I attended a big Irish funeral earlier this week. Archbishop Noël Treanor, the Vatican’s diplomatic representative to the EU, died suddenly on 11 August and was buried in St Peter’s cathedral in Belfast, where he had previously been the bishop for many years, last Tuesday. I happen to be in Norn Iron at present and attended, sitting between a retired South Belfast community worker, and the mum of two of the choristers.

I knew Noël from his current and previous roles in Brussels, and we’d had a really excellent lunch at his residence on 12 July (an auspicious date!), my last working day in the office until September. We discussed many things, including ironically enough the Pope’s health (“I saw him just a few weeks ago; our appointment was at 8.30 am and it was his fourth meeting that morning; his mobility may not be great but he’s as sharp mentally as ever and he’ll stay around at least until the Synod has concluded in October”) and the church blessing of same-sex relationships (Noël surprised me by saying, without any prodding from me, that he agreed with the Pope’s positive approach). I looked forward to continuing the conversation on my return to work next month, but, alas, it is not to be.

The funeral was a massive affair, with a full cathedral including dozens of bishops and well over a hundred priests. (“I’ve never seen so many priests!” gasped the lady beside me. “I didn’t realise there were that many left!” I replied. Noël, who was 73, would have been roughly in the middle of the age range of the clergy attending, and younger than most of the bishops.) It ended with Noël being laid to rest in the chapel where two of his predecessors already lie (Patrick Walsh, his immediate predecessor, died only last December). The current bishop, Alan McGuckian, led the service, apart from the committal at the very end which was led by Paul Gallagher, the Vatican’s foreign minister. The ceremony stuck closely to the liturgy that I know so well, but with a lot more ecclesiastical chanting than I am used to (and that’s a fine thing). It was a respectfully and carefully designed occasion; I left feeling that my friendship with Noël, which was warm but not deep, had been given decent closure, and I am sure that everyone in the congregation who knew him felt the same.

Funerary rituals have been around since the dawn of humanity, but it is surprisingly difficult to track down the historical details of death as a cultural phenomenon. Clodagh Tait has tackled Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550-1650 in this short monograph. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

The period of time between a person’s physical demise and the disposal of their corpse is worth close examination, for in the glimpses of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century people addressing the fact of the corpse in their midst we can also see them dealing with some of those rather more complicated questions raised by that corpse’s presence among them. The rituals and processes involved are difficult to reconstruct. At this stage the corpse usually was in the hands of family and friends, the focus of procedures which, because they were to contemporaries too ordinary to be documented or remarked upon, let alone explained, become all but invisible when the historian attempts to look at them in any depth.

This is a very dense book, looking in depth at what is known about attitudes to death and the dead in Ireland in the early modern period. Tait is frank about the shortcomings of the source material – the surviving written evidence is mainly about the rich rather than the poor, about English speakers rather than Irish speakers, about adults rather than children. But there is enough to pull together a fascinating cultural and ritual landscape, of corpses and graves being relocated for political reasons, of which relatives you are buried with, of how the afterlife is imagined at a time when Protestants and Catholics were being offered very different future fates.

The struggle over the religious jurisdiction of death would in itself have been enough for a whole book, but it would not have been as good; by leading in with the nuts and bolts of the deathbed, the funeral rites and the monuments, Tait establishes a framework of universal human experience, with an Irish historical hue, in which the denominational squabbles then take place. Many of the old cultural practices around death are lost forever, thanks to industrialisation and modernisation, but enough survives to give us a really interesting glimpse of a society both familiar and alien. You can get it here.

This was the shortest unread book that I acquired in 2018. Next on that pile is The Mark of the Maker: A Portrait of Helen Waddell, by Monica Blackett.