Each entry in Part III represents a salient aspect of the death arts in Renaissance England’s humanistically orientated publications, from Tudor times to the co-regency of William III and Mary II; from the veneration of the classics, sententiously sprinkled throughout original treatises and literary exercises, to a more vitalist worldview where experimental science and pragmatic philosophy would hold sway. Death played a vital role in Renaissance humanism, and archeological discoveries sparked renewed interest in old sarcophagi, tomb sculptures, and inscriptions, consistent with the general effort to reconstruct a body of knowledge from long-dead civilizations otherwise consigned to oblivion. Part of this growing interest involved filtering and repackaging the pagan classics. Consistent with the humanist impulse to extend the boundaries of what can be known and accomplished was an ever-widening view of the world occasioned by mercantile voyages aimed principally at opening trade routes and maintaining outposts; and, correlatively, the ruthless enforcing of the colonial project when subduing people from other lands and cultures was deemed expedient.

In Part II, the death arts cover the post-mortem period from funerals to commemoration, completing the death-cycle initiated by Part I with its emphasis on the pre-mortem period and preparation for death. England’s protracted Reformation complicated this latter set of death arts. The relationship of worshippers to the dead underwent substantial reorientation on account of Protestantism’s elimination of the doctrine of Purgatory. Modernized and annotated excerpts, taken from a diversity of genres – including chronicles, the Book of Common Prayer, and consolation – reflect the changes not only to the Church’s burial rites but also less ritualized remembrance, which increasingly manifested itself through epitaphs, funeral elegies, and funeral sermons. Similar confessional and political tensions may be seen in the excerpts on Protestant and Catholic martyrs. Excerpts also represent a range of more secular commemorative acts from remembering traitors, regicide, and the ideal courtier, to a mother’s elegies for her infant son and a pamphleteer’s mourning of the unnamed masses killed by the plague.

The Introduction sets out the aims and objectives of the study. The death arts, the Introduction proposes, possess the vigour and energy that built up the early modern world and injected animation into everyday existence. The chosen phrase, the ‘death arts’, while encompassing a plurality and heterogeneity of disciplines, activities, and techniques dedicated to mortality, foregrounds their artifice, thereby permitting us to conceive of the distinctive features and constructedness of Renaissance artifacts, whether textual, cognitive, or visual. Divided into the three subsections, the Introduction first outlines the legacy of the death arts in early modern English culture. Next we describe how the death arts are represented, focusing specifically on issues of gender, sexuality, and race. The introduction closes with a helpful guide for how to use the anthology.

To some extent all of the entries in this anthology are, strictly speaking, literary in that they trade in metaphors, allegorical figures, and poetic conceits as well as make use of discernible rhetorical structures and turns of phrase. Part IV therefore offers a survey and closer look at works which, in the broadest generic sense, fall under the heading of ‘literature’ – drama, poetry, and prose fiction. Regarding the latter only (for the purposes of this synoptic view of our representative sampling of literature of the period), the death arts are part and parcel of the adventures found in episodic novels. Accordingly, our three examples of this literary type run the gamut of mimetic verisimilitude from Margaret Tyler’s chivalric romance, to Mary Wroth’s pastoral romance reprising the ethos of the Sidneys’ Arcadia, and Aphra Behn’s captivity narrative reflecting Caroline England’s own ‘here and now’, the slave trade in the New World. What we find in the period is that literature has been not only caught up in and representative of the death arts but also, through its endless strategies to prompt reflection upon mortality, profoundly constitutive of them.

Part I covers the death arts that focus on the period leading up to and concluding with the advent of death. Both philosophical and biblical traditions enjoined the early modern individual to prepare physically, mentally, and spiritually for the day that he or she would die. In addition to ensuring that one’s worldly goods were in order and left to the most suitable survivors, preparation entailed attending to the health of one’s soul: one would repent of sin, cultivate a legacy of virtue, and contemplate the four last things – Death, Judgement Day, Heaven, and Hell. The primary means of instructing the religiously minded in how to die well were ars moriendi treatises, several of which are represented here. Modernized and annotated excerpts also represent many other genres, high and low, that directed readers to look deathward. Devotional and theological works, conduct manuals, emblem books, calendars, ballads, and last dying speeches illustrate not only exemplars of good and bad dying but also the various arts whereby readers could prepare themselves for the afterlife. Throughout the excerpts, the confessional and political implications of the death arts are highlighted.