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DEATH AND DYING

DEATH AND DYING. The certainty of death is something we share with our early modern ancestors, but they were more likely than we to die young and to experience throughout their lives a sequence of bereavements. Average life expectancy was shockingly low by modern (Western) standards: barely thirty in the seventeenth century. The averages are brought down by high infant mortality: around a quarter of children died in their first year, and barely half made it to their tenth birthday. For adults, remarriage after the death of a partner was commonplace. Nonetheless, suggestions that early modern people were somehow inured to death, making little emotional investment in young children, have been largely rejected by modern scholarship: there is plenty of evidence for deeply felt grief.

Throughout the period, epidemic disease was a major killer. Early modern Europe witnessed no pandemic on the scale of the "Black Death" of 1348–1349, but plague was a recurrent visitor, wiping out a quarter of London's population in 1563 and nearly half of Marseilles's in 1720. Plague disappeared from Western Europe in the early eighteenth century, but there was little protection against other virulent diseases—typhoid, dysentery, smallpox, influenza. In urban centers the death rate invariably exceeded the birth rate, and towns relied on immigration to sustain their populations. Periodic harvest failure and famine exacerbated the impact of disease. The 1590s were years of hunger across Europe, as were the 1660s and 1690s (when a third of Finland's population died). The "mortality regime" was punitive and changed little over the course of the early modern period.

RITUAL AND REFORMATION

If death was frequent and unpredictable, it was also highly ritualized. The late medieval church stressed the importance of a good death; pious texts taught the ars moriendi, the "art of dying." On the deathbed Christians felt particularly vulnerable to the wiles of the Devil, who might tempt them to despair and damnation. An elaborate sequence of "last rites"—confession, communion, and anointing by a priest—offered some protection, though the moment of death remained fraught with danger, and "sudden death," with no opportunity to make amends for sin, was widely feared. Successful navigation of the deathbed was only the first stage toward eternal life with God in heaven. It was believed that since the ordinary good person could perform only a fraction of the penance due for their sins, the remainder would have to be paid off after their death, in purgatory. Images of fire and torment filled descriptions of purgatory, though it is unclear whether people typically lived in fear of the prospect or stoically accepted it as their lot. In any case, it was possible to ease the pains of souls there and hasten their passage to heaven by performing good works on their behalf, particularly by having masses said for them. A great deal of pre-Reformation religion was driven by a "commemorative impulse": the bequeathing of lands and goods in order to be remembered, and thus prayed for. For some reason, purgatory and intercessory prayer appear to have been a more marked feature of north European than of Mediterranean lands in the century before the Reformation.

The Protestant revolt against medieval Catholicism was from the outset deeply concerned with issues of death. Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses of 1517 questioned the pope's authority to issue indulgences (certificates remitting "time" spent in purgatory), and by 1530 Luther, with other reformers, had denounced the doctrine of purgatory itself. Purgatory offended Protestants because they could not find it in Scripture and because it seemed to undermine Christ's sacrifice upon the cross, making human beings active participants in the business of salvation. The doctrine of predestination held that God had from time eternal assigned all people to one of two destinations: heaven or hell. There was no room for a "middle place" and no possibility for the living to change the dead's preordained fate. In territories where the Reformation took hold, institutions (chantries and monasteries) whose purpose had been to intercede for the dead were dissolved, and requiem masses were abolished. Deathbed rituals were radically simplified, and the presence of a clergyman became less necessary. Most Protestant theologians taught, contrary to the medieval theory, that infants dying before baptism could still be admitted to heaven. In Catholic Europe, by contrast, the cult of the "holy souls" in purgatory was emphasized in the Counter-Reformation period.

Yet the dramatic changes of the Reformation were accompanied by underlying continuities. Protestants continued to display a concern with the "good death," and ars moriendi literature remained popular in both Catholic and Protestant societies. (To believers in predestination, appropriate deathbed demeanor might be an indication of "election.") Though Protestants were barred from praying for the dead, the impulse to commemorate them remained strong, finding expression in monuments and epitaphs and in a profusion of printed funeral sermons. The Reformation undoubtedly changed the relationship between the living and the dead, but it did not end it. Most evidence concerns the social elite, but it is at the level of popular belief that continuities were most marked. Though Protestant theologians taught that the souls of the dead could never return (and Catholic theologians imposed strict limitations on it), belief in ghosts was widespread. Indeed, some burial practices may have been concerned not so much with commemorating the dead as with providing protection against them. This was the case with the bodies of those committing suicide—the ultimate "bad death"—which were often staked and interred at crossroads.

DEATH AND THE SOCIAL ORDER

Moralists, Catholic and Protestant, presented death as a leveler—the artistic motif of the "Dance of Death" depicted popes, princes, and beggars linked by their common fate. Both before and after the Reformation, however, the delineation of rank was a major concern of funerary rites. This was particularly apparent in the case of royal funerals: the ritual was most elaborate in France, where it involved an eerily lifelike effigy of the deceased monarch—a symbolic assertion of the survival of the king's "social body." Extravagant aristocratic funerals, involving vast amounts of black cloth, hundreds of mourners, and lavish distributions of charity sent out messages about the location of power in local communities. The poor were typically carried to the grave with little ceremony. Burial practices, too, reflected social status. In London, Paris, and some other urban centers, pressure on space led to the repositioning of cemeteries in suburban locations away from churches—a process under way throughout the period. But across much of Europe traditional patterns persisted: the elites could expect burial within the church building; the masses had to be content with the churchyard outside, where graves rarely received permanent markers and bones were periodically dug up to be stored in charnel houses. Those who had died "dishonorable" deaths (e.g., by execution) were refused burial in the churchyard and were often interred under the gallows or in other dishonored places. In Calvinist Scotland the authorities forbade church burial as "superstitious," but landowners got around the ban by erecting elaborate "burial aisles" on the side of churches. Early modern Europeans were unequal in death, as in so much else.

See also Medicine; Plague; Reformation, Protestant.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. Translated by Helen Weaver. London, 1981. Translation of L'homme devant la mort (1977).

Gordon, Bruce, and Peter Marshall, eds. The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, U.K., 2000.

Koslofsky, Craig M. The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany, 1450–1700. New York, 2000.

Marshall, Peter. Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England. Oxford, 2002.

PETER MARSHALL