The study of medieval attitudes towards death, from sociological, historical, literary artistic and theological viewpoints, has long been a major scholarly preoccupation in France. The first British conference devoted to this field was the Eugène Vinaver Colloquium held in Manchester in March 1983; this volume contains its revised proceedings. Covering a broad range of disciplines (history, literature, theatre, theology among others) and a diversity of late medieval European cultures; it offers a challenging conspectus of scholarly thinking about attitudes towards death from St Bernard and Dante to the Renaissance.