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{"id":17752,"date":"2015-12-04T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-12-04T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=2578"},"modified":"2015-12-04T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-12-04T00:00:00","slug":"losing-the-body","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2015\/12\/losing-the-body\/","title":{"rendered":"Losing the Body"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

The Economist\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0review of Thomas Lacqueur\u2019s\u00a0The Work of the Dead<\/a> highlights the shifts in our funeral customs over the past few centuries: \u201cA large part of the book is devoted to the slow transition from churchyards to cemeteries, a story of changing sensibilities, epitomised by the gradual replacement of the epitaph Hic jacet (\u2018Here lies the body. . .\u2019) by the less corporeal \u2018In memory of. . .\u2019 . It is about the rise of material refinement during the 18th century, about anticlericalism and the decline of superstition. Once death was \u2018stripped of superstition,\u2019 writes Mr Laqueur \u2018and revealed in all its natural boldness,\u2019 the enlightened world recoiled.\u201d<\/p>\n

This enlightened recoil produced an odd sentimentality concerning death: \u201cA veiled way of imagining death needed a different kind of space. Elysium and Arcadia, nymphs and shepherds, were already familiar from the long tradition of pastoral poetry and from paintings\u2014in particular, Nicolas Poussin\u2019s \u2018The Arcadian Shepherds\u2019 from 1637-38. Architects and landscape gardeners working on grand English estates\u2014Sir John Vanburgh at Castle Howard and Stowe, William Kent at Rousham\u2014were creating them on the ground. Here was something to trump the churchyard. Serene and clean, the classical world appealed to the hygienists and sanitation men too, to become the inspiration for cemeteries.\u201d<\/p>\n

The attempt to veil the corpse was only partially successful. Instead of hiding death, it created unsettling juxtapositions of death and chubby cherubs and other Victorian bric-a-brac. Lost was the old realism of Christian funeral practice, and the Christian confidence that the living and the dead formed a single communion of saints.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"