The body is a current obsession in the Western world; in this excellent book, the early modern dead body gets its turn to be center stage. Sarah Tarlow explains that she is an archaeologist, adding that “the contribution of archaeology to early modern beliefs about the body has not been great up to now” (2). Perhaps, then, I should explain that I am a historian of death in early modern England, with particular interests in funeral rituals and in visual as well as written sources, particularly portraits. So Tarlow and I share overlapping, but not identical, subject matter and are concerned with bodies—her focus is firmly on the corpse—but we employ rather different types of source material. In line with most scholars working on death in the early modern period, we both posit that an increased sense of individualism was driving changes in attitudes toward death in this period; Tarlow focuses on the body “becoming the locus of self” and requiring greater “propriety” for the “dignity, privacy and decency of the person,” especially after death (137).

As she notes, “archaeological evidence, along with historical evidence, does not witness beliefs, but practices” (15). Both of us therefore take a multidisciplinary approach, and Tarlow has divided her book into four chapters reflecting her chosen disciplines—“Religious Belief,” “Scientific Belief,” “Social Belief,” and “Folk Belief.” One of her key findings is that “it is possible for people to hold a number of incompatible or incommensurate beliefs simultaneously. … Different contexts brought different conventional beliefs to the fore” (15); a modern example might be someone who attends church but also consults a horoscope. Tarlow therefore does not seek to reconcile differing beliefs about the corpse but to record their coexistence. Another principal line of inquiry is the extent to which a dead individual “lives on” in early modern Britain and Ireland and the different forms this might take. As well as obvious ones—in memory, perhaps monumentalized in some way—her focus on the corporeal provides some extraordinary examples, particularly relating to the recently deceased.

Throughout, Tarlow carefully matches, wherever possible, appropriate archaeological discoveries with the beliefs she is writing about. These examples appear like sudden close-ups in a film, bringing the reader instantly face to face with a specific early modern individual, to great effect. For instance, in discussing anatomy, she gives examples not just of skeletons bearing marks of anatomists at work but even of certain graves that show signs of possibly having been robbed by body snatchers to sell corpses to anatomists.

So how well does this structure support what Tarlow sets out to achieve? It is definitely a strength to look at the whole of the British Isles and Ireland and to embrace the differences between the different localities within the two major islands. For example, she describes and illustrates “cillini” in Ireland, places of burial for babies dying before baptism, who therefore cannot be buried in consecrated churchyards. She then is able to link these with what seems to be a cemetery for neonates at Tintagel in Cornwall, even drawing parallels in grave construction between the two.

“Early modern” is generally taken to comprise, roughly, the sixteenth, seventeenth, and first half of the eighteenth centuries, and this is the time frame Tarlow adopts. However, there is a problem with the survival of some sources from this period, particularly relating to folk beliefs. There are also difficulties in dating some of the archaeological evidence, which is why she chose to work in themes and not chronologically. Her approach is to include later eighteenth- and even nineteenth-century material if it throws light on her subject, which may raise the hackles of purists, but is pragmatic given the difficulties.

The distinction between religious and scientific beliefs is largely straightforward and unproblematic and does, indeed, show people being capable of holding very different sets of views simultaneously. However, the boundary between what is social belief and what might be classed as folklore is far more porous and open to interpretation. Again Tarlow takes a pragmatic approach, separating “the more mainstream, establishment and uncontested social beliefs” from “the unorthodox, the demotic and the superstitious” (104). Despite these caveats, the structure of differing types of belief seems to serve her well, even if some traditional historians might crave a more chronological approach.

So what happens if one looks at rituals and beliefs about the corpse in early modern Britain through the eyes of an archaeologist? Because Tarlow's focus is specifically on the already-dead body, her discussion is not primarily about causes of death, although this is a subject to which archaeology can make a key contribution. The nature of burial archaeology in this period—mainly graves containing skeletons with little or no remaining soft tissue—means it is all too easy to concentrate on “marginal, unusual and deviant burials” in which the treatment after death has been sufficiently extreme to alter skeletal remains (104). This would include embalming (in which some tissue does survive) but which was confined to the rich; anatomizing bodies, generally associated with criminality; or burying bodies in unusual places, including bodies of unbaptized babies, suicides, or people who had been excommunicated.

Tarlow struggles hard against this pressure to focus exclusively on extreme examples. She explores widely applicable subjects such as the orientation of graves, although this reveals another group outside the mainstream—the nonconformists, who rejected as superstitious the east/west orientation used by both medieval Catholics and post-Reformation members of the established church. However, no one reading this study could doubt that the dead had a “life” in early modern Britain, if sometimes in strange forms. As Sarah Tarlow shows, in a wide range of different ways, corpses were still very much alive and kicking and, even in their dead state, made their presence impossible to ignore.