structural:expansion, stylistic:style_transfer, structural:summarization
Middle Ages

In parts of Europe, cremation was forbidden by law, and even punishable by death if combined with Heathen rites. Cremation was sometimes used by Catholic authorities as part of punishment for accused heretics, which included burning at the stake. For example, the body of John Wycliff was exhumed years after his death and burned to ashes, with the ashes thrown in a river, explicitly as a posthumous punishment for his denial of the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.

The first to advocate for the use of cremation was the physician Sir Thomas Browne in Urne Buriall (1658) which interpreted cremation as means of oblivion and reveals plainly that "'there is no antidote against the Opium of time...". Honoretta Brooks Pratt became the first recorded cremated European individual in modern times when she died on 26 September 1769 and was illegally cremated at the burial ground on Hanover Square in London.