MEET THE AUTHOR
As Halloween looms, Rosemary Collins speaks to HELEN FRISBY about her fascinating new book Traditions of Death and Burial
What is your book about?
The book is an illustrated history of funeral customs and traditions starting with the Norman Conquest and going right up to the present day, and even thinking about what these customs might look like in the future. It’s a real sweep through history telling the story of how different people have met that ultimate existential challenge in their own way according to the context of the time, and particularly how they’ve created, navigated and negotiated their relationships with the dead.
What were you most surprised to discover? What really interested me was just how old some of these customs and beliefs are. One example is the belief that owls crying is a portent of death. That one’s attested in I think the 1250s and it’s clearly well established then, yet it’s still being recounted in the 1930s. There are other examples where although the form and focus of the custom change, because technology evolves for example, it retains that similarity. For example, postmortem portraiture was quite common among the upper social classes in the Middle Ages to create images of the dead to remember them by, then in the 19th century the custom takes another twist and turn thanks to photographic technology coming along.
Sometimes you also get old customs being grafted onto new technology. A good example of this would be the belief that breaking a mirror portends a death. Although this sounds like a very old idea, it’s unlikely to have been popular before the 1840s, because that’s when the silver glass mirror was first manufactured. There’s a whole host of customs coming and going, but with a very consistent underlying thread about this idea of relating to the dead.
Another thing that really surprised me was just how creative people are. It’s almost like exercising agency and standing up to the cold, hard facts of mortality, and saying we can’t defeat death but we can certainly ensure social and emotional continuity with it. It’s about facing up to the fact of mortality, and dealing with it as best we can with the resources we have to hand.
How does your book benefit family historians?
If we want to understand our ancestors as more than a name and a set of dates, then we need to understand how they felt and thought. In some ways they experienced life differently from us, but in other ways their life was remarkably similar. Learning about death and burial customs can help people to empathise more with the life challenges that their ancestors, and indeed all of us, have to face.