We assume these things, but we do not really know.
We assume that anyone believing that the souls of the righteous are in the hands of God will find comfort from it. We assume that, with death such a regular visitor to the pre-modern household, bereavement was not so devastating for our ancestors as it is for us. With so little tangible and reliable evidence it is far easier to shroud these matters in assumptions. Brought under the historian’s microscope, such materials can all too easily turn to dust. So in the written record bereavement and consolation necessarily remain elusive, their traces fugitive, and evidence of them oblique, amorphous, fragmentary, ambiguous-and sometimes mendacious. The chief witnesses, the bereaved themselves, are usually too overwhelmed, too busy, too stricken, to analyse their feelings, let alone sit down to describe them. Neither is quantifiable, neither is verifiable, both are imprecise. Neither bereavement nor consolation submits to the demands of the historian without a struggle. What bereavement meant to past generations, and what consolation was available to them, are questions which, understandably, are generally passed over in favor of more tractable problems-who attended the funeral, what was in theĦ863 Bolitho / BEREAVEMENT AND CONSOLATION / sheet 10 of 242
Each has remained tantalizingly vague, glimpsed out of the corner of one’s eye, hovering wraith-like on the periphery of every deathbed and every funeral, only to vanish at the first sign of the historian’s direct scrutiny. Bereavement is one, and its timid attendant, consolation, is another. Amongst all this bustle, however, some of death’s shadowy companions seem to have eluded analysis. Not as lively, perhaps, as gender and sexuality, but, in its way, unarguably more forward-looking. The result is that mortality has been resurrected and is now a lively historical topic. There is no shortage of material for those who rummage through the vaults of death. They have examined the forms of requiem masses, the wording of wills, the cost and content of funerary obsequies, the size of tombs, the length of epitaphs, the emblems of iconography, the location of graveyards, the arguments for and against an afterlife, for and against limbo and purgatory, for and against salvation and damnation (whether instantaneous or deferred until the Day of Judgement). One after another, scholars have found themselves drawn to the medical, spiritual, and material aspects of the end of life. Over the past twenty years or so-in fact, since the publication in of Philippe Ariès’s Essais sur l’histoire de la mort- death has gradually wormed its way back into the consciousness of historians.
Kyokuso¯ the Scholar / Conclusion: Consolation in Tokugawa Japan / Abbreviations / Notes / Bibliography / Ħ863 Bolitho / BEREAVEMENT AND CONSOLATION / sheet 8 of 242Ħ863 Bolitho / BEREAVEMENT AND CONSOLATION / sheet 9 of 242 Preface / ix Introduction: Bereavement in Tokugawa Japan / . The mind concedes Not comprehends That all beginnings Have their endsĦ863 Bolitho / BEREAVEMENT AND CONSOLATION / sheet 6 of 242Ħ863 Bolitho / BEREAVEMENT AND CONSOLATION / sheet 7 of 242 Bolitho, Mary Poyzer, and Kay Tuisk-and to Bill Bolitho The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.Ħ863 Bolitho / BEREAVEMENT AND CONSOLATION / sheet 5 of 242 Includes bibliographical references and index. Bereavement and consolation : testimonies from Tokugawa Japan / Harold Bolitho. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bolitho, Harold. Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books. Set in Caslon type by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections and of the U.S. Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of , Yale College. 6863 Bolitho / BEREAVEMENT AND CONSOLATION / sheet 1 of 242Ħ863 Bolitho / BEREAVEMENT AND CONSOLATION / sheet 2 of 242Ħ863 Bolitho / BEREAVEMENT AND CONSOLATION / sheet 3 of 242ī C Testimonies from Tokugawa Japan H BĦ863 Bolitho / BEREAVEMENT AND CONSOLATION / sheet 4 of 242