Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present.
1974PW1032Baltimore:: Johns Hopkins University Press 1974. 1974. 8vo. xi 3 111 1 pp. Figs. index. Beige gilt-stamped cloth dust jacket; jacket chipped. Very good. ISBN: 0801815665 First American edition. Aries was a French medieval historian and friend of Michel Foucault. He is best known for his book Centuries of Childhood 1962 which presents childhood as a social construction rather than an actual physiological state. The other focus of his academic career somewhat paradoxically was the evolution of western societies' concept of death. In Western Attitudes Towards Death he argues that as religiosity has waned societies have become increasingly reluctant to confront death directly. / "Proposing that there is a permanent relationship between one's idea of death and one's self Aries explains how and why death ceased being a familiar routine forgetting of a self and has become a wild feeling of personal failure." –jacket. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. hardcover books
