AriA]s traces Western man's attitudes toward mortality from the early medieval conception of death as the familiar collective destiny of the human race to the modern tendency, so pronounced in industrial societies, to hide death as if it were an embarrassing family secret. -- Newsweek

An “absolutely magnificent” book (The New Republic)—the fruit of almost two decades of study—that traces the changes in Western attitudes toward death and dying from the earliest Christian times to the present day. A truly landmark study, The Hour of Our Death reveals a pattern of gradually developing evolutionary stages in our perceptions of life in relation to death, each stage representing a virtual redefinition of human nature. Starting at the very foundations of Western culture, the eminent historian Phillipe Ariès shows how, from Graeco-Roman times through the first ten centuries of the Common Era, death was too common to be frightening; each life was quietly subordinated to the community, which paid its respects and then moved on. Ariès identifies the first major shift in attitude with the turn of the eleventh century when a sense of individuality began to rise and with it, profound consequences: death no longer meant merely the weakening of community, but rather the destruction of self. Hence the growing fear of the afterlife, new conceptions of the Last Judgment, and the first attempts (by Masses and other rituals) to guarantee a better life in the next world. In the 1500s attention shifted from the demise of the self to that of the loved one (as family supplants community), and by the nineteenth century death comes to be viewed as simply a staging post toward reunion in the hereafter. Finally, Ariès shows why death has become such an unendurable truth in our own century—how it has been nearly banished from our daily lives—and points out what may be done to “re-tame” this secret terror. The richness of Ariès's source material and investigative work is breathtaking. While exploring everything from churches, religious rituals, and graveyards (with their often macabre headstones and monuments), to wills and testaments, love letters, literature, paintings, diaries, town plans, crime and sanitation reports, and grave robbing complaints, Aries ranges across Europe to Russia on the one hand and to England and America on the other. As he sorts out the tangled mysteries of our accumulated terrors and beliefs, we come to understand the history—indeed the pathology—of our intellectual and psychological tensions in the face of death.

In this enduring classic, cultural historian Philippe Ariès brings death out of the shadows and into history's mainstream. He explores how over the last millennium the response to death and dying has changed dramatically in Europe, Western Russia, and America, sometimes initiating, sometimes reflecting social shifts and progress. Under Ariès's incisive scrutiny, Church observances, pilgrimage and penance, and folk beliefs spring into high relief. Archaic funeral ceremonies, the architecture of tombs, and images of the deceased in stone or paint regain often lost meanings; the liber vitae, the artes moriendi, and the danse macabre are stripped of mystery, and their purpose and power made plain. Through a rich array of journals and letters from all periods and classes, as well as religious and secular literature from Dante to Tolstoy and Twain, Aries demonstrates society's concern for reassurance against the finality of death and the individual's search for consolation. Ariès brilliantly analyzes death in the contemporary world in which the hospital, suburban chapel, and crematorium have replaced the bedside, priest, and wake. As his richly documented, finely illustrated, and engagingly written masterpiece confirms, death and dying have inspired much of the literature of--and art that forms--our cultural heritage.--From publisher description.