Volume 25, Number 16 · October 26, 1978
Death in New England
By Lawrence Stone
The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change
by David E. Stannard
Oxford University Press, 236 pp., $11.95
In a previous article I examined the survey of death in Europe over the past thousand years by Philippe Ariès in his new book L'Homme devant la mort, and I pointed out the problems involved in applying a unified model to so many national cultures across so many centuries. [1] Professor Stannard has gone about his business in quite a different way taking a single, clearly defined provincial culture, that of the Puritans of New England, and looking at changes in their attitude toward death over a limited period of 300 years from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Working within this much narrower perspective, he can be much more precise and convincing in his analysis, and in doing so he brings valuable support to M. Ariès's general scheme.
Review, 1463 words
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