Medieval and Renaissance medicine turned the dead body into knowledge, evidence, remedy, and spectacle, often by using...
Death
As Britain’s cities filled with the dead, body snatchers, anatomy schools, pauper graves, and public-health fears forced...
: Twentieth-century grave robbing did not disappear. It changed form, moving through ransom, looting, museums, medical schools,...
Across ancient African cultures, mourning was more than sorrow. It was the ritual work of guiding the...
In early modern England, dying children were imagined not as silent victims but as emotional, spiritual actors...
Maya death rituals linked burial, ancestor worship, maize, jade, caves, tombs, and the underworld into a sacred...
Famadihana, Madagascar’s “turning of the bones,” is more than a funerary ritual. It is a powerful act...
New Orleans jazz funerals turn mourning into movement, blending African diasporic deathways, Christian ritual, brass bands, mutual...
Across the ancient Mediterranean, death could be judged not only by its cause, but by its purpose,...
Old Norse myth and saga did not treat voluntary death as a single moral category. Chosen death...
Victorian Britain inherited suicide as felo de se, a felony against the self, God, and society. Sympathy...
A 9,500-year-old cremation pyre in Malawi is changing how archaeologists understand Stone Age hunter-gatherers, ritual labor, and...
Xunzang reveals how Chinese rulers carried power into the grave through servants, guards, concubines, and symbolic substitutes....
Victorian mourning was not simply morbid fascination. Nineteenth-century Britain built a culture that kept the dead visibly...
Socrates’ acceptance of execution in ancient Athens reframed death as philosophical commitment, revealing how conscience could outweigh...
In medieval Japan, seppuku framed voluntary death as ritual honor, revealing how violence, loyalty, and morality intertwined...
In 1873, Samuel Williams ignited debate over “mercy killing,” exposing Victorian anxieties about medical authority, morality, and...
In 2002, the Netherlands formalized assisted dying, transforming end-of-life care into a regulated practice and redefining autonomy...
What had once been largely a domestic, community-managed process became a commercial enterprise characterized by standardized services,...
Families already reeling from medical bills and emotional loss face a system where final expenses are opaque,...
Dead communicating with the living. By Dr. Mario ErasmoCultural HistorianProfessor and Head Undergraduate CoordinatorUniversity of Georgia Introduction...
The dead did not vanish but were transformed. By Matthew A. McIntoshPublic HistorianBrewminate Introduction Across the high...
How we care for our dead, and what such care reveals about how we live. By Matthew...
This evolving landscape reflects society’s changing relationship to death. By Matthew A. McIntoshPublic HistorianBrewminate Introduction For centuries,...
Grief is a powerful and deeply personal emotion, and when we lose someone we love, the journey...
Symbolic practices began for much more practical purposes. By Dr. Maria-José Iriarte-ChiapussoIkerbasque Research ProfessorUniversity of the Basque...
Examining Roman death rituals including funerals, cremations, and graves. By Dr. Mario ErasmoCultural HistorianProfessor and Head Undergraduate...
The dead represented as alive and the living (self) represented as dead. Introduction This living hand, now...
How the deceased lived with the living. By Dr. Mario ErasmoCultural HistorianProfessor and Head Undergraduate CoordinatorUniversity of...
Medieval society is popularly believed to have been obsessed with death. By Dr. Sophie OosterwijkArt Historian, Freelance...