Grave Matters: Death and Dying in Dublin, 1500 to the Present ed. by Lisa Marie Griffith and Ciarán Wallace (review)

Grave Matters arose out of a 2014 conference at the Glasnevin Cemetery Museum; it comprises fourteen essays divided into four sections. The editors recognize the already extensive work concerning death and dying in Ireland, and so, rather than offering yet another historical survey of beliefs, rituals, and events, this collection explores how death becomes a spectacle under urban circumstances. The capital has always offered a large audience for public commemoration and for social, political, and economic maneuvering. Its higher population also equated to more deaths, and resources like hospitals and job opportunities drew in concentrations of specific types of fatalities. Additionally, certain mortuary businesses found in Dublin could only be supported in an urban setting. The trends these businesses fostered shaped how private grief was articulated through material objects and social rituals, and, in time, diffused throughout the rest of Ireland.

The heightened presence and visibility of death in urban centers is far from a groundbreaking argument, but—by linking the essays through place—the volume is in some ways closer to an ethnography than a history. As a study of people-in-place, an ethnography brings into focus the sense of self, the sense of others, and sense of state in Dublin over the past half millennium and adds humanistic elements to our understanding of local history. For example, the essays on medical history in the first section bring to light the threats, worries, and fears Dubliners endured from diseases. The first, by Philomena Gorey, chronicles puerperal fever infections at the Rotunda Lying-In Hospital from 1767 until the acceptance of germ theory in 1936. It is followed by Ida Milne's exploration of objects and accounts relating to fear caused by the 1918-19 influenza pandemic. Together, these essays demonstrate how diseases shaped health practices and institutions in Dublin.

The second section offers an insightful survey of how death was politicized through social trends. Paul Huddie considers the veneration of Crimean War soldiers in Anglican Church memorials, which were heavily influenced by Victorian romanticism and cast the war dead in a new, more heroic light to deal with the trauma of losing young men so far from home. Similar concerns inform James McCafferty's essay, which jumps forward a century to the death of nine Irish soldiers during a 1960 UN peacekeeping mission in the Congo. As their funerals proceeded down O'Connell Street to Glasnevin Cemetery, crowds gathered to pay respect to the soldiers who died under a foreign body for a foreign cause. Ian Miller then examines the death penalty in Ireland. Hanging had previously served as a spectacle to enforce social order, but capital punishment was not part of the emerging European order. Its persistence in Ireland up until 1990 was controversial and potentially embarrassing. These three essays address the costs Ireland had to accept as modernity brought it into contact with external pressures and international responsibilities.

The third section of Grave Matters discusses choices. The style, inscription, and placement of stone memorials must be considered as deliberate decisions people made to represent themselves and others to contemporaries and posterity. In the case of the Agard family, memorials were used to emphasize the relationships between the dead and the living for political purposes in addition to sincere emotions of loss. Similarly, the funding and upkeep for the memorial of William Conolly consumed his wife but was considered a necessity for asserting an emerging class identity. In both cases, the memorials reflected deliberate decisions that served a variety of purposes. Relationships, affection, and identity are explored more generally in the last three essays of the section, which focus on archaeological material from Dublin's graveyards and cemeteries and their history.

Section IV, "Coming to Terms With Death," explores living with death. Ciarán Mac Murchaidh parses the sermons of...