Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change Book

This is a very uneven book. When Stannard is actually talking about seventeenth and eighteenth century New England and the conflict in Puritan orthodoxy between longing for and fear of death, he's excellent (the section on funerary carving and sculpture was particularly illuminating). But he insists on trying to make a transhistorical argument (of the "since the beginning of time" sort), and those parts of the book I found both unconvincing and off-putting: I didn't want to be convinced, because the argument seemed smug, superficial, and arrogant. And very 1977.