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Danielle Westerhof, Death and the noble body in medieval England, Woodbridge, Suffolk, Boydell Press, 2008, pp. xii, 190, £50.00 (hardback 978-1-84383-416-8).
Danielle Westerhof s study examines the relationship between death and the aristocratic (male) body in England from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. Bringing together an unusually diverse collection of source material, including medical treatises, legal codes, and theological doctrines as well as romances, chronicles, and surviving material culture, Westerhof investigates how the concept of nobility came to be encapsulated in the aristocratic body and illustrates the consequences of this belief on aristocratic culture and funerary practices, and on the judicial punishment of aristocrats for treason. Religious teachings on the corruptibility of flesh and the unchanging nature of saints' bodies were, as Westerhof demonstrates, fundamental to the formulation of practices associated with the preservation and burial of cadavers, while the liminality of death was reinforced by both religious doctrine and by the centrality of commemoration in elite medieval society.