ABSTRACT
Death is a natural process, but humans have consistently created cultural behaviours and associated material culture to cope with this separation of the living from the dead. In the early modern period the material culture associated with burial, mourning, and commemoration were of many kinds, linked to class and religious persuasion but also changing over time. The early modern period saw a readjustment in attitudes to the dead and to commemoration brought about by the Reformation, both within those areas that became Protestant but also because of the effects of the Counter-Reformation elsewhere in Europe. However, once these adjustments had been made the effects of increased literacy, the expansion of the middle classes, and increasing consumerism were combined with changing attitudes to the body, death and the afterlife in the light of shifts in scientific and ethical paradigms. These all created significant changes in mortuary and commemorative practices. Recent research has examined many of these trends, with differing emphasis with regard to the main motors for such changes, in part because distinct data sets have tended to be researched by scholars within separate disciplines. For example, internal memorials have largely been the preserve of art historians, with external memorials more frequently considered by archaeologists. The treatment of the body and the practices of the funeral, together with the undertaking trade, have been the focus of historians, though archaeologists have considered these alongside the evidence from excavated coffins and their contents – both cultural and anatomical. Some aspects of the subject are still largely in a data-gathering phase, others are more interpretive, but across the whole range of early modern mortuary culture the researches of the last few decades have transformed our understanding.
