Death and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death Among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-century France - Hardcover

McManners, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198264402 ISBN 13: 9780198264408

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1982

Synopsis

Death and the Enlightenment is an unusual survey of the daily rituals, customs, and attitudes surrounding death and dying in 18th-century France. Focusing on the tension between the faithful and the growing ranks of unbelievers bred on Enlightenment philosophy, McManners charts the course of pestilence and plague, and examines the terrible fears connected with childbirth, disease, disfigurement, mortality, and the hereafter. He also examines suicide, public execution, and the rites surrounding the deathbed, and demonstrates how the period's ever-present concern with death and dying was transformed into the Romantic cult of melancholy that occupied the creative imagination of generations to come.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1982
• ISBN 10: 0198264402
• ISBN 13: 9780198264408
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 628