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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76.2 (2002) 362-364



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Book Review

The Place of the Dead:
Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe


Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall, eds. The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xiii + 324 pp. Ill. $64.95 (cloth, 0-521-64256-6), $24.95 (paperbound, 0-521-64518-2).

Although it has few explicit references to the history of medicine, this excellent collection of articles, on the social and cultural history of death and of funerary and commemorative practices from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries, is of great interest for historians interested in medical practice and public health in this period. Focusing on regions from Scotland to Tuscany to Transylvania, the essays, both individually and collectively, sketch out an impressively nuanced and textured account of the changing ways in which local communities negotiated the ongoing relationship between the living and the dead. Using a wide range of sources—including testaments, theological treatises, parish records, saints' lives, and funeral orations—the authors explore such topics as the nature of individual and family identity, the variety of ways in which the dead could torment or succor the living (by returning as ghosts or possessing spirits, or by intervening on their behalf with God and the saints), and the ways in which the living attempted to commemorate and appease the dead. Roughly half the [End Page 362] essays deal with Catholic or pre-Reformation practices, while the rest treat Protestant communities; in both cases, however, the authors pay careful attention to the complicated interactions between popular belief, which tended to accept the reality of ghosts and revenants (particularly in the case of those who had died "badly"), and official church doctrine, which attributed phenomena such as possession and ghostly apparitions to nonhuman entities such as angels and demons.

The implications for the history of medicine are indirect but suggestive and important. Take, for example, human dissection, which emerged as an important and ongoing element in the teaching and practice of medicine and public health in precisely the period covered by this volume. Where historians of medicine have typically invoked vague "taboos," papal decrees, or complicated theological doctrines to explain the evident ambivalence with which this practice was embraced in certain parts of Europe, the ritual and cultural meanings of dissection appear much more clearly once one understands the specific beliefs involved, which involved neither theology or taboos. As Nancy Caciola demonstrates, for example, executed criminals, the principal source of cadavers for public dissections, were considered by fifteenth-century Italians to be the exemplum of those who had died badly (in the sense of suddenly and violently, after a life of wrongdoing) and who were, as a result, the most likely candidates to return and possess the living. Furthermore, as Vanessa Harding argues, in a stimulating essay on attitudes toward the dead body in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Paris, the most dangerous and unstable corpse—corresponding to the fate that the living most feared on their own account and on that of their families—was the body "depersonalized" by its mode of death and burial; unmoored from the individualizing family contexts that anchored their personal identity, executed criminals, those who died in hospitals, and the victims of devastating epidemics lost all personhood when they joined the mass of the anonymous dead. This fear of depersonalization does much to explain the resistance to dissection on the part of individuals and institutions (for example, the Hôtel-Dieu of Paris) that fully accepted the practice of autopsy.

Other essays in the collection deal with additional topics of relevance to historians of medicine, such as the particular issues raised by the death of children. For example, Will Coster's discussion of the lengthening delay between birth and baptism in later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England reveals a dramatic shift in attitudes toward the moral status of children, which has clear implications for birthing...

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