Death and dying

Death has been a subject of fascination for all of human history, and evidence of its grip on the human imagination can be seen from The Epic of Gilgamesh to the present day. ¹ It is not hard to see why the subject has continued to fascinate people from all walks of life. Death is, after all, the great leveller. In this respect it is then unsurprising that the subject of death has been approached from many disciplines; history, theology, philosophy, et cetera. What should be surprising, however, is the lack of focus from a scholarly perspective on the emotional aspects of death until very recently. For a bewildering length of time studies of death attempted a clinical approach, focussing more upon practice or belief than upon the emotional reaction to the subject, with the one exception to this trend coming, perhaps, from literature studies. This has begun to change, of course, and this chapter offers an investigation of the theories and methodologies of the various approaches to the subject, the particular challenges posed to them by the shift from late medieval to early modern, and how various disciplines have tackled these challenges.