La Bretagne aux 16e et 17e siecles. La Vie- La Mort- La Foi

This is a remarkable work. It is a traditional French university thesis in the sense that it is massive (some 1,600 pages), based upon an amazing variety of archival sources (national, departmental, communal, notarial, ecclesiastical, hospital, municipal, fiscal) and filled with literally thousands of references, statistics and plans. But it is in no way traditional in its subject matter. Attitudes of societies towards death is still a fairly new subject, and Alain Croix now joins those distinguished French historians who have extensively studied this subject. He has used the techniques of demographer, geographer and anthropologist, as he has examined the culture, mentalites, iconography and folklore of this region.