The book traces how death shaped cities and vice versa, arguing that by studying death and the city, we can open new areas of research in religious, political and cultural change. It is essential for students and scholars of death in the medieval period. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of Mortality.

Martin Christ is Research Fellow at the Max Weber Centre of the University of Erfurt, where he works on the urban dead of Munich and London as part of the research group "Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations". He is interested in confessional coexistence in early modern Europe, urban history and the placement and treatment of the dead in major European centres. He has recently published Biographies of a Reformation. Religious Change and Confessional Coexistence in Upper Lusatia, 1520-1635 (2021).

Carmen González Gutiérrez is currently Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow at the department of Art History, Archaeology and Music at the University of Córdoba, Spain. She is part of the Getty sponsored workshop series "Mediterranean Palimpsests: Connecting the Art and Architectural Histories of Medieval & Early Modern Cities" (MCities). She specialises in the medieval history and archaeology of al-Andalus, especially during the Umayyad period. She has published on the medieval archaeology of Córdoba, Islamic architecture, and the history of mosques in al-Andalus.

Introduction: Death and the city in premodern Europe 1. Placemaking of the dead in urban Rome 2. Love, death, and funerals in ancient Rome: on the goddess Libitina 3. Death in Smyrna: the Martyrdom of Polycarp as urban event 4. Islamic funerary archaeology in Córdoba (Spain): state of the art and future paths 5. Regulating urban death in early modern German towns 6. Afterword: urbanity and the afterlife of death