ABSTRACT
A far larger proportion of deaths took place in the early and middle decades of adulthood than occurred in old age, whereas the reverse is true today. The interval between death and burial allowed friends and kindred to pay their personal respects to the laid-out corpse. Tombs or gravestones marked the burial places of many people of substance. Commemoration had always been a primary purpose of funeral monuments. The likelihood of losing one's spouse before old age was much higher between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries than it is today. Widowhood seems to have been experienced by many more women than men. The arrangements made for widowhood by local custom therefore varied greatly in their security and duration. In some places widow's rights terminated on remarriage while in others they were unaffected by it. A serious disincentive to remarriage was the fact that in many places a woman's customary rights lasted only so long as she remained a chaste widow.
