Social Science : Death & Dying

Christopher Daniell establishes the role that death played in the Middle Ages by explaining the procedures that were involved when a person died and discussing the literary and artistic themes associated with death. He assesses archaelogical discoveries by including the very latest research, both his own and others working in the area. The final chapter presents a uniquely detailed survey of death from the Norman Conquest to the Reformation in the 1550s. more...

Price: $38.95

An innovative application of theories of memory and material culture to an early historic society, this book uses the early medieval cemetery in Britain between 400-1100AD as a rich and complex data set, addressing the commemorative functions of funerary ritual using archaeological remains as its evidence base. more...

Price: $77.00

Author Alix Strauss takes a provocative look at the self-imposed deaths of the famous and infamous in Death Becomes Them. In this fascinating and intimate chronicle of celebrity suicides, the spotlight shines on the lonely last moments of Kurt Cobain and Ernest Hemingway, Abbie Hoffman and Adolf Hitler, Dorothy Dandridge, Sigmund Freud, Hunter S. Thompson, and others. Death Becomes Them explores their sadness and madness, their accomplishments and the circumstances that led to their irreversible decision, and wishes them all a fond final good-bye. more...

Price: $11.99

The theory of the three estates made clear distinctions between the functions of the two estates which comprised the elite of medieval society: the oradores (ecclesiastics) and the defensores (warriors or nobility). They had different lifestyles, clothing and ways of thinking about life. more...

Price: $85.00

Margaret King shows what the death of a little boy named Valerio Marcello over five hundred years ago can tell us about his time.This child, scion of a family of power and privilege at Venice's time of greatness, left his father in a state of despair so profound and so public that it occasioned an outpouring of consoling letters, orations, treatises, and poems. In these documents, we find a firsthand account, richly colored by humanist conventions and expectations, of the life of the fifteenth-century boy, the passionate devotion of his father, the feelings of his brothers and sisters, the striking absence of his mother. The father's story is here as well: the career of a Venetian nobleman and scholar, patron and soldier, a participant in Venice's struggle for dominion in the north of Italy.Through these sources also King traces the cultural trends that made Marcello's century famous. Her work enlarges our view of the literature of consolation, which had a distinctive tradition in Venice, and shifting attitudes toward death from the late Middle Ages onward.For the depth and acuity of its insights into political, cultural, and private life in fifteenth-century Venice, this book will be essential reading for students of the Renaissance. For the grace and drama of its storytelling, it will be savored by anyone who wishes to look into life and death in a palace, and a city, long ago. more...

Price: $29.00