Laqueur:	So I was at [inaudible 00:00:00] Seminar in 1966, in the spring ... He was a wonderful teacher, but he was also a person who was at the forefront of his discipline. So we were talking about Edward Thompson, the making the English working class. At launch, it came out in 1965, and we read in the spring of 1966. 
	So he took Swarthmore Undergraduate seriously, as did Charles Bradford, my other teacher. I was back for the first time at graduation for the first time in 47 years. This is my second time back in 47 years. It becomes harder and harder to remember why I didn't come back earlier because it's such a wonderful and magical case.
	In any case, I want to talk to you about the care of the dead. I wish I could actually talk to you about death, but it's a subject that I haven't really, after many years of thinking about it, figured out how to talk about. I'm going to sneak up on the question of death by talking about the dead, who take their meaning from the fact of death, but in more complicated ways than you might imagine.
	Again, for "caring," I'm going to be maybe more elliptical than some of you would like, but we could talk about this more as I go on.
	So, I want to answer the question that this title poses ... the question is, "Why do we care of the dead?" ... on two time scales.
	The first of these times scales is the time scale of the very long duress. Sort of anthropological deep time. This is measured in millennia, or tens of millennia, even. I want to make a claim. It's very general. It's very general. In that register, in this long time period, the answers I will offer to you are repeated with variations, of course, again and again, iteratively, through the ages. So, that's the one time scale.
	The second time scale is the scale of generations, or even the scale of moments. In that register, I can ask the question with much more specificity, with reference to why and how caring for the dead changed, and why, at this moment, we care for the particular dead in a particular way.
	One of my answers is going to be cosmic, and one of my answers is going to be, in a very real sense, parochial. That is, I'm going to be about the parish. 
	Let me begin with the cosmic, and then turn to the particular. I want to begin the discussion of the cosmic with an outrageous person by an outrageous person. I'm talking about Diogenes the Cynic, Stoic philosopher who, in the fourth century, made the case that the answer to my question is that we actually shouldn't care for the dead. We actually have no genuine text of Diogenes, but here's what Cissero says he said. "He ordered himself to be thrown anywhere without being buried, and when his friends replied, 'What? To the birds and the beast?' 'By no means,' says he. 'Place my staff near me, that I might drive them away.' 'How can you do that,' they'd answer, 'for you will not perceive them?' 'How am I then injured, by being torn apart by those animals, if I have no sensation?'" 
	When his younger contemporary, Plato, was asked what sort of a man Diogenes was, he said, "Socrates gone mad." In him (that is to say, in Diogenes), the philosophical pursuit of virtue had, so to speak, gone off the rail. His views of the dead, as on other matters, if you read him, have a certain lunatic quality. He was a clown, perhaps the most famous derelict in history, who tested the limits of culture and convention as he tried to live in accord with nature. The dead body is nothing, and it makes no difference what we do with it. 
	Socrates had, in some sense, hinted at it in one last effort to teach Crito something. He said to him, to Crito, that he, Crito, would not be laying out or burying Socrates because Socrates would no longer be there. He, Socrates, cared little about how he'd be buried. "Buried me in any way you like if you can catch me, and I do not escape you." But, that said, Socrates didn't, in fact, ask the students to reject custom. Diogenes the Cynic did. 
	In a world in which the great tragedians and poets would write about the horror of being left unburied, he wanted something preposterous: to have his body tossed over the walls, to be ostentatiously returned to nature. 
	Diogenes's argument has had many admirers over the ages including, implausibly, Saint Augustine. It was much raised, it was much quoted for thousands of years, and it's remained culturally and emotionally unacceptable. The argument has always been, "Yes, yes, you're right. But, yes, except-" Little that we do, culturally I think, over the millennia, has been more generative than arguing in words and in action against Diogenes. "Of course," comes the collective voice in thousands of different timbres, "the dead are not refuge to be just like of the debris of life. They cannot be left to the beasts to scavage. The dead human body isn't carrion." They remain part of culture. Base as they may be as a class of beings, they do not revert back to nature easily. 
	Instead, they bear the historical continuity of humanity. We, as a species, care for the dead. We live among them. We make ciphers of them of memory. We make them the ciphers of memory, bearers of memory. They're the grantors of land and power and authority. They're the temporal foundation of human communities. The fact that the dead body bears meaning, that it needs to be cared for, depends less, I want to argue, on what we might loosely call our metaphysical views about death or about our particular religious views (I'll try to catch both those views). Rather, on an ethical obligation that we (the living) owe them (the dead) in general, in certain of the dead in particular.
	Or, we put it differently. The fact that we care for the feelingless dead body is the product of qualities that we attribute to it in a primordial sort of way. The history of much of human thought and culture, I think, can be written in our resistance to Diogenes ... not, as I said, because of particular beliefs. I think there's a sort of back formation to what we do. But because ... I don't quite know how to call this. Sometimes I want to call it idolatry. It is sort of an idolatry. It's sort of irresistible idolatry. We know that the dead body, or ... Everyone has always claimed to know that, on the one hand, the dead body is just matter, yet it's always more, whatever we purport to believe about where the dead are, or who the dead are, or what the dead are.
	So, in this sense, I want to make a very general claim. I hope to cash this out, that this is independent of a broad variety of beliefs, be they beliefs in Taoist or Buddhist or ... I mean, all beliefs, in my most radical anthropological move. And then, I want to try to make this very particular in the particular historical section of a Christian community in the west in a parish.
	Back to the question of why this should be the case. Why do we not, in fact, follow Diogenes, but rather, in various ways, care for the dead from when they die to when we put them in the ground to cremate them or give them to the boards or whatever we do with them. So, one set of answers depends on the claim that we have a sort of primordial, primal aversion to the uncared for that is the bereft, dead body. 
	Here's how one 18th century clergyman puts it. "The dead naturally tend to destroy the life of others, and that's really the reason men naturally abhor the sight and touch of the dead. The natural spirit of life is afraid of a dead body, and has an abhorrence of it, which is why cannot just toss it away." In any case, we can't just toss it out of sight. 
	Now, the same argument at a very different register comes from Julia Kristeva, the French feminist psychoanalyst. She writes, "The corpse, or cadaver, how dare it to fall, seen without God and outside of science is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. As in true theater, without makeup or mass, refuge, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside on order to live: that I am at the border of my condition as a living being." Without God, then, without science, outside of culture, that is the corpse as Diogenes proposes to regard it. It's fundamentally abject and terrifying in the sense it's impossible to live with in that pure form.
	The second kind of answer for why we care for the dead is grounded in a sort of fictive historical anthropology that Enlightenment thinkers often engage in, but that is by no means limited to them. The care of the dead, in this Enlightenment view (or [inaudible 00:09:57] Enlightened view), the care of the dead sort of stands for the kind of ground zero of an origin story. Hegel, for example, argued the tomb is the first work of the symbol-making architect. In distinction, Hegel's account of the house that is but the life-conserving structure of a builder. Or, put differently, the house of the dead (put differently, these are his terms) is the entry into symbol-making and into memory. 
	But this kind of argument goes well beyond Hegel and Europe and the 18th century. Humans have clan names, according to a compilation of Chinese ritual and ceremonial texts from the Han ... that is, about 1,000 BCE. In order to distinguish themselves from the beast, in order to order the generations and to induce men to love each other during life and to mourn each other in the care of death, they exist also to prevent marriage to others of the same clan name, which links this care of the dead (this was clan that names of the dead) to the incest taboo. I want to try to connect these two in just a second.
	In the 17th century, Hugo Grotius, the founder of modern international law of war, compiled a library of opinions and practices for his view that the denial of proper burial, that is, as a following [inaudible 00:11:24]'s view, was a just cause of war. The reason he argued it was a just cause of war, it was fundamentally at odds with any conceivable regular order, with any account of human beings as creatures and culture. He has four pages of quotations from antiquity. I'll give you some examples. "Hence it is," he said, quoting the ancients, "that this good office of burial was said to be performed not so much to the man (that is, the particular person buried) as to humanity. That is the human nature in general. Wherefore, Seneca and Quintilian called burial a 'piece of public humanity.' And [Patroneus 00:12:04]: 'a piece of humanity derived down to us from our ancestors.'" Grotius' catalog goes on, as I said, for pages. The right to burial was common among all civilized nations. It came from the gods. It was evidence of our common nature, of compassion, of religion, of humanity. Care of the dead represented the advent of the Olympian gods. We really are going, now, to a real deep origin story. "The giant," says [Motianac 00:12:33] Greek tragic poet, roughly Diogenes's contemporary, "used to devour the dead bodies of men, the abolition of which burial practice is signified by burial."
	My point, in all this, is that for way back ... And I can give you Muslim visitors to India making these kinds of claims in the 11th century. I mean, we can get a whole story of world's origins stories; I can give you Nez Perce stories. There's a world of these origin stories about the move of death into culture.
	Let me sum up this whole line of argument, then I can give you more evidence if we want to talk about that part of the story. There is a timeless need, or perhaps, a need sort of expressed in this, a liberal temporality between human time and nature time, to care for the dead body. It's articulated over and over again in different culture contexts as foundation. 
	The care of the dead, then, it a, if not the sign, of the emergence of humans out of the order of nature into culture. It is, and I want to quote [Hansky R. Gotimer 00:13:36] here on the point, "the immutable anthropological background for all the human and social changes, past or present." I want to continue this, because this makes my connection with the incest taboo, and with this deep, long, anthropological tradition. "The burial of the dead is, perhaps, the most fundamental phenomenon of being human. Burial does not refer to a rapid hiding of the dead, a swift clearing away of the shocking impression made by one's suddenly struck, fast and lasting sleep. On the contrary, by a remarkable expenditures of human labor, there is sought an abiding with the dead; indeed, a holding fast to the dead among the living. We have to regard this and its most elementary significance. It's not a religious matter or transposition of religion into secular customs, mores and so on. Rather, it's the matter of the fundamental constitution of human being, from which derives a specific, sensitive human practice. We are dealing here with life that has spiraled out of the order of nature." 
	I actually think this is roughly right, so I subscribe to the anthropological tradition that he is assuming here. The phrase, of course, "elementary significance," I think, would put many of you who read it in mind of Levi-Strauss's "Elementary Structure of Kinship," which argues that the incest taboos stand at the border of humans being in nature and in being in culture. So, the incest taboo is this sort of moment of a person entering into culture, representing this. This is a moment, in some sense, of preventing a person moving back into nature, keeping a person in culture. I see this as kind of parallel, liminal structures in this very macro-ic, anthropological sense.
	So, my first answer or response to Diogenes can be summed up in this liminal moment in the making of culture spiraling out of the order of nature that [Gotimer 00:15:29] identifies. So that's answer one.
	My second answer in response to Diogenes is now (many of you might be happy because we're moving to history; we're honoring a historian) brings us into the realm of history. But I'm getting into history via anthropology. It's the claim that, in general, and in particular circumstances, the dead do work for the living. Putting it in its strongest terms, they make civilizations. But more modestly, they make nations and communities of all sorts. 
	Now, I'm perfectly clear that we talk about the dead doing things. My book is called "The Work of the Dead." We do this for them. We, the living, do it. We are doing things to the dead. But we need them to do the work they do more than they need us. The dead, especially the dead as elements of a system of meaning, made out of their matter, are not really dead. And that's the big point. 
	"In Spain, the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country in the world," said [Fredrick of Garcia 00:16:52]. But there's a competition. Richard Cobb, who we also read in [Bike 00:17:00] Seminar, puts the case more generally: "The most dangerous person at a funeral is the one in the coffin." The history of the work of the dead, then, is the history of how they dwell in us, individually and in community, and how, from these places, they act in the world. It's the history of how we imagined them to be, how they give meaning to their lives, how they structure public spaces, politics and time for us.
	But we need the dead. We actually need ... It's a material history of the body. It won't do just to remember them. I want to insist that it's the body that's crucial in this story. The history of the work of the dead, then, is in the first sense the history of the imagination. The history of how we invest the dead ... And I'll be speaking here almost entirely about the dead body because, as I say, this is a materialist account. Though, in a larger context, clearly the big point is the dead body's relationship to death and all sorts of other things. But I'm interested in the dead body, the mystery is how this thing that we take to be nothing becomes something. 
	So, the dead body takes meaning. I think it's really the most expansive possible history of the imagination. "We know the dead are not able to speak," writes an 18th century clergyman, "for they are all silent in darkness. They cannot see, or walk, or handle things with their hands, either. Yet they do speak, different from the living. Saint Paul preached to the Hebrews that he, being dead, yet speaketh," and more generally concludes, "It is common in the Scriptures for inanimate things to be represented as speaking as well as hearing." You find this in other traditions, the speaking dead, or the inanimate speaking. So we endlessly invest the dead body with meanings because, somehow, through it the dead (that is the human past) speaks to us. 
	Now, let me cash out on the part that I don't think his has to do with religious particular beliefs. I think it's the case independently of specific views or theories about the dead, though everyone that will hold this view will have some specific view ... sometimes specific views which actually argue against doing the very thing that they're doing. But there's an enlightenment moment, I think, when history seems to take the place of metaphysics as the kind of argument that one might want to make for why one is doing this, caring for the dead. 
	I want to illustrate this point by a brief reading of the work of the Enlightenment Deist and philosopher William Godwin. The essay, many of you might know this, it's the 1809 essay called the "Essay on Sepulchers." It's about secular necromancing. That is, Godwin believes nothing of what Saint Augustine or Saint Thomas, for example, believed about the cult of saints. And yet, you'll see, he speaks uncannily in their terms. The weight of the anthropology of the dead, in deep time, informs his argument by mobilizing the dead to create a new, national pass. His interest is not [inaudible 00:20:13] not in the holy being here and transmitting the holy to the living in a way that a saint's body is, but it's in producing a sense of history. But it's a sense of history through this dead body, which assumes all the qualities that the saint did for Augustine, as you'll see in just a second.
	So, Godwin's tract subtitle says, "Reposal for erecting some memorial of the illustrious dead in all ages on the spot where their remains have been interred." And it was intended, he said, as the first step of a kind of ... He didn't say utopian; I'm calling it utopian. The utopian plan to map necrogeography in such a way as to resist the inevitable erosions of time. The places where noteworthy bodies were buried would be identified by name," Godwin proposed, like today's historical signs, and will be marked on maps like those that already existed in which the scenes of famous battles were distinguished from a particular mark. This exercise would result in what he thought was an atlas of those who have lived for the use of men hereafter to be born. They would keep in memory those who might otherwise be forgotten. 
	So it's scheme for putting bobbies and marking them and mapping them, so they would be explicitly bearers of memory. He makes no religious claim for where these bodies are, where they fell. But now, let me talk to you about how he gets there.
	He offers this proposal as a way to overt oblivion through perpetual care of the names of these dead for the sake of mankind. The recollection and admiration of the dead, made possible by knowing where they're buried, will, he argues, make us better people, and the world a more virtuous place. That claim is less important for my purposes this afternoon than the arguments he makes for why the dead body matters in the first place. 
	Godwin wrote this pamphlet in 1809, which was twelve years after Mary Wollstonecraft, his wife, died giving birth to the girl who would end up marrying Shelly and writing Frankenstein. The enormity of death, the greatest of earthly calamities, and the most universal ... her death still weighed on his heart. "The dead are gone," he reflects, "beyond all the powers of calculation to reach. The effects, flowing from the mortality of man to human affairs, is incalculable. Loss is, perhaps, greater to him that survives than him that dies." This is the last time I'll use him, because it's perfectly clear what he writes about is her, but he's using the universal pronoun "him," so I'm misquoting him by putting in "her." "Not because, as Saint Augustine wrote, the dead are comfortably at the mercy of God, or because of the assurance of life eternal, or because, as the Epicureans would have it, the dead are no more than they were before they were unborn. The living suffer because they cannot be sure that the dead are anywhere." Godwin, like Augustine in this respect, tries to bridge this unimaginably great divide between these two worlds of the living and dead, through attention to the material bodies of the special dead. But not the special dead that are saints. The special, historical dead. 
	The question is why, for someone who is as close to an atheist as you can find in the late 18th century (I mean, he was Deist of a advanced sort), the dead are able to do this? Godwin's answer are going to take us back to the church fathers and forward to the historicity of the dead in the next century. In our time. He offers a psychology and a theoretical anthropology of the dead. "For those who survive," he says, "anything associated with a friend ... possessions, furniture they used, body parts, have the virtue with the Indian (the Native American) is said to attribute to the spoils of him he kills." That's also an amazing, emotional alliance between a person who prided himself in civilized rationalism, on the one hand, and the wild Indians of the Americans. He explains what he means. "Everything which has been practically associated with my friend acquires a value from that consideration. Her ring, her watch, her books, her habitation." Thomas Aquinas had essentially said the same thing, and he was quoting Augustine on this point. "If we feel this way about our loved ones" (this is Augustine saying it about a son's relationship to his father's tools) "how much more precious are the relics of a saint?" 
	I don't think you read Augustine or Saint Thomas, but that's the argument. But a more powerful connection to a person or a friend than what she had owned or held near to her body was the body itself. "He knows the truth," he says. "The body of my friend, the vehicle through which here knowledge and virtue was conveyed to me, was nothing. And yet," he says, he "cannot let it go at that. I can never separate my idea of her peculiarities and her action from my idea of her person. I cannot," he concludes, "love my friend without loving her person. And if a cold, unfeeling, inert relics of this friend are the nearest thing of that person that one has on this side of the great chasm to love and to cherish, so be it. Her dead body is far closer to that person even than her book and her watch." 
	Godwin is all too aware that there exists no more radical rupture than the rupture between the living and the dead. "If its rosy hue of life could somehow be purchased, it would be my companion still, which she, painfully, is not. The corpse is the great paradigmatic reminder sent to us by the system of the universe, that we are of a degraded nature and humble origins. That we are mortal. That there is an abyss between the living and the dead. We cast bodies into the ground to mold back into earth as the token of this truth ... And yet," the other argument, "and yet, the corpse remains the person it was, lacking only what seems so little yet so great: the breath of life, the rosy hue. The corpse, then, and the person, are not irrevocably sundered."
	Godwin also resists what would seem the self-evident truth that the dead are really gone, that they are no more in this world. He therefore asks the next obvious and universal question: if the dead are not gone, then where are they? Where is my friend? Close deductions of reason might allow him, he says, to recover the thinking principle which animated her. This is the idea that her spirit lives somewhere. Suggestions of faith might allow him to follow the dead through the vast regions of space and see the spirit return to God that gave it. But neither of these principles is satisfying to him. "All we are left with is the epithet '[foreign language 00:27:29] here lie the dead' over the place where the body is deposited." His words. So it's an indexical sign, this [foreign language 00:27:41].
	But now, Godwin mobilizes this remarkable power of the imagination and creates a microcosm of the kinds of stories I suggested earlier ... these stories that exist from beginning and deep time. "One would have to have an impenetrable heart," he says, "not to feel a certain sacredness of the grave." That is very strange. I mean, this man should be speaking of sacredness. There's a certain sacredness to the grave, and sensibility as old as writing on the subject of death and its generative. Based on this intuition, this feeling, what Godwin proposes is essentially necromancing. The habit of seeing with their intellectual eye things not visible to the eye of sense, rescuing the illustrious dead (and I would add to that any of the dead for which one cares) from the jaws of the grave, making them pass by and review, querying their spirits and recording their answers ... having live intercourse with the illustrious dead of all ages. The proposal to erect a small monument with a name affixed to the final resting place of the worthy dead is thus explicitly an act of calling them back or willing them into being through the voice of the imagination and the acts of building monuments.
	But he wants to do more than just call the individuals back to life. Marking them with names, places, hallowed the reception of all that was mortal of these glorious in erecting a shrine to memory. It's the de facto creating a community of the holy dead without believing holiness. It's the way of communicating with each and every one of them without subscribing to any traditional religious views of how and whether this might be possible. 
	So, Godwin offers what he knows is a formula for necromancing. He's a man who wrote a book proposing necromancing. He knows exactly what speaking to the dead is. Offers a formula for necromancing and for veneration of relics, which he doesn't believe in, and then the natural church actually disavows. This is what Protestants don't believe in. "We indulge all the reality that we can now have of a sort of conference with the dead by repairing to the scene which, as far as they are on earth at all, they still inhabit." Italic in the text. "The dust that covers the great man's tomb," although by extension of my discussion, any tomb worth paying attention to is, he says, "simply and literally" italics again in the text "the great man himself. We attain," he says, "the craft and mystery by which we may spiritually, each in his several ways, compel the earth and the ocean to give up their dead alive." 
	He was aware that all this was very close to what English men would've branded "Catholic superstition." He protests to much by assuring readers that there's no danger in the present temper of the European mind of falling into idolatry. But still, no one could not be affected by the visit to the grave. Again, there's a very long history of this problem, the grave with idolatry. It goes back to Clement of Alexandria before the beginning of the Christian prosecutions, who argues against the pagans, saying, "You have dead in your tombs, and you treat these as if they're important, as if they're idols. Our God is a living God; your dead are as dead as stone." This is just before the persecution that produced the cult of saints. So, in other worlds, this story of getting it, that they're nothing and that they're something, is a story that's very, very old. 
	So, the pamphlet that I've been talking about is grounded both in the sort of long duress of the dead (that is to say, in this anthropology, on the one hand) and it's also grounded in this specific moment when they are mobilized for new work. In this case, for representing the nation through a kind of historical necrogeography. 
	Is that clear so far? I'm trying to give this big picture ... parts on this particular story. This particular story is a historical story. He says, we want to gather all the dead together, sort of a prototype of our national cemeteries and other ... These social cemeteries, all these places where we make a new community of the dead. All right? So, we're getting now into the more particular historical. 
	So, the times then, in which the work of the dead I want to suggest is especially strenuous or effective or purposeful ... The Enlightenment, in its aftermath roughly into the 20th century, maybe still now, is one of them. 
	First, the question to argue that the Enlightenment represents a break in the story of death. But my version is somewhat different, and I want to just take a second to explain why my version of the story of the Enlightenment and death is different than, maybe, other stories that you might've heard about. This is a sort of segue way from my cosmic story to my parochial story.
	If you take the great French trio of Michel Foucault, Philippe Ariès, and Michel Vovelle, the philosopher, the deeply conservative Catholic historian of death, and the deeply radical atheist historian of death, as three ... Foucault is actually near Ariès; Foucault wanted to be buried back in his village and has very conservative views. He actually wrote a very appreciate obituary of Ariès in Le Mont. So, in some way, Foucault is nearer to the conservative Catholic side than the radical Marxist side, but ... Be that as it may. 
	Looking at these three, all of them offer narratives of the disappearance and disenchantment of the dead, and of death in modern times. For Vovelle, this is a good thing. He takes the decline of testamentary requests of masses for the dead as evidence of secularization, which is good, and he then maps it onto sort of Communist voting in certain parts of France. Secularization equals absence of false conscious needs ... Communist. I mean ... it's a big book, that's a ... the tweet version.
	For Ariès, it's disastrous. An epidemic of fear grips Europe as the dying come to worry about premature burial as the result of doctors telling them, their patient, that life, that death, is nothing but the extinction of even the tiniest flame of life. How would one really know? And in the 19th century, sentimentalism and excessive personal grief replaces more communal understanding of the dying in a deeper and metaphysically rooted account of death itself. For Foucault, death gives way to the regime of life. The clinical gaze serves to implicate bodies in a new web of power knowledge that regulates life in the most intimate corners.
	So, the story I'm telling is not about disappearance, but about reinvention. From the 18th century to the 20th, the dead become, if anything, more visible than they had been before. So, my history is a historical anthropology of the ways in which the presence of the dead enchants a purportedly disenchanted world. It's about how layers of meaning from the deep past lay beneath the present and are reused and reimagined. In fact, I think the dead have never been more prominent, more apprehensible, or more important. 
	My story is either the dead have always been enchanted, or the dead have never been enchanted, all right? And I think Diogenes represents the fact that they have been both. I mean, that's my ... So, the story I'm telling you is of a ... Can you reinvent ... Of enchantment under all sorts of different circumstances.
	Now, let me talk to the very particular, really parochial. For those of you not interested in English history, you can go now. But anyway, here we go. Let me talk to a case study. I want to suggest a particular date for when the Old Regime ends in England. That date is 1880. 
	In 1880 is the passage of the Burial Law Amendment Act, which I'm sure none of you've ever heard of, and for good reason. It's important to some people, but it's really important to me. Its provision subsumed the churchyard under the more general rubric, "graveyard." Graveyard included joint stock companies ... I mean, actual stock companies sold stocks, owned cemeteries, made profits ... burial boards, the commissioners of the sewers in London. I mean, all sorts of people were in charge of ... Churchyards now become part of this much more general world. Burial of the churchyard [inaudible 00:36:27] became a civil right open to anyone without regard to their membership of the body of Christ. Anyone could read any service that they wished at a grave in the churchyard. 
	So, this is momentous. After more than a thousand years, the legal foundations of the churchyard's delicate balance between civic and ecclesiastical place collapsed. It was a moment of radical undoing, and the conservative knew it. Walter Chamul, and the vicar of Saint John's Bolton, and a bitter enemy of what we might call the civil churchyard (the churchyard where you have a civil right to be buried) got to the heart of the matter. Dissenters, that's people who weren't members of the Church of England, claimed that "our churchyards belong to the nation." In disputes about burial, the rights of the nation are in dispute. That a grave was a national right to be enjoyed by communities of whatever kind. It was all of these things which he'd said were fundamentally wrong. 
	In 1880, his side lost. An ancient space that had been radically altered, signaling the fall of the final bastion of the Old Regime: the churchyard, and a particular imagined community of the Christian dead in deep time. Whatever was left of the old political theology by the end of the 19th century was gone. So the premise is, then, the churchyard ... I went on ... This is not my doing, it's a French historian churchyard ... is understood since somewhere between the 5th and the 9th century to somewhere in the late 18th century. The Christian community in deep time, located in that place.
	So, there are two ways into the story of 1880.
	The first would take us back to the appropriation of the dead by the church in the late 18th century. It's a moment ... let me go back to Gibbon on this, that Gibbon took to be a kind of foundational moment, though it's notional, in the sense that nothing changed that second in the fourth century, but ... This is Gibbon's account. It happened when the bones of Saint Babylas were brought into the Grove of Apollo in Antioch. This is the failure of Julian the Apostate's return to paganism. He'd given reports that "the cymbal of the god stopped speaking." There's this moment where the Christian body is brought into a pagan shrine that the ancient gods would speak. In fact, it took a very long time for Christians and pagans to be buried separately, and Jews and Christians and pagans'd be buried separately; there's a whole history of where this happens, when, and in different parts of Europe, but ... By the 10th century, everywhere in England and in most of Europe, the churchyard had become the only place in which a Christian could be decently buried, and it's a place, the access to which, was guarded by the clergy.
	This story would be the making of a new Christian necrogeography, which I think is actually the central feature of the rise of Christianity. In fact, anything the church does is gain power of the dead, and all the vast apparatus that goes around the care of the dead. So, one version is, you create a Christian necrogeography. The other, the anti-clerical version of the story, the Enlightenment version, Gibbon's version, is that this begins the tyranny of priests over the dead that went on for more than 1,000 years. It was that story that's behind one of the great burial controversies of the 18th century: what should happen to Voltaire's body? But basically, every Enlightenment figure had a huge fight about what should happen to their bodies. Some were less a big deal than Voltaire's. Voltaire's was a world sensation, translated in twenty languages and so forth ... but that's a side note.
	So, the second story, then ... (that's the one story, the macro-historical story) is a more intimate one. Now we focus on England. Burial in the parish churchyard was also a communal right, and not just a religious right. Grey's elegy, "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," is the most reprinted and recited poem of the 19th century. I can give you evidence for this in a moment. It represented a deep, local commitment that transcended religious and social differences. Of course, the clergy could exclude suicides, the unbaptized and the excommunicated, but in an increasingly plural society, and especially after the Toleration Act of 1689, these categories were increasingly indefensible. 
	Sometime in the 18th century, and even more in the early 19th century, these two stories, the one story representing the political theology of the Old Regime, the other a nexus of communal rites of parish, and especially poor people at a parish, came into conflict. So I want to end with that conflict and its resolution.
	There's a long and fractious history of burial disputes, and I want to start with a court case in 1808. The dissenting clergyman (that is a clergyman [inaudible 00:41:39] not belong to the church of England) complained that John Wickes, rector of the Parish of Wardley, had refused to read the burial service of the body of Hannah Swingler, the infant daughter of John and Mary Swingler (these are poor people) who were members of this parish. Now, both sides stipulated in modern lawyer talk. Both sides agreed that Hannah had been baptized by a minister in her denomination who had been licensed by the state. Everyone agreed that he had done so in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and that he had done water, used water for the baptism. So this was a kosher baptism.
	Wickes, the rector, admitted that he was guilty as charged. He refused to bury Hannah, and for the following reason: she was not regularly baptized, because only an ordained priest could regularly baptize. But his political motivation in refusing to bury her corpse, while not germane to the only recent for which the canons allows him to not bury someone (which is to say, unbaptized, suicide or excommunicated) makes clear why he was so insistent. Her people were enemies of the church, whose demand for a burial service and a place in the churchyard was nothing less than subversion. "'Johnny' Swingler, the father," Wickes responded in the pamphlet, "isn't even a dissenter, but the lowliest of the Methodists, who keeps a private conventicle in his house with his own mystical lubrications upon a new birth. He's a friend and sometimes rival of the infamous keeper on conventicles William Kemp, whose flock is notorious for all sorts of improprieties." He would not bury the infant Hannah Swingler, and refused to bury any dissenter if a similar situation arose. "We," that is to say, the Church of England, "have to defend itself against iterated garbage and torrent of encroachment by dissenters by keeping the churchyard pure." The parish clerk, at the end of the story, eventually buried Hannah without a service of the dead.
	What's fascinating about this is no one actually ever dared read a service at a churchyard who wasn't an Anglican. It was a kind of ... Even people who would sneak a body in, do all sorts of things, would not actually contravene the law that only a churchman could read a service at a churchyard.
	This case came up because there's a group called the dissenting deputies, which handled these cases in which there was conflict between dissenters and the state church. [inaudible 00:44:11] they represented, they took this case to the highest ecclesiastical court, which is the Court of the Province at Canterbury, the Court of Arches. Arguments were heard on 9 November that year before a man named Sir John Nicholl, who was a staunch Tory and a well-known defender of the Anglican church in other controversies that had gone before. 
	Conservatives, then, were shocked when so seemingly loyal a churchman as this man ruled in favor of the dissenter's right to burial. "There was no way around this," the judge argued. "It is with some degree of surprise that the court has heard the suggestion of there being no law to compel the clergy to bury dissenters. This seems to be most strangely perverting, or rather inverting, of all legal considerations." He rehearsed then the long history of lay baptism in learned detail with lots of quotations from Latin from medieval church counsels, and a careful reading of Anglican precedence in English. "How could one," he says, "read the 1604 canons to mean that only those baptized by an Anglican priest could be buried?" 
	If only three years later, Parliament passed the rule requiring that [inaudible 00:45:20], which is to say, Catholics, should have to be buried in a churchyard. The law was saying Catholics can't form their own community of the dead; they will bloody well be buried in churchyards. So how can Parliament hold that and say, "You have to be buried ..." You can't have it both ways. After tracing the law of baptism through several stages of history, he concluded, "It's impossible to entertain a reasonable doubt that the church did, at old times, hold baptism, though not administered by any person to be valid, lay person or any person." Unbaptized means what it means in ordinary language, which is unbaptized. If the infant Swingler was baptized ... and Wickes had a duty to bury her in the churchyard. And moreover, he ought to want to bury her to signify that in death and in the last offices there is, the judge says, "no separation between the church and her Protestant dissenting brethren." That is to say, they want to hold fast the dead among the living, as Gotimer would've put it. 
	So the dissenting deputies were vindicated, and they very graciously decided not to seek costs, and they felt the matter was settled.
	Meanwhile, the high church clergy was furious at Nicholl's betrayal of their cause. They made all sorts of arguments. They said, "It was your duty to exclude these dissenters" because civil society had become unmoored from the Anglican church and it was time to draw battle lines and force them back in.
	The Wickes case, though often cited in burial disputes for the next forty years, didn't settle the matter. Twenty years later, the highest court in the land (that is, the Supreme Court, the Privy Counsel) heard a new test case. And actually, the interesting thing that these burial case ... The first appeal from the newly independent Canada was on a burial case. The first Canadian appeal to the Privy Counsel, which until relatively recently heard appeals from Canadian judiciary, was on burial. These burial cases strike some very deep notes.
	The Wickes case is the following. Let me give you the facts.
	Elizabeth Anne Cliff, the daughter of Thomas Cliff, a blacksmith, and his wife Sara in a small Lincolnshire parish, died on the December 14, 1839. She'd been baptized soon after her birth by a 26-year-old, unordained Methodist minister. All agreed that he'd used the proper words, "Father, Son, Holy Ghost." The day after she died, Elizabeth's father waited on the Reverend Escot and informed him of his daughter's death. That is to say, he gave what's called proper notice. He wasn't asking for trouble. We know this is not to try and have a test case. He says he wanted his daughter buried with his ancestors, or her ancestors, because this parish church was where his family had been buried for a very long time. 
	There was, as many contemporaries on the other side of this argument pointed out, more religion of the poor than their betters realized. But Escot refused. The case was brought, then, against Escot in the name of a Methodist minister in this parish, and it made its way to the Court of Arches. By this time, the Court of Arches was even more learned opinion with long disquisitions on Tertullian, and long disquisitions on separate ... it's a weird, weird, story. Long disquisitions on 18th century Reformation history. I mean, it's kind of strange kind of rehearsal of the kind of battles from the English Reformation days.
	That's also kind of amazing. You think that these are all anachronistic controversies, the issues of the nature of rebaptism, the contested nature of the Book of Common Prayer. All of a sudden, you kind of feeling like these are reanimated ghosts from 300 years before. So, for a brief moment, then, conflicting Victorian interpretations of Tudor/Stuart Era political theology based on 4th century political theology had seemingly apocalyptic significance. Litigation became a kind of historiography, sending lawyers skittering to archives to fight for the soul of English Christianity. 
	At stake was the care of the body of a dead infant. Meanwhile, I should say, the dead girl was carried to the churchyard gate in the double coffin in which she had been resting on the family horse for months. A Methodist maybe read a burial service at the entrance to the churchyard. Again, no one challenged the right to go into the churchyard ... And was then carried through the gate and silently buried.
	So ... he lost in the court of Arches, but then, through a technicality, which is the question of whether you could swear Methodist (don't ask) ... long technicality, he managed to get the case into Privy Counsel. So now Privy Counsel, which had the most famous judges of the day ... I mean, Lord Broom, and all these heavy duty guys, produce a 100-page long judgment, hugely distinguished panel, and they affirmed the obligation to care for the dead of the parish.
	It settled matter in law, but not in practice. And then we have a long history for the next 30 years of guys saying, no, only bury this child in what the villagers called "hell's corner," that is, the northern section of the churchyard, which was supposedly unconsecrated. Or the victory of ... There was another place that won't bury a old woman, a pauper, because she had been seen at a Unitarian meeting. So all sorts of little, petty quarrels about who we're not going to have in your community.
	So, the beginning of the end of my paper and of this whole story comes in sort of a notorious case called the Akenham Burial Scandal, and that's in a small, Suffolk parish in 1778. Here's how a local newspaper tells the story. The reason we know all this is because the clergyman then sued for libel, this newspaper; this makes a big libel case, so, again, we have a lot more on this story.
	"Mr. George Drury, the vicar, on learning that the child, the 2-year-old Joseph Ramsey, had not been baptized-" (because his parents were Baptists, who didn't believe in infant baptism) "-positively and [inaudible 00:51:31] refused to have it (the child) buried in consecrated ground, but gave permission to be buried at unconsecrated ground reserved for stillborn infants on the condition that no religious services be performed anywhere in the churchyard. He sternly refused to bury it himself and refused and insisted that no one should officiate the church in his stead." Very naturally, the sorrowing parents did not wish to have their beloved child buried like a dog. This became the last in a long line of these burial controversies, and led to the defining law change in English burial law that I just talked to you about. Joseph Ramsey's parents eventually sneaked the body through a hedge into the churchyard, where his body was buried. The minister, again, didn't read the service in the churchyard, but read a burial service outside the churchyard before the body was carried in. 
	I want to suggest the last vestige of the political theology of a thousand year regime was laid to rest. These conservative clergy had failed to maintain the vision of the community of the dead that, in some sense, had become insupportable in this rigorous way since the Reformation. This is pluralism. 
	But this did not mean, and I want to end here, that the dead body and the places where they were posed had either disappeared or became disenchanted. Let me go back to the generation observation, which I began, and conclude with one answer to Diogenes in particular that I find persuasive.
	Care of the dead, like the incest taboo, has continued across the rupture between the Old Regime and the Modern Era to do the work of coming into culture. The dead alone and collectively, for this civilization [inaudible 00:53:18] and a large number of others. The dead have worked over millennia in the interest of transcendent religion. They work today largely in the interest of history and memory, in particular, communities.
	So why is this possible?
	My answer to this comes from the art critic David Heche. He writes about watching a Los Vegas magic show. It's a magic show about levitating elephants, which ... He thinks this whole idea of levitation is sort of connected to the dead, and the fact that we watch this show with some suspension of disbelief ... We won't enjoy if we constantly say, "Oh, this is how they do it." We get into it, right? So he ends this thing with ... his answer is largely this. "We are mortal creatures who miss our dead friends, and thus can appreciate levitating tigers and portraits by Raphael-" So, art ... portraits by Raphael. "-for what they are: songs of mortality sung by the prisoners of time." So, largely beyond metaphysics, I think the dead body cajoles with this sort of magic. It's the magic that we post-Enlightenment people can believe in. Thanks.