Who Telleth a Tale of Unspeaking Death?

Death is silent; all the ‘tales’ we hear about it – be they of a religious, philosophical, scientific or artistic nature – are told by other humans. but specific deaths are often utilised to reconfirm or challenge existing societal structures, values and belief systems. the eight ‘tales’ collated here – based on the work of the Research Strand Death, Burial and the Afterlife at University College Dublin’s College of arts and humanities – present numerous interdisciplinary examples of how this process works.

The topics of the essays include the ideological orientations of Irish political funerals; the death rites of Cameroonian immigrants at home and in dublin; the Baroque artist Pietro da Cortona’s success in turning a Roman church into his own funeral monument; the role that Alexis de Tocqueville’s death played in his emergence as an iconic political theorist; the philosopher Josef Pieper’s attempt to approach the mystery of death through idealist thinking, the changing human attitudes towards the death of animals; the use of war maps as marketing devices during the Second World War; and the critique of political and societal structures embedded in Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Berliner Requiem.