Death Through the Ages: A Brief Overview - The Renaissance

Obsession with death did not diminish with the "rebirth" of Western culture during the mid-fourteenth century. The new self-awareness and emphasis on humans as the center of the universe further fueled the fear of dying. Rebelling against religion, people distanced themselves from the relatively comforting concept of forewarning and the communally shared experience of death.

By the sixteenth century many European Christians had stopped relying on church, family, and friends to help ease their passage to the next life. The religious upheaval of the Protestant Reformation of 1520, which emphasized the individual nature of salvation, caused further uncertainties about death and dying.

The seventeenth century marked a shift from a religious to a more scientific exploration of death and dying. Lay people drifted away from the now disunited Christian Church toward the medical profession, seeking answers in particular to the question of "apparent death." In many cases unconscious patients were mistakenly believed to be dead and were hurriedly prepared for burial by the clergy, only to "come back to life" during burial or while being transported to the cemetery.

But even physicians disagreed about what happened after death. Some believed that the body retained some kind of "sensibility," a belief shared by many in the general population, who preserved cadavers so that the bodies could "live on." On the other hand, physicians who ascribed to the teachings of the Catholic Church claimed that once the body was dead, the soul proceeded to its eternal fate. Since the body could not survive without the soul, these physicians would pronounce the cadaver permanently dead.