"This book is an exploration in social history, showing how the practices surrounding death and burial can illuminate urban culture and experience. Vanessa Harding focuses on the crowded and turbulent worlds of early modern London and Paris, and makes use of rich contemporary documentation to compare and contrast their experience of dealing with the dead. The two cities shared many of the problems and pressures of urban life, including high mortality rates, and a tradition of Christian burial, and there are many similarities in their responses to death. The treatment of the dead reveals the communities' preoccupation with the use of space, control of the physical environment, and the ordering of society and social behaviour. But the impact of Reformation called into question many traditional attitudes, and although London was fairly successful in establishing a new consensus, burial of the dead became a serious point of conflict in Paris."--Jacket.