ABSTRACT
Death has been a subject of fascination for all of human history, and evidence of its grip on the human imagination can be seen from The Epic of Gilgamesh to the present day. From a modern perspective the most common place to find studies of death and emotion was initially in the work of anthropologists such as Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown and Arnold van Gennep, and sociologists such as Emile Durkheim and Robert Hertz. A central tenet of all European reformations concerned addressing death, dying and burial, as well as a stricter control of the emotional practices and displays involved. The categorization of types of death was nothing new when Aries embraced it, and such categorizations can be seen in late medieval and early modern Ars Moriendi works. The emotional state of an individual at the point of death was of great concern in the medieval and early modern periods, as attested by the various ars moriendi works of the time.
