The Death Arts in Renaissance England

The first-ever critical anthology of the death arts in Renaissance England, this book draws together over 60 extracts and 20 illustrations to establish and analyse how people grappled with mortality in the 16th and 17th centuries. As well as providing a comprehensive resource of annotated and modernized excerpts, this engaging study includes commentary on authors and overall texts, discussions of how each excerpt is constitutive and expressive of the death arts, and suggestions for further reading. The extended Introduction takes into account death's intersections with print, gender, sex, and race, surveying the period's far-reaching preoccupation with, and anticipatory reflection upon, the cessation of life. For researchers, instructors, and students interested in medieval and early modern history and literature, the Reformation, memory studies, book history, and print culture, this indispensable resource provides at once an entry point into the field of early modern death studies and a springboard for further research.

William E. Engel is the Nick B. Williams Professor of Literature at the University of the South, Sewanee. He is the author of five books on literary history, memory studies and applied emblematics, including Mapping Mortality (1995), Death and Drama in Renaissance England (2002), and co-editor of The Memory Arts in Renaissance England (Cambridge, 2016). He is on the editorial board of Renaissance Quarterly and is the Renaissance Society of America's Discipline Representative for Emblems.

Rory Loughnane is Reader in Early Modern Studies and Co-Director of the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at University of Kent. He is the author or editor of eight books, including, most recently, Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594 (Cambridge UP, 2020) and The Death Arts in Renaissance England (Cambridge UP, 2022). He is a General Editor of The Oxford Marlowe, a General Editor of The Revels Plays series for Manchester UP, an Associate Editor of the New Oxford Shakespeare, and a Series Editor of Routledge's Studies in Early Modern Authorship and Cambridge's Shakespeare and Text. He was awarded the 2019 Charles and Rose G. Hoffman Prize for distinguished work in Marlowe studies.

Grant Williams is an Associate Professor of English at Carleton University. He has co-edited four collections: Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture: Lethe's Legacies (2004), Ars reminiscendi: Memory and Culture in the Renaissance (2009), Taking Exception to the Law: Materializing Injustice in Early Modern English Literature (2015), and The Memory Arts in Renaissance England: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge, 2016). He is currently working on an introduction to an edition of Henry Chettle's Kindheart's Dream and Piers Plainness and a SSHRC funded project to study 16th and 17th century emblematic title pages.