Quoting Death in Early Modern England: The Poetics of Epitaphs Beyond the Tomb

[...]the increase in the production of epitaphs during the sixteenth century stems from the often violent "convulsions of the theological environment in Tudor England and the more general trends towards public piety in post- Reformation culture" (17). [...]the dissolution of such instituti...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inSeventeenth - Century News (Online) Vol. 68; no. 3/4; p. 173
Main Author Bentley, Greg
Format Book Review
LanguageEnglish
Published College Station Seventeenth-Century News 01.10.2010
Subjects
Poetics
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:[...]the increase in the production of epitaphs during the sixteenth century stems from the often violent "convulsions of the theological environment in Tudor England and the more general trends towards public piety in post- Reformation culture" (17). [...]the dissolution of such institutional practices as annual masses and prayers for the dead "encouraged an individualistic turn" (19), and, third, "[t]he Protestant (increasingly secular) epitaph came to 'reoccupy' the space left by the disappearance of Purgatory" (24). Newstok's analysis of this unusual political act leads him, as he says, to make his "most extravagant claim" regarding it: "that Elizabeth imagining her own tombstone was is in some sense a precursor to the aggressively satirical publications of the 1640s, which saw the rise of epitaphs for composite fictional characters" (80).