Author: Clodagh Jane Tait

Publisher:

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 479

ISBN-13:

Death is not merely the final event in the life of an individual. It is also an event in the life of the community at large. Not only that, but it is an event whose significance stretches into the periods which precede and follow it, the periods of dying and of commemoration. Each death weakens the community both numerically and psychologically. The challenge to that community is to successfully deal with the loss of a member, the fact of their corpse, and the reminder of universal mortality with its concomitant threat of dissolution. Ritual provides the structure within which the disruptive influence of death may be controlled and society symbolically reordered. However, the ending of the ritual does not correspond with the banishing of the dead. The process of 'social death' is a far longer one, and its story is that of how the memory and reputation of the dead lived on amongst those who knew them, and also in the churches where they sited their monuments. The thesis thus focuses on a number of points. It is a consideration of how people dealt with the deaths of others in Ireland over a period of just over one hundred years. It is also a study of personal and public manipulation of commemoration of the dying and the dead. But there is another layer of investigation which is inextricably linked with this topic, since the study of death inevitably draws other human concerns (with religion, human relationships, social and political structures) into its net. Thus in many ways this thesis is not about death at all - death is merely a starting point for the investigation of the social and cultural life of sixteenth and seventeenth century Ireland. The three final chapters serve to draw together some of the more random thoughts of the thesis to demonstrate the value of the documents, methodologies and themes dealt with to discussions of particular individuals and events.