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“... thinkers from John Donne to Schopenhauer have mounted various lines of defence. But in general, as Philippe Ariès argued in The Hour of Our Death, we now generally treat death not as the ultimate test of our courage or convictions, but as the inevitable and unpleasant culmination of our waning years. From the sociological point of view, we tend to ...”

“... if things went on too long. Successful birth, of course, was not the end of a mother’s worries. Philippe Ariès suggested thirty years ago that because of demographic conditions in the Middle Ages, parents learnt not to invest too much emotional capital in their children before it became clear that they stood a fair chance of reaching useful adult ...”

“... the subject and to examine the attitudes embedded in social and legal practice. The late Philippe Ariès, for example. Or Jean-Louis Flandrin, whose study Le Sexe et l’Occident (1981) is a collection of essays on changing attitudes which well deserves translation. But Darmon is not in the Flandrin class. Nor is Guido Ruggiero, although his ...”

“... for those changing fashions in dying and those varying attitudes to living which historians like Philippe Ariès have been exploring so imaginatively and suggestively in recent years.2 Speaking of the old Irish jurists, Binchy says: ‘Naturally they were unaware that what they were describing was the vestigial remnant of an extremely ancient usage ...”

“... What is more important: is it the project of understanding why sexual desire is, or has become, a problem for us like no other, fraught with particular anxiety and special perplexity; or is it the task of establishing – maintaining, perhaps – principles according to which this desire can be regulated, guided, temporised? The change in relations between the sexes and the concomitant change in relations between members of the same sex, the double alteration that has come over us in the last two or three generations makes a certain kind of intellectual investigation possible for the first time ...”

“... we encounter an essay on the consciousness of death in the West, as imagined and reconstructed by Philippe Ariès. Have we come upon a theme after all? Not quite. But we have found a region where our understanding is not only severely tested but put in its place. Death is like painting in this respect. It does ‘the real talking’, as Kermode says of ...”

“... like Bremond, Vovelle, Le Bras, Morin and, of course, the doyen of contemporary authorities, Philippe Aries. Waley’s introduction emphasises the antithetical viewpoints represented by Ariès, whose observations ‘are never related to any demographic or economic background’, and Vovelle, with his meticulous ...”