Enjoy For Free The Undiscovered Country: Journeys Among The Dead Authored By Carl Watkins Available Through Multimedia Format

is a book you should read if you provide end of life care, EOL being the modern euphemism for the deathbed, It's not about death, but about what the living have believed about death through the ages,

It's made me think about the modern rituals of death, the ones so ubiquitous we don't see them as rituals, Iain Sinclair on The Undiscovered Country: Journeys Among the Dead by Carl Watkins:

sitelink guardian. co. uk/books



This is a fascinating book, albeit one that occasionally becomes bogged down in an overload of information, backtracking through anecdotes and details that Watkins has already provided.
He does tell a few ghost stories, and relates a handful of ancient customs, as promised by the blurb, but my one real gripe is that in places, it becomes less about the attitude towards the dead and more about the belief systems inherent within different strands of Christianity.
The discussions around Spiritualism and the growth of a more secular society are fascinating, and clearly no discussion of death rituals would really be complete without reference to religion, but at times the book feels less like an investigation of the way that the living approach the dead, and more a history of British religion between the Reformation and the First World War.
That said, it is

interesting and his chronological approach makes it easy to see the differences unfold, even if he does sometimes repeat himself or spend paragraphs obsessing over minute and often irrelevant details.
I have to admit to having a macabre interest in death, in attitudes the living have adopted to deal with this ultimate, unavoidable fate specifically, So much so that when I was at university my final year dissertation was based on a study of changes in attitudes over the last millennium.
As such I found this book fascinating from start to finish, Francis Bacon said that 'Men fear death as children fear to go into the dark' and this is a point that this book makes clearly.
It studies the way the living have confronted this fear, and have reassured themselves about the uncertainty of the afterlife, Such a fascinating subject, and a well written insightful book, A review of ancient customs related to death,

This was a weird book, Im really sure what points it was trying to make, The writing was repetitive and it could have been done with being shorter it would probably work better as a spoken piece, We know what happens to the body when we die, but what happens to our souls The answer may remain a great unknown, but the question has shaped centuries of tradition, folklore and religious belief.


In this vivid history of the macabre, Carl Watkins goes in search of the ancient customs, local characters and compelling tales that illuminate how people over the years have come to terms with our ultimate fate.
He discovers what a small Norfolk church has to tell us about the apocalypse why the greatest minds of the seventeenth century were embroiled in debate over the phantom Drummer of Tedworth and how a nineteenthcentury Welsh Druid completely changed the national view of cremation.


The result is an enthralling journey into Britain's past, from medieval hauntings on the Yorkshire moors and eccentric memorials on the Cornish coast to seances in Victorian kitchens and gallows tales from a Bristol gaol.
Impeccably researched and elegantly told, The Undiscovered Country ventures beyond the veil to bring the dead back to life, Whatever the faults of this book, they are over shadowed by the eloquence of the second to last chapter about death and World War I.
The difference between 'Do you believe in Ghosts', 'Do ghosts exist' and 'Do you know any ghost stories'

Watkins tracks the changes in people's beliefs death from the Middle Ages to the end of the first world war.
He does this not by focussing on the official theological versions, but by searching out specific anecdotes evetns and stories which he presents as representative.


So the stories he tells are those of people's wills, their burial practices, specific sermons and diary entries, famous ghost stories and now forgotten spiritualists.
And he localises his stories geographically, often beginning each section by describing the landscape in which the story is set,

It's a fascinating book, He writes well, and his method allows him to illuminate the differences between what the church or the priest or the latest theology said people should believe, and what they actually believed reflected in their own words and actions.
He gently illuminates the contradictions,

It's a fascinating book, Everyone thinks about death at some point in their lives, maybe multiply times over the years, Most of the time it's, how are they going to die, or when are they going to die, But not a lot of people really question, what happens after we die

Carl Watkins takes us on a journey through time, detailing different thoughts and belief's of the different eras through life, the customs that comes with death and even the folklore behind others.
We go from one end of the country to the other following after different subjects from ghosts to burial rites and wants, We follow along with religious belief's in the rights and wrongs of a body, upon how many believe in the dead being buried rightly by god, touching upon cremation and even the aspect of those who don't believe in god.


It's certainly a book that I'm glad I happened upon and added to my collection, I fully enjoyed reading through the thoughts and stories that Watkins collected to write this book and it's one I will cherish and read again in the future sometime.
This is an incredibly frustrating book, Whilst there are some fascinating stories included, it is very repetitive and has no clear structure aside from a vague chronology, It also starts arbitrarily in theth century some clarification on this would have been helpful, especially when there are so many interesting things to discuss about earlier medieval practices related to death.
An interesting insight into attitudes to death, dying and bereavement throughout the ages, Faith and folklore are treated with equal respect, I thoroughly enjoyed this. Packed full of anecdotes fromyears of death in the British Isles, I wondered whether it might be a bit morbid or grim not necessarily a problem, of course but far from it.
This was a fun read, full of wit, humour and insight,


The way death rituals and folklore have changed, rather unsurprisingly, with the religious upheavals in the country, with the fraught switch away from Catholicism particularly important, was a fascinating study.
The changing nature of ghosts and the refusal of such a belief to die, pardon the pun, was also well worth the price of admission.


Given the rich source of anecdotes it provides, this could be of interest to storytellers and folklorists as well as the general reader, and makes a good companion read to Religion and the Decline of Magic which covers similar shifts of belief following the split with the Catholic church.


At times it did very much feel like an exploration of a hidden area, and perhaps a bit more of a throughline or argument might have made it a true treasure.
Nevertheless, thoroughly engrossing and I can imagine poring through it again in the future, It shall, rather ironically, have a long and happy life on my bookshelf, This was overall interesting, if a little too detailed at times, The chapters would have more impact if they were shorter and punchier as they repeated themselves a bit e, g. having many different examples, but all actually saying the same thing in a roundabout way,

I think the book goes roughly in chronological order by chapter, though it did seem to jump around a bit which was confusing.
My favourite chapters were those on cremation and the final chapter on the WWI war dead,

This is evidently a wellresearched book and there are some interesting facts to be found in it, This book looks at English beliefs surrounding death from the late Middle Ages through to the end of World War I, From ghost stories and lore to religious upheaval to scientific discoveries to spiritualism, many varied topics are covered, This could be morbid and/or dry, but the author looks at these topics through the eyes of people who lived through all the different ages and who left enough of a record for us to get to know them as actual people, not just someone who died long ago.
We learn about monks and merchants and soldiers and more, and we come to understand how religion, social structure, and geography all come to play a part in how people look at death.
Highly recommended. Starting from the medieval era, Watkins looks at changing attitudes and beliefs towards death, dying and the afterlife, This wellwritten book presents some interesting viewpoints, Glanville apparently said that the spirit world was not a well discovered region, but rather an unknown territory whose contours needed mapping, I agree. Why don't we spend more time mapping them

I enjoyed the first part of this book, where the author discussed what medieval people believed, but then the book became more a collection of stories and less of a discussion.
Maybe it's harder to get a handle on what we still partially believe

Amused to find that many of the things I was taught in my convent have not been believed for centuries! There is so much information in this book, which was a bit tedious at times, but the author presented it with such clear order that it was very easy to follow the details from his clearly exhaustive research.
The end of the book was a little slow, and entire sections were almost verbatim repeats of earlier ones, particularly when he discussed the transition from hellfirepreaching evangelicism to a more spiritual materialisminfluenced interpretation of the Bible's postmortem conjectures.
I think my favorite part of this book was the tangible historical information: political figures amp dates, the fathers of the "Ghost Story" genre, the social evolution of radical agnosticism, ampc I now have a long list of further reading to do! A perfect companion to the festive season.
Carl Watkins is a captivating historical tour guide for the afterlife c,. He offers a series of local narratives that illustrate larger trends in British attitudes towards the dead, as well as describing individual eccentricities in the quest to be remembered on earth and/or blessed in heaven.
This book will help you to answer questions such as, Should Protestants like a good ghost story How can you offer a worse legal punishment than execution Why does a HM Revenue and Customs officer make a quinquennial trek up a Cornish hill After reading, I would recommend reading the Bible as a good followup with more definite answers to the question: "What next" A specialist in religious culture in the central and later Middle Ages, Carl Watkins is Reader in History at the University of Cambridge.
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