The Work of the Dead

The Greek philosopher Diogenes said that when he died his body should be tossed over the city walls for beasts to scavenge. Why should he or anyone else care what became of his corpse? In The Work of the Dead, acclaimed cultural historian Thomas Laqueur examines why humanity has universally rejected Diogenes’s argument. No culture has been indifferent to mortal remains. Even in...

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The Greek philosopher Diogenes said that when he died his body should be tossed over the city walls for beasts to scavenge. Why should he or anyone else care what became of his corpse? In The Work of the Dead, acclaimed cultural historian Thomas Laqueur examines why humanity has universally rejected Diogenes’s argument. No culture has been indifferent to mortal remains. Even in our supposedly disenchanted scientific age, the dead body still matters—for individuals, communities, and nations. A remarkably ambitious history, The Work of the Dead offers a compelling and richly detailed account of how and why the living have cared for the dead, from antiquity to the twentieth century.

The book draws on a vast range of sources—from mortuary archaeology, medical tracts, letters, songs, poems, and novels to painting and landscapes in order to recover the work that the dead do for the living: making human communities that connect the past and the future. Laqueur shows how the churchyard became the dominant resting place of the dead during the Middle Ages and why the cemetery largely supplanted it during the modern period. He traces how and why since the nineteenth century we have come to gather the names of the dead on great lists and memorials and why being buried without a name has become so disturbing. And finally, he tells how modern cremation, begun as a fantasy of stripping death of its history, ultimately failed—and how even the ashes of the victims of the Holocaust have been preserved in culture.

A fascinating chronicle of how we shape the dead and are in turn shaped by them, this is a landmark work of cultural history.

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: The Work of the Dead 1
Part I The Deep Time of the Dead 29
1 Do the Dead Matter? 35
2 The Dead Body and the Persistence of Being 55
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Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: The Work of the Dead 1
Part I The Deep Time of the Dead 29
1 Do the Dead Matter? 35
2 The Dead Body and the Persistence of Being 55
3 The Cultural Work of the Dead 80
Part II Places of the Dead 107
4 The Churchyard and the Old Regime 112
The Development of the Churchyard 114
Language 117
Place 121
The Church and Churchyard in the Landscape 121
Necrogeography 123
Necrobotany 133
Necrotopology and Memory 137
The Life and Afterlife of the Churchyard in Literature 141
The Passage of the Dead to the Churchyard 145
Law 148
Exclusion from the Churchyard 148
The Claims of the Dead Body on the Parish Churchyard 151
The Claims of the Parish on the Dead Body 153
The Economics of Churchyard Burial 155
The Right to Burial and the Crisis of the Old Regime 161
Enlightenment Scandals 182
Voltaire 189
David Hume 203
5 The Cemetery and the New Regime 211
The Danger of the Dead and the Rise of the Cemetery 215
Genealogies of the New Regime 238
Imagination: Elysium, Arcadia, and the Dead of the
Eighteenth Century 238
Cimetière du Père-Lachaise 260
Distant Lands and the Imperial Imagination 265
The Age of the Cemetery 271
Novelty 272
Necrogeography and Necrobotany 279
Cemeteries and Capitalism 288
Religious Pluralism in the Age of the Cemetery 294
Reform, Revolution, and the Cemetery 305
Class, Family, and the Cemetery 309
Putting the Dead in Their Place: Pauper Funerals and Proper Funerals, Burials and Reburials 312
Disrupted Bodies 336
Part III Names of the Dead 363
6 The Names of the Dead in Deep Time 367
Names of the Dead in Times of War 375
Names of the Dead in Times of Peace 382
7 The Rise of the Names of the Dead in Modern History 388
8 The Age of Necronominalism 413
Names over Bodies 415
Names and the Absent but Present Body 417
Monumental Names 421
Names of the Vanished Dead 431
9 The Names of the Great War 447
Part IV Burning the Dead 489
10 Disenchantment and Cremation 495
11 Ashes and History 523
Different Enchantments 524
Ashes in Their Place 542
Afterword: From a History of the Dead to a History of Dying 549
Notes 559
Image Credits 679
Index 681
Plates follow page 408
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