Historians began to take a specific interest in changes in the European practices and meanings of mortality following the publication of The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924) by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, a book which, in its attempt to capture and re-articulate the human spirit or ‘soul’ of an epoch, broke dramatically with the positivist approach that dominated the profession. In France the formation of the École des Annales in 1929 marked the beginning of an academic programme for the study of the cultural history of medieval and early modern Europe, including attitudes – or mentalités as the French scholars, following Huizinga, called them – to death. Probably the most ambitious historical survey of Western understandings of death, and certainly, thanks to the success of its English translations, the most well-known among the Anglo-American intelligentsia, did not come from the Annales school, however, but was conducted by the French Catholic historian Philippe Ariès. As an independent scholar (he called himself a ‘Sunday historian’) whose conservative outlook did not endear him to the left-leaning members of the Annales, Ariès was a more marginal figure in French academia than, say, his critical interlocuter Michel Vovelle, and certainly more marginal than his popularity in the English-speaking world might suggest. Yet 15 years of research by Ariès and his art historian wife, Primerose, into literary, archaeological, documentary, epigraphic and iconographic material, mostly but not exclusively from French sources, bore a rather splendid fruit: the impressive and often-cited magnum opus L’Homme devant la mort (1977), or, in the English translation, The Hour of Our Death (Ariès 1982).