Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England [Paperback]

This collection reexamines commemoration and memorialization as generative practices illuminating the hidden life of Renaissance death arts.This collection of essays by leading scholars of death and memory studies outlines the cultural, religious, epistemological, and political contexts for understanding how people in Renaissance England engaged with memorialization while at the same time recalling their own mortality.This collection of essays by leading scholars of death and memory studies outlines the cultural, religious, epistemological, and political contexts for understanding how people in Renaissance England engaged with memorialization while at the same time recalling their own mortality.Drawing together leading scholars of early modern memory studies and death studies, Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England explores and illuminates the interrelationships of these categories of Renaissance knowing and doing, theory and praxis. The collection features an extended Introduction that establishes the rich vein connecting these two fields of study and investigation. Thereafter, the collection is arranged into three subsections, 'The Arts of Remembering Death', 'Grounding the Remembrance of the Dead', and 'The Ends of Commemoration', where contributors analyse how memory and mortality intersected in writings, devotional practice, and visual culture. The book will appeal to scholars of early modern literature and culture, book history, art history, and the history of mnemonics and thanatology, and will prove an indispensable guide for researchers, instructors, and students alike.Introduction: Between memory and death William E. Engel, Rory Loughnane and Grant Williams; Part I. The Arts of Remembering Death: 1. Death and the art of memory in Donne Rebeca Helfer; 2. Spiritual accountancy in the age of Shakespeare Jonathan Baldo; 3. Recollection and preemptive resurrection in Shakespeare's sonnets John S. Garrison; 4. Learn how to die Scott Newstok; Part II. GroundlãN