The Place of the Dead

Although much has been published on the social history of death this is the first book to give a comprehensive account of attitudes toward the dead--above all the placing of the dead in physical spiritual and social terms--in order to reveal the social and religious outlook of past societies. The contributions range widely geographically from Scotland to Transylvania and address a spectrum of themes: attitudes toward the corpse patterns of burial forms of commemoration the treatment of dead infants the nature of the afterlife and ghosts.