Death in the Middle Ages and early modern time : the material and spiritual conditions of the culture of death Death has never been a simple matter neither for the victim s nor for the survivors. All societies have deeply struggled with the issue of death and have found material and spiritual answers in response to death. The medieval and early modern world had to cope with the same questions but found its own characteristic answers as the contributions to this volume illustrate in a myriad of approaches Provided by publisher Death and the Culture of Death : Universal Cultural Historial Observations with an Emphasis on the Middle Ages Albrecht Classen Heroic Poetry : Achievement and Heroic Death in Old English Literature John M. Hill Death and Ritual : the Role of Wills in Late Anglo Saxon England Mary Louise Fellows Palimpsest in the Service of the Cult of the Saints : the False Arch in the Naves Vault of the Abbey Church of Saint Savin sur Gartempe Rosemarie Danziger When the Dead No Longer Rest : the Religious Significance of Revenants in Sagas set in Viking Age Settlements Around the Time of Conversion Katharina Baier Werner Schäfke The North Portal of the Freiburg im Breisgau Minster : Cosmological Imagery as Funerary Art Nurit Golan The Effects of the Black Death : the Plague in Fourteenth Century Religion Literature and Art Jean E. Jost Bonum est mortis meditari : Meanings and Functions of the Medieval Double Macabre Portrait Dominique DeLuca Imagining the Mass of Death in Chaucers Pardoners Tale : a Critique of Medieval Eucharistic Practices Daniel F. Pigg Death Sinfulness the Devil and the Clerical Author : the Late Medieval German Didactic Debate Poem Des Teufels Netz and the World of Craftsmanship Albrecht Classen Pro Defunctis Exorare : the Community of the Living and the Dead in Jean Gersons Sermones de Omnibus Sanctis and de Mortuis Scott L. Taylor And Thus She Will Perish : Gender Jurisdiction and the Execution of Women in Late Medieval France Patricia Turning Je viens destrange contrée : Medieval French Comedy Envisions the Afterlife Sharon Diane King Gallows Humor in the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea Connie L. Scarborough Late Medieval Carved Cadaver Memorials in England and Wales Christina Welch Images of Mortality in Early English Drama Thomas Willard New Perspectives of the Early Modern Afterlife : the Last Pilgrimage in the Poetry of John Donne and Sir Walter Raleigh Cyril L. Caspar Maternal Death and Patriarchal Succession in Renaissance France Elizabeth Chesney Zegura Fear of Seeming Death in Eighteenth Century Europe Václav Grubhoffer