Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman (review)

Reviews 181 Parergon 21.2 (2004) regain the ‘aura of meaning and association that traditionally informed them’ (p. 185). Throughout Bath is conscious of the ways in which these Scottish examples often inventively rehandle their sources. In doing so he moves far from Apted’s more descriptive work. The splendid colour photographs, with the detailed Inventory, enhance his progress. One can only wish that he had drawn together all the valuable interpretative comments into a final chapter. For the second edition the small errors and omissions, such as the reference to ‘Ballachastell’ (p. 4) not indexed; the references to ‘Mantz, Gardner and Ramsden 1997’(p. 16) and ‘Bath and Willshire 1996’ (p. 30) not in the bibliography; the inconsistent treatment of heraldic references (Lyndsay’s, National Library of Scotland, Adv. MS 31.4.3, is not given but Sawers’ and Workman’s are), and of a location map, should be corrected. Janet Hadley Williams English, School of Humanities The Australian National University Becker, Lucinda M., Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2003; hardback; pp. ix, 226; 3 b/w illustrations; RRP £45; ISBN 0754633497. Ashgate Publishing has been responsible for an interesting series of books that look at oblique corners of the lives and writings of women in the medieval and Early Modern periods and Lucinda Becker’s title promises a welcome addition to the corpus. There is no doubt that much scholarly attention has been devoted to the subject of death, but this effort has generally excluded studies of gender as well as of the popular literature connected with mourning such as comic and bawdy epitaphs and elegies. Becker’s contribution has little in common with more conventional works such as Arnold Stein, The House of Death; Joshua Scodel, The English Poetic Epitaph; or Bettie Anne Doebler, ‘Rooted Sorrow’: Dying in Early Modern England. The book is divided into three sections: an overview of death in Early Modern England, an examination of the female version of the good and bad death, and an assessment of death as an opportunity to leave a lasting impression through publication, legal documents, sermons and memorials. Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman is clearly written and displays an awareness of theoretical 182 Reviews Parergon 21.2 (2004) issues, but does so without jargon. The book draws heavily on primary rather than secondary sources and is well annotated. As the author notes in her conclusion, her research forms a starting point for an exploration of death and the female. This is a limitation that sometimes results in a lack of focus and clear line of argument, which tends at times to render the book a motley collection of disparate, if noteworthy, fragments. One of the book’s strengths, however, is its inclusion of many idiosyncratic and non-canonical writings: poems and pamphlets that do not appear in anthologies or critical studies of the period. These come together to create a sense of dying as spectacle and as potential literary legacy, whether at home or in some more public place. The first section of the book draws on a wide variety of written accounts of women in death, produced in every genre. Becker suggests that the chroniclers of death engaged in a ‘textual shaping of reality’ rather than ‘an accurate representation of the deceased’. Social and cultural pressures, however, operated equally on representations of male death where narrative accounts or expressions of sincere sorrow are packaged into conventional forms. Elegies, which dominate mid seventeenth-century poetry, inevitably follow the classical prescription of including eulogy in lamentatio and concluding with a consolatio of Christian cliché. (And where are the great elegies written for a woman?) Prison writings and gallows speeches (which gave many women, but also many men, a voice in print for the first time) often follow the standard form of conversion narratives.All are overlaid with the Puritan conception of the ‘good death’. Death in childbirth, however, provides a separate category and is dealt with in some detail in Chapter 2, following which Becker looks at death as punishment in a fascinating section, which could have been expanded or re-organised. The failed execution of Anne Green is mentioned, but Becker fails to...