`A profoundly learned, richly detailed history of death ... remarkable'— The New York Times Book Review

In this monumental study, Philippe Aries attempts to isolate and define a thousand years of Western Man's attitudes towards dying, burial, grief and remembrance. In a- feat of remarkable detective work which took him fifteen years to complete, the author draws on centuries of literature, folklore, religious history, and an enormously rich bedrock of source materials — civic and private documents, graveyards, love — letters, novels, poems, paintings, crime and sanitation reports and funereal art and architecture.

As he unravels our civilization's preoccupation with death, analysing the complex terrors and sets of beliefs which have built up during the centuries, he exposes the foundation — indeed the pathology — of our cultural and psychological tensions in the face of death and our changing attitudes to it.

`A seminal work of historical scholarship, a major landmark in the historiography of the late twentieth century'—, Lawrence Stone, author of The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500- 1800

Cover design by Nicholas Thirkell & Partners The cover shows 'La Mort devant son Juge' from the Grandes Heures de Rohan in the Bibliotheque Nationale