Exploring and improving our relationship with death through respectful enquiry. Here you’ll find conversations with those who work with the dead and grieving, in addition to episodes examining death through a lens of history & the arts, folklore and food.
We’ll take you from ancient funerary rituals to forensic anthropologists via green burials, disaster recovery and Persephone’s pomegranates. We hope the journey & stories will provide you with some of the knowledge and empathy you need to navigate this vast hidden world as well as shine a light on the kindness and tenderness displayed by those professionals who truly take care of our dead.
Contact: A Question of Death
About the Episode
I spoke with the wonderful Dr Dan O‘Brien in a fascinating discussion about historic funerary journeys. In or conversation he shared how this area of historical research had first attracted him as well as revealing why somepeople would brave the serious danger and significant expense of long distance travel with the dead rather than bury them close to where they died.
Dr Dan is also is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath. His research focuses on the undertaking trade and their products in eighteenth century England. He can also be found on Instagram where he shares glorious historic memento mori artefacts and art.
Some things mentioned in the episode:
Sir Henry Upton portrait – https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw06456/Sir-Henry-Unton
The book I couldn’t remember: Unruly: A History of England’s Kings and Queens a book by David Mitchell.
The book buried in the pile: Death, grief, and mourning in contemporary Britain by Gorer, Geoffrey 1965
About the Podcast
Exploring and improving our relationship with death through respectful enquiry.
Here you’ll find conversations with those who work with the dead and grieving, in addition to episodes examining death through a lens of history & the arts, folklore and food.
We’ll take you from ancient funerary rituals to forensic anthropologists via green burials, disaster recovery and Persephone’s pomegranates. We hope the journey & stories will provide you with some of the knowledge and empathy you need to navigate this vast hidden world as well as shine a light on the kindness and tenderness displayed by those professionals who truly take care of our dead.
Contact: A Question of Death