This chapter examines attitudes towards the dead body, as exemplified by
arrangements for funerals and burials, in Paris between around 1550 and
1670. It seeks to establish, not so much what people said should happen
to the bodies of the dead, but what happened in practice - the care, or
lack of it, which the living accorded to the corpses of their
contemporaries and predecessors - and to use this to further our
understanding of the mentality of early modern urban dwellers. It is
part of a wider enquiry, to explore the attitudes of the living to the
dead in Paris and London, and to consider the ways in which this can
illuminate the nature of these two metropolitan societies, in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Looking at the treatment of the
corpse can also take discussion of the body, and the ways in which it is
apprehended and understood, a stage further than the predominant focus
on the living; dead bodies were as variably constructed, as liable to
objectification (even commodification), as exposed to contest and
competition over meaning as living ones. This particular study
highlights the issues of control and ownership, among the complexity of
reactions to the materiality of bodies, and offers an insight into power
relations in a wider social and spatial environment
