How has our understanding of death evolved over the course of 2,500 years? What can recorded history tell us about how different cultures and societies have felt about, experienced, responded to and marked the occasion of death across different periods and lands?
These are the questions pursued by 54 experts in this landmark work that explores the way past societies thought, behaved and developed as they wrestled with enormity of their own mortality. The volumes draw on history, anthropology and cultural studies to carve a complete picture of death, its symbols and interpretations from Antiquity to the present day.
Individual editors ensure volumes are cohesive and chapter titles are also identical across the volumes. This gives the choice of reading about a specific period in one of the volumes, or tracing a theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of the six.
The six volumes cover: 1. - Antiquity (500 BCE - 800 CE); 2. - Medieval Age (800 - 1450); 3. -Renaissance (1450 - 1650); 4. - Age of Enlightenment (1650 - 1789); 5. - Age of Empire (1800 - 1920); 6. - Modern Age (1920 - 2000+).
Themes (and chapter titles) are: Dead and Dying Bodies; The Sensory Aesthetics of Death; Emotions, Mortality and Vitality; Death's Ritual-Symbolic Performance; Sites, Power and Politics of Death; Gender, Age and Identity; Explaining Death: Belief, Law and Ethics; and The Undead and Eternal.
The page extent is approximately 1,728 pp with c. 300 illustrations. Each volume opens with Notes on Contributors, a series preface and an introduction, and concludes with Notes, Bibliography and an Index.
The Cultural Histories SeriesA Cultural History of Death is part of
The Cultural Histories Series. Titles are available both as printed hardcover sets for libraries needing just one subject or preferring a one-off purchase and tangible reference for their shelves, or as part of a fully-searchable digital library available to institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access (see www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com).
Davies, Douglas: - Douglas Davies is Professor in the Study of Religion and Director of the Centre for Death and Life Studies at Durham University, UK. He is the author of Natural Burial (2012), The Theology of Death (2008) and A Brief History of Death (2004). He is also the editor, along with Lewis Mates, of The Encyclopedia of Cremation (2005). Professor Davies is a Fellow of the British Academy, as well as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and of the Learned Society of Wales.
