This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This volume provides a series of
illuminating perspectives on the timings of death through in-depth studies of Shakespearean
tragedy criminal execution embalming practices fears of premature burial rumours of Adolf
Hitler¿s survival and the legal concept of brain death. In doing so it explores a number of
questions including: how do we know if someone is dead or not? What do people experience at
the moment when they die? Is death simply a biological event that comes about in temporal
stages of decomposition or is it a social event defined through cultures practices and
commemorations? In other words when exactly is death? Taken together these contributions
explore how death emerges in a series of stages that are uncertain paradoxical and socially
contested.
