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This chapter discusses how the Shrine's Crypt Church served as response to Protestant interpretations of Roman Catholic belief and practice. During the period of consolidation—and before the decline of the Protestant establishment in the 1960s—U.S. Catholics had to make meaning and negotiate power in relation to Protestants. And just as many ordinary lay Catholics, who negotiated daily in the workplace and the streets with their Protestant neighbors, had a presence at the Shrine by giving and going, so, too, the Shrine's clerical planners found that they were able to make their presence felt there—by materially manifesting their own desires in the building itself. Yet Protestants had a presence in the Shrine, too. It was not only the Protestant landscape architects, Olmsted and Olmsted, who recommended where to situate the Shrine on the campus plan, or the many non-Catholics who later visited and donated, like Susanna Fay, the Protestant donor of one of the apsidal altars. Protestants also were always lurking in the Crypt Church's subterranean shadows, as the incorporeal Other against which those clerics had to define themselves and against whom they felt they had to defend their embattled Church.

Chapter 7 explores how formal fragmentation in Perséphone reveals its authors’ melancholic attitudes. The interpretive method here is based on Freud’s Trauer und Melancholie, Derrida’s spectrality, and Abraham and Torok’s notion of the crypt. Gide negotiates his mother’s death and the threat of young homosexuals committing suicide by escaping into archeological fantasy, and thereby connecting with a culture of gay mourning associated with British aestheticism and Walter Pater. His Persephone, like Eurydice, wanders between life and death, achieving what Christopher Peterson calls the “ultimate queer act.” Stravinsky melancholic stance is evident in “Sur ce lit,” which encrypts forbidden desire linked to death. The use of an unpublished setting of Petrarch’s Dialogue on Joy and Reason reveals the trauma of desire and loss in the heart of his neoclassic style. In his eagerness to respect the alterity of the dead, Stravinsky creates the type of disruptive form characteristic of Benjamin’s modernist allegory.

The B Text of Piers Plowman contains a surprisingly conventional repertoire of tropes about death. But by placing "Death" at the edge of the field the C Text suggests that death is a more fundamental problem throughout the poem. The salvation of the just pagan Trajan demonstrates the permeability of the boundaries of death; Trajan's famous disavowal of books is a figure of the cryptic presence of death in the poem itself.

The uncorrupted body of a just pagan found in the foundation of St. Paul's Cathedral in St. Erkenwald extends the theological and philosophical exploration of death and salvation from Piers Plowman. The undeciphered inscription on the tomb is a resonant figure of the literally cryptic nature of death.

The main seat of Hathor, one of the most important goddesses of ancient Egypt, was her temple in Dendera, the metropolis of the sixth Upper Egyptian nome. The town lay on the west bank of the Nile and its remains, including the important Hathor temple, are to be found a few kilometres south of Qena, the administrative and economic center of the modern region. It is clear from written records that the Hathor temple was already in existence at the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty in the reign of Khufu. In the temple, one very important element, from a religious point of view, are the crypts.

There was little access to professionally carved tombstones in Arkansas until after the Civil War. By the 1870s itinerant carvers, moving from town to town in search of work, made and signed tombstones that employed the popular, well-understood mourning symbols of the day (lambs, doves, flowers, anchors, hands, etc.). The lives of two carvers (one female) are examined. Certain types of grave coverings (now rare), are found in the Ozarks, including gravehouses, false crypts (often coffin-shaped) and necked discoids. When granite replaced marble markers the industry changed, too, now having professional monument yards and imported stone. The chapter also discusses epitaphs, white bronze (zinc) markers, the use of photoceramics and the widespread popularity of distinctive Woodmen of the World tree trunk markers.

This chapter adds to the canon of secret Londons through the inscription of another layer, another arcane and invisible text in the palimpsest that is the urban landscape. Such accounts of other Londons gesture toward the irreducible survivals of past landscapes in a place that constantly unearths its own history. As stated by Prof. Timothy Morton, “the streets beneath the streets, the Roman Wall, the boarded-up houses, the unexploded bombs, are records of everything that happened to London.” London's history exists in its form. From histories of the Underground to accounts by urban explorers entering the city's sewers and crypts, from compendia of obscure folklore to catalogs of nearly forgotten ghost stories, London provokes a predilection with the hidden.

Five archaeological sites were sampled across China and Mongolia to document non-traditional burials in the region. The earliest levels of the Jinlianshan site of the Dian culture (206 BC–220 AD) in Yunnan Province, China consisted of secondary burials with up to 22 individuals; these interments may have been evidence of cemetery relocations during the process of colonization and state expansion. In the Henan Province, China, the Yangshao period burials at Mianchi Duzhong (3500–3000 BC) show evidence of conflict, with several individuals killed and thrown down wells, while the Longhu Xingtian is a mass grave that includes decapitated Han soldiers who tried to retreat during the battle between Qin and Han state (230–221 BC). The burials at Hulin Am, Mongolia are from the Uighur Khanate (744–840 AD), which is a unique site in that over 80 percent of the burials are infants. One burial from a Koguryo culture (37 BCE–221 AD) fortress was beheaded, which was a form of execution reserved for defeated military, while some of the earliest evidence for possible corporal punishment comes from the Qijia culture (1900–1600 BC) in Gansu Province, China, where several individuals had their hands and feet tied, and were left within family crypts.

This chapter looks at Italy’s connection to the Gothic, with particular emphasis on the “picturesque horrors” of the Crypt of the Capuchin monks in Rome. To Northern Europeans, especially the English, Italy reeked of cultural atavism—the inbred depravity of a decaying aristocracy and the perversions of Papism (paganism in a reversed collar, as far as Protestants were concerned). To the Enlightenment mind, ancient Rome was the embodiment of classical virtues in philosophy and culture. But the brilliance of Seneca, Cicero, Horace, and Virgil had to be weighed against the horrors of Nero, Domitian, and Caligula. The Grand Tour of the Continent impressed these lessons on England’s upper class. But English Italophilia was darkened by the shadow of the Gothic. The discovery, in the late fourteenth century, of mysterious grotte, or underground chambers, in Rome’s Aventine hillside had exhumed the Gothic’s close cousin, the Grotesque. The Crypt of the Capuchin monks has a corridor with six roped-off antechambers, or chapels, such as the Crypt of the Resurrection, the Crypt of Skulls, and the Crypt of the Three Skeletons.

In their Introduction to this volume, the editors note that the contextual analysis of cremation requires an understanding that is broader and more complex than we generally assume. This chapter examines what has been termed a crematory at one site, and tries to determine the accuracy of this label and its cultural implications. The research included in this chapter is not European in focus, but instead looks at the North American site of Aztalan in southern Wisconsin. Aztalan has been excavated, studied, and interpreted over a period of more than 150 years, and serves as a useful contrast to some of the European sites in this volume because research at Aztalan has drawn on different kinds of analogies, modern allusions, and different histories of development of archaeological method and theory. However, because Aztalan is also a site that represents a widespread, structured, complex, agriculturally based society, it should provide a useful comparison with similar European groups, and expand the range of understanding and examples of cremation and fiery technologies. Of course, there is not a formal link between this site and those in Europe, but many of the same kinds of processes, and especially modern allusions and interpretations, apply to both. A discussion of cremation, copper working, and fiery displays is presented first, followed by details of the Aztalan example and the feature originally labelled a crematory (Rowe 1958). Following this, an outline of the range of Aztalan mortuary practices and pertinent ethnographic and ethnohistoric data highlights the importance of both copper and fire in the Mississippian context. Rather than simply looking at the Aztalan structure as an alternative mortuary location, this chapter tries to place the feature contextually in a much broader social, physical, landscape, and behavioural frame. Since 2000, archaeological approaches to the analysis of mortuary sites have become more sophisticated, both theoretically and analytically. In this process, scholars have begun to focus on the fact that cremation practices have often been presented and interpreted as nothing more than an alternative mortuary practice, and the presence of both cremation and inhumation in a single site is often seen as representing no more than choice or a reflection of changing practices over time.

Chapter 1 frames the first-generation German-Jewish Holocaust novel in the broader debates on Holocaust representation, and sets it against the backdrop of the (post)modern. Before either postmodernism or modern-day trauma theory, the authors of these novels were adopting what we have since come to consider as the techniques of postmodernist and trauma literature. Reacting to a personal crisis, they were already anticipating how the Holocaust would come to stand both as a singular catastrophe and as the culmination of a hyper-crisis of modernity and cornerstone of a postmodernity founded on a sense of living in an aftermath. Their response makes postmodernism and trauma theory appear as much symptomatic as diagnostic of their times. At the same time, trauma theory in conjunction with a postmodernist view of representation (e.g. in Derrida’s reading of Abraham and Torok’s psychoanalytical crypts and phantoms) has retroactively given us tools for reading the first-generation Holocaust novel.