Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of

Interdisciplinary History

Review
Author(s): Bruce Mazlish
Review by: Bruce Mazlish
Source: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 5, No. 4, The History of the Family, II (
Spring, 1975), pp. 751-752
Published by: MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/202869
Accessed: 06-11-2015 16:28 UTC

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Reviews
WesternAttitudestowardDeath: Fromthe MiddleAges to the Present.By
Philippe Aries (trans. Patricia M. Ranum) (Baltimore, The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1974) iii pp. $6.50
The subjectof deathhas taken on new life recently in the West. There
has been a plethora of books and articles calling attention to our
metaphysicalattitudes,our funeralhabits,and our medical mores. The
historyof the subject, however, has enjoyed a comparativequietude,
remindingone of the silencenormally expected to surroundthe tomb.
Aries' little book, based on four lecturesgiven at Johns Hopkins
in 1973, is an ambitiouseffort to break that silence. He works within
the Annales tradition of the "history of mentalities," and seeks to
describeWestern attitudestoward death from the Middle Ages to the
present,just as earlier, in Centuriesof Childhood(New York, 1962),
he described attitudes to early life. His thesis is that in the Middle
Ages, death was ritualized,public (even children were present), and
connected to the supernatural;the individual was forewarned of his
death, which he conceived of as part of a collective destiny, and pre-
pared to play a meaningfulrole in it.
Then, changes occurredso that, by the twentieth century, death
has become shameful, a taboo subject, the event itself dissectedinto
bits ratherthan a single moment. The individualno longer sees him-
self as connected to a collectivity; his tomb or urn is a piece of private
property; and death, which typically occurs in a hospital, is the
negative conclusion to a life whose pursuit is earthly happiness.
Though Ariesis regrettablyvague and shiftingabout the stagesleading
to the changed situation in industrialsociety-and the United States
is his prime example of the new attitudes-he does mention nodal
points in the twelfth or thirteenthcenturies(awarenessof one's own
deathreplacesawarenessthat we all shalldie), in the eighteenthcentury
(awarenessof death of the other person), and in the eighteenth-
nineteenthcenturies(the romanticfascinationwith death as beautiful).
His method, as befitting the history of mentalities,is primarilyto
employ literaryexamplesand iconography,althoughhe does cite wills
at one point. One problem, then, is to know how closely the ideal
portrayedin these texts correspondswith the reality of ordinarylife.
Were victims of the plague, for example, sufficientlyforewarned of
their death so as to preparethemselvesin properly ritualizedfashion?
Another problem is to know whether all parts of the West were as

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752 | BRUCE MAZLISH

similarin their attitudesas Aries implies. Are Sweden and Spainreally

parts of an undifferentiated"West" in this regard? Aries does tell us
that in the nineteenth century "important differences"appeared in
the mentalitiesof North America,England,and a part of northwestern
Europe on one side, and France, Germany, and Italy on the other.
Obviously, much more research is needed on particularareas and
times, as well as a much greaterexploration of all kinds of evidence,
quantifiableas well as qualifiable.
The overwhelming idea to remember in studying death is that
it has meaning only in terms of a society's life. Death attitudesand
customs tell us only about the living, about the society as it functions
in vivo. Death is not an undifferentiated,existentialfact (though it is
also that for the individual).It mattersgreatly how it comes: To die
of tuberculosisin the nineteenthcenturymeant a profoundly different
encounterwith death than to die of camp fever. Thus, any history of
death must also be a study of disease.Death is also a matter of status,
in spite of the myth of death as the great equalizer:The rich die in a
differentsetting from the poor, and an ornate tomb possessesdifferent
significancefrom a pauper'sgrave. Rural and urbanattitudesto death
are not the same. It also matters whether God is living, or dead (as
Aries senses);and whether the collectivity views the possible death of
the speciesas part of a supernaturalpunishmentor a man-madenuclear
"accident."
On another side, death is also a question of genealogy, of the
passingof power and property, as well as of identity, from generation
to generation.There are also certainpsychologicalgivens: Research is
aided if we ask about the way in which societies and individualsdeal
with loss, with separationanxieties,and with the problemsof mourning
and melancholia, concepts usefully dealt with by Freud and his fol-
lowers. (In his only referenceto psychoanalysis,Aries refers to death
as assumingan eroticmeaningat the end of the fifteenthcentury, when
death is perceived as the rape of the living.)
The history of death, in short, is a wide-open and beckoning area.
It requires imaginative methodology and a sense of the whole of a
society's life. In studying a society's attitudes toward death, and its
consequent practices,we are studying what is unquestionablyone of
the most vital and defining parts of that society's existence. Aries has
glimpsed this extraordinaryfact, and alertsus to the lillies of the field,
peeping out of the graveyardsof the past.
Bruce Mazlish
M.I.T.

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