model for a republican public.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Secularization was hardly complete. High cultural sources indicate a Romantic turn that involved a good deal of spirituality. Sentiment and sorrow replaced the serenity of the previous period. New levels of attention were devoted to grief and to mourning rituals. Romantic burial grounds and a literature evoking them provided an alternative to the neoclassicism of the eighteenth century. The afterlife made a comeback, but the new emphasis was on a heaven where loving families would reconstitute themselves. Religious and secular beliefs and ritual combined in the nineteenth century. Alternative cults of the dead proliferated; their creators included the liberals Victor Cousin and Charles-Bernard Renouvier and the socialists Charles Fourier and Pierre Leroux. Less political but equally mainstream was the spiritism of Allan Kardec and Camille Flammarion, encouraging communication between the living and the dead. Spiritism, like the occult more generally in Europe, was largely a middle-class phenomenon, a response to the decline of formal religious practice and an expression of enthusiastic hopes for science.
A focus on the legacy of the Enlightenment, on declining church attendance, and on movements toward separation of church and state may lead one to disregard the survival of religious practices for the majority, particularly when marking life-course events. In Victorian England, a continuity can be detected until the 1870s in the Evangelical style of dealing with death, which perpetuated the notion of the good death but added great intensity in the expression of grief. But there was already a good deal of secular influence. Throughout Europe the doctor played a more important role at the bedside. His administration of opiates eased the passage. The doctor's bedside presence in nineteenth-century votive paintings demonstrates his intervention in even the most devout Catholic contexts. Large suburban cemeteries took the burial ceremony away from the churchyard and into secular space. The cemeteries came to resemble cities of their own, with streets, alleys, and addresses. Burials increasingly fell into the hands of commercial enterprises.
When twentieth-century Europeans looked back at the nineteenth century, they criticized what they took to be elaborate Victorian rituals of death. They assumed that what appeared to be excessive mourning by Queen Victoria for Prince Albert was considered normal by her contemporaries. Scholarship of the 1990s calls that assumption into question. Victoria was, in fact, criticized for excessive mourning; her own subjects saw her as depressed. But formal mourning practices, rules, and schedules certainly were important in Victorian society. In France widows mourned for a year and six weeks in Paris, two years in the provinces; men mourned six months in Paris, a year in the provinces. Fashionable widows spent the first months in the black woolen dress, hood, and veil of high mourning, the next stage in black silk, and the last in alternate colors. In high society mourners wrote on black-bordered paper, widows continuing the practice until remarriage or death.
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Nineteenth-century formality was already giving way before World War I, but the mass slaughter that ensued transformed the setting if not the content of the cult of death. The difficulty of finding bodies and, once found, of transporting them raised practical problems. Bereavement in some ways became more difficult, and recovery from a loved one's death was seemingly more challenging. Such developments occurred across Europe, and in every country monuments sprang up quickly. Monuments to the war dead placed local contributions within a national narrative, and the key to their success was the listing of names. Whereas previously war memorials had honored rulers and officers, now they were democratized. Veterans' groups were often heavily involved, thus taking some responsibilities out of the hands of families. Sometimes local sculptors crafted original monuments, but most towns and villages opted for mass-produced works which they ordered out of catalogs. In some cases the meaning of memorials was contrary to the received wisdom. Among a few small pacifist monuments that stand in rural France, one shows a schoolboy in Gentioux with raised fist and the inscription, "Cursed be war." But most monuments of that era represent the soldier or an allegorical female embodying the nation.
World War II called for further commemoration of mass death, but the working out of memory and the design of monuments were in some ways more difficult. Death in the Holocaust, in particular, was long described as unrepresentable. Yet as survivors reached old age at the end of the century, efforts were made to collect their stories, to encourage them to speak, and to create monuments and memorials not only in Europe but in countries all over the world. Commemorating the deaths of those who fought in colonial and postcolonial wars involving Europeans also took some time. In France, the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) began to be memorialized in a serious way that recognized French defeat and Algerian victory only in the 1990s.
After World War II, European countries moved against the death penalty. The Nuremburg tribunals in the war's immediate aftermath resulted in the executions of Nazi war criminals. But 1948 saw the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which proclaimed a right to life. Although the declaration did not explicitly call for the outlawing of the death penalty, it served as the basis for a series of international covenants. The death penalty was abolished in Italy in 1948, in West Germany in 1949, in Britain in 1965, and in France in 1981. In 1989 the European Parliament adopted a Declaration of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms, which announced the abolition of the death penalty.
The post–World War II period also saw the transformation of the cultures of death in the most traditional regions of rural Europe. In Brittany Catholic ceremony and Breton folklore coexisted with modern individualism. Until the 1960s traditional notions of purgatory predominated, mourning was still a communal experience, and supernatural connections between the living and the dead were central to people's worldviews. But by the end of the century, even Brittany participated in the more general "denial of death."
In the twentieth century people chose alternative methods to the traditional disposal of the body by burial. By the latter part of the century, 72 percent of English people in 1998 opted for cremation. For some religious and ethnic minorities that choice was more difficult to make, as it raised the question of assimilation. Some immigrant communities also engaged in reflection on the meaning of being buried in Europe rather than in their countries of origin. Generations born in Europe questioned their elders' attachments.
SUICIDE AND EUTHANASIA
Suicide and euthanasia, specialized themes in the history of death, offer perspectives on the processes of secularization and medicalization. In English the word for suicide did not exist until the seventeenth century. Until then the act was called self-murder, and those who committed it were assumed to be criminals, madmen, and sinners. Suicide was an affront both to God and to the social order. Suicides were tried posthumously, their property was forfeited, and their bodies, denied Christian burial, were buried away from the community. In England suicides were buried facedown with wooden stakes driven through them so as to prevent their ghosts from wandering. The incidence of suicide is difficult to measure, but it has elicited scholarly interest during the Renaissance and serious investigation during the Enlightenment. The Renaissance saw the revival of classical cases of elite suicide. Taking one's own life could be construed as an act of freedom. Literary representations of suicide proliferated in the period 1580–1620, notably in the 1600 example of Hamlet. Seventeenth-century thinkers tried to repress the practice, but the numbers seem to have been fairly constant. By the late seventeenth century, as officials and the public grew more sympathetic, attitudes toward suicide had begun to change; evidence suggests that in England after 1750 suicide was seen not as diabolical but as the result of mental illness. Coroners' juries increasingly refused to punish severely; where they did convict, they undervalued self-murderers' goods. Among Enlightenment thinkers, the right to commit the act was supported by those favoring individual liberty, but the fact of suicide was seen as an attack on social solidarity. Although the French Revolution decriminalized the act and Romantic suicide in the wake of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) gave it some cachet, Enlightenment ambivalence toward it continued. Self-sacrifice for political reasons might be seen as an ideal or, alternatively, as an act of cowardice. In the first half of the nineteenth century, suicide became less a philosophical subject than a social scientific one. The practice, of course, continued, but by the second half of the twentieth century attempted suicides were seen as calls for medical help, not acts requiring legal responses.
Euthanasia represents a related phenomenon. It originally meant a gentle death, such as that which may be the desire of suicides seeking to end unendurable pain. Since the work of the English philosopher Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century, the assumption has been that euthanasia, as the alleviation of the suffering of the dying, must be administered only by a doctor, although doctors have ethical obligations not to end life. Beliefs about euthanasia began to change in the 1890s, when Adolf Jost wrote of voluntary euthanasia (a right to die) and the idea of negative human worth. In 1920 Karl Binding, a professor of jurisprudence, and Alfred Hoche, a professor of psychiatry, developed the idea of "life unworthy of life." What began as a discussion of psychiatric reform in line with cost-effectiveness ended up as a program for the killing of the mentally and physically handicapped. Euthanasia came to be seen as a eugenic method for "improving" the population and eliminating those deemed unworthy of life. The early euthanasia program in Nazi Germany focused on the young. In 1940–1941 70,273 people were killed, many in gas chambers. Some of the killers would soon use the same methods on the Jews of Europe.
Postwar opinion recoiled at the crimes of the Nazis. Yet as long life became the norm in subsequent generations, and the incidence of degenerative diseases in old age increased, doctors and patients returned to the issue of mercy killing. Questions of the withholding of medical care that would prolong the lives of the terminally ill accompanied debates over medical coverage in the world of the welfare state. Rationing of medical care and notions about the overconsumption of medicines were on the public agenda in the turn to neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s.
CONCLUSION
The contributions of social history have challenged the understanding of changes and continuities in the experience of death. It is not always easy to pinpoint the relationship between physical and cultural change. For example, nineteenth-century grief, particularly over the death of children, may have contributed to greater attention to measures designed to reduce mortality levels; but shifts in mortality levels affected attitudes toward death and mourning practices in turn.
The history of death is about the present as much as it is about the past. It permits us to address painful issues at a distance. Yet clearly those issues are not in fact all that distant. Some historians seem to be looking for a better way of dying and dealing with uncertainty. In that spirit, the German historian Arthur Imhof (1996) turned from historical demography to the kinds of cultural and religious questions raised by Ariès. He asked why life had become so difficult despite a dramatic medical triumph over death, and devised a chart that illustrated the history of life expectancy as a decline from hope of heavenly immortality to knowledge of earthly mortality. Like Ariès, he claimed that as Europeans have conquered death, they have lost the ability to deal with it. For example, the response to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, on 31 August 1997 prompted studies of the hunt for new ways of mourning. In that case, mass mourning became a media event and vice versa, as multicultural mourners, in the role of both participants and spectators, explored new ceremonies and rituals. Death was far from hidden, and the ways in which media death might influence ordinary Europeans' approach to dying remained to be seen.
See also other articles in this section.
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