“Dr Evy Johanne Håland is to be congratulated on assembling a rich and thought-provoking collection of contributions on the subject of ‘Women and Death on the Margins of Europe and Beyond’. As she remarks, the most notable works on the subject of death were written quite some time ago; yet it is arguable that the subject has never been more timely, given the increasingly interdisciplinary approaches to questions of culture in university teaching and research and the need for common themes around which to articulate specialist work. The recent expansion of the European community makes its integration of studies of east and west particularly welcome.
Women and Death are universal categories, and offer an immediately coherent framework for the research presented in this collection by anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, literary scholars, folklorists and others. Dr Håland as editor has the advantage of an academic specialisation in southern Europe, along with a Nordic background. She has scored a coup in securing the participation of Gail Holst-Warhaft, whose opening essay not only gives an interpretative overview, but also links the current work, much of it based on extended original research by younger scholars, with classic publications on the ritual lament, such as Holst-Warhaft’s own earlier work and that of Margaret Alexiou.
The present volume casts its net widely, and includes original fieldwork as well as rereadings of earlier material. It should be of interest to teachers and researchers in a wide variety of disciplines, and should also be most useful as an undergraduate textbook, in Women’s Studies and Intercultural studies, as well as in the specialised areas represented.
I have learned much from this manuscript, and commend it highly.”
Angela Bourke MRIA
Professor of Irish-Language Studies

"Editor Evy Håland has done the scholarly world a great service in bringing together this set of essays. Each chapter reflects extremely careful research and offers a wonderful richness of descriptive detail. Several chapters push the current theoretical and methodological envelope. In this volume some readers may encounter for the first time women’s laments— a topic of perennial scholarly interest. Although previous lament scholarship covers some of the same local traditions, several chapters here offer striking new insights into the poetics, paradoxes, and power of lament. Other chapters introduce traditions that have received almost no attention. At our best, we who study history and culture can uncover broad patterns of social life even when focusing narrowly on a particular practice. This collection’s focus on women and death reveals much about the social life of signs, the ways authority is produced and reproduced, and the alchemy resulting from the mixing of suffering, resistance, and play in the work of culture. Thus students of history, cultural studies, folklore, and anthropology will find the collection extremely useful."

Jim Wilce, Professor of Anthropology Editor, Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture, Northern Arizona University