"This book is the first detailed examination of death in early modern Ireland. The author brings together a wide variety of source material to explore how people coped with and viewed the deaths of friends and foes. The book deals with the process of dying; the conduct of funerals; the arrangement of burials, and their rearrangement through disinterment; private and public commemoration of the dead; and ideas about the afterlife.

It considers how the living manipulated ceremonies of death and the reputations of the dead to support their own political and religious ends and the insights this can offer into the interactions between and within Ireland's different communities in a time of rapid change. This scholarly and accessible work will be indispensable reading for all those interested in the history and archaeology of Ireland, as well as those more broadly concerned with death studies."--BOOK JACKET.