In the aftermath of Brexit, is it wise to leave English-language scholarship about the history of early modern Europe’s principal funeral ceremonies in the hands of the European Union? This coffee-table book from a Belgian firm with three French co-editors offers a salutary warning. Its subtitle contains the word diplomacy, which one rarely encounters in its sixteen articles. It has two hallmarks of pretentious ornamental books—abundant illustrations (twenty-one roman-numeral color plates and sixty black/white figures) and redundant scholarship (sixteen separate bibliographies, with many overlapping titles)—which imperfectly conceal its academic limitations. Its organization by centuries seems almost quaint, and its footnotes reveal that most of the contributors reworked earlier publications about related topics.
Most of these articles describe funeral practices in Francophone regions or the Italian peninsula. None of the contributors comes from Germany, the fifteenth-century princely funerals of which receive their interpretations from Moscow. Although two color plates (VII,...