Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England

Phillippy examines the literal and figurative roles played by women in death and mourning during the early modern period.

Patricia Phillippy (Author)

9780521126182, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 14 January 2010

324 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.48 kg

"[Phillippy] excavates valuable and wide-ranging documents on women's involvement in death and dying, and carefully distinguishes between women's self-representations and other cultural constructions. Moreover, she maintains a carefully nuanced understanding of public and private roles often oversimplified in studies of early modern women's lives and works....Phillippy offers a valuable model for historicizing affect and provides an important service for literary critics and historians of the early modern period through her extensive archival research." H-WOMEN

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.

Acknowledgements
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.

Subject Areas: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], British & Irish history [HBJD1], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]