The work of the dead: a cultural history of mortal remains

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Work of the dead

Part 1: Deep time of the dead:

Do the dead matter?

Dead body and the persistence of being

Cultural work of the dead

Part 2: Places of the dead:

Churchyard and the old regime:

Development of the church-yard

Language

Place

Church and churchyard in the landscape

Necrogeography

Necrobotany

Necrotopology and memory

Life and afterlife of the churchyard in literature

Passage of the dead to the churchyard

Law : Exclusion from the churchyard

Claims of the dead body on the parish churchyard

Claims of the parish on the dead body

Economics of churchyard burial

Right to burial and the crisis of the old regime

Enlightenment scandals:

Voltaire

David Hume

Cemetery and the new regime:

Danger of the dead and the rise of the cemetery

Genealogies of the new regime:

Imagination : Elysium, arcadia, and the dead of the Eighteenth Century

Cimetiere du Pere-Lachaise

Distant lands and the imperial imagination

Age of the Cemetery:

Novelty

Necrogeography and necrobotany

Cemeteries and capitalism

Religious pluralism in the age of the cemetery

Reform, revolution, and the cemetery

Class, family, and the cemetery

Putting the dead in their place: pauper funerals and proper funerals, burials and reburials

disrupted bodies

Part 3: Names of the dead:

Names of the dead In deep time:

Names of the dead in times of war

Names of the dead in times of peace

Rise of the names of the dead in modern history

Age of necronominalism:

Names over bodies

Names and the absent but present body

Monumental names

Names of the vanished dead

Names of the great war:

Part 4: Burning the dead:

Disenchantment and cremation

Ashes and history

Different enchantments

Ashes in their place

Afterword: From a history of the dead to a history of dying

Notes

Image credits

Index

Plates follow page.