Word: ary
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...HOUR OF OUR DEATH by Philippe Ari...
...Philippe Ariès is an unusual figure in the formal and rigorous world of French historiography. He is not a professional scholar, but head of the information center of the Institute of Applied Research for Tropical and Subtropical Fruits in Maisons-Lafitte. Clearly mangoes and papayas have not been enough to satisfy his voracious intellect. Ariès is best known as the author of Centuries of Childhood (1962), a landmark study that demonstrated that benevolent child rearing is a relatively recent practice in the West...
...Hour of Our Death takes on the last stage of life. The book is a majestically ambitious attempt to isolate, define and synthesize a thousand years of attitudes about dying, burying, grieving and remembering. Ariès has burrowed through centuries of literature, folklore, religious history and civic and private documents. He has filled his eye with cemetery architecture, iconography, art and funeral kitsch. His conclusions: a millennium of living and dying in the West can be understood in five models...
...first, dating from the early Middle Ages, Ariès calls "the tame death," a calm acceptance of the end of life. He notes that in the Song of Roland and the Arthurian legends, heroes had premonitions of their deaths. In the final hour they prepared themselves with a simple, dignified ritual that reflected a world made whole by faith, community and a sense of common destiny. To die was to enter a long sleep until the day of resurrection...
...second model, "the death of the self," attempts to describe changes that Ariès believes began in the 11th century. The tightly woven tapestry of knights and monks gracefully facing their fate was attacked by the moths of individualism. The world became more worldly, and so did the otherworld. Ambitious men sought to preserve their identities beyond the grave. Hence the development of wills providing for memorial Masses and religious endowments that could be good investments in heaven...