My sister Clare Gittings, who has died of a stroke aged 71, was a sympathetic student from her teenage years of the way that society treats death.
At 16, she published a successful guide, Brasses and Brass Rubbing (1970), that recorded its many forms – from skeletons to the “wild man of the woods”. After an MLitt at Oxford University (1978), she wrote a pioneering study, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (1984), showing how death shifted from a social event often celebrated by “merry mourners” to a less communal approach. Clare had a wide knowledge of church memorials, and was especially interested in those verses written with genuine emotion by the widow rather than by a scholar or priest.
