Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England

In Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England Patricia Phillippy examines the crucial literal and figurative roles played by women in death and mourning during the early modern period. By examining early modern funerary, liturgical, and lamentational practices, as well as diaries, poems and plays, she illustrates the consistent gendering of rival styles of grief in post-Reformation England. Phillippy emphasises the period’s textual and cultural constructions of male and female subjects as predicated upon gendered approaches to death. She argues that while feminine grief is condemned as immoderately emotional by male reformers, the same characteristic that opens women’s mourning to censure enable its use as a means of empowering women’s speech. Phillippy calls on a wide range of published and archival material that date from the Reformation to well into the seventeenth century, providing a study that will appeal to cultural as well as literary historians.

• The topics of death, mourning and grief in the early modern period are examined with lucidity • Examines the gendered culture of grief in post-Reformation England • Should be of interest to cultural historians as well as literary scholars

Acknowledgments; List of illustrations; Introduction; 1. A map of death; Part I. Disposing of the Body: 2. The body of history: embalming and historiography in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII; 3. Humility and stoutness: the lives an deaths of Christian women; 4. London’s mourning garment: maternity, mourning and succession in Shakespeare’s Richard III; Part II. Sisters of Magdalene: 5. ‘I might againe have been the sepulcure’: maternal mourning and the encrypted corpse; 6. ‘Quod licuit feci’: Elizabeth Russell and the power of mourning; 7. The mat(t)er of death: the defense of Eve and the female Ars Morendi; Codicil: ‘A web of blacke’; Notes; Bibliography; Index.