Shaping Remembrance from Shakespeare to Milton

This book studies the arts of remembrance in post-Reformation England, including funeral monuments, manuscripts, and artifacts, relating their meanings to Shakespeare's late plays, Milton's Comus and epitaphs, and works written or commissioned by women. This book places monuments at the center of the period's religious and cultural identities.

Whether situated in churches or circulating in more flexible, mobile works - manuscript or printed texts, jewels or rosaries, personal bequests or antique ''rarities'' - monuments were ubiquitous in post-Reformation England. In this period of religious change, the unsettled meanings of sacred sites and artifacts encouraged a new conception of remembrance and, with it, changed relationships between devotional and secular writings, arts, and identities. Beginning in the parish church, Shaping Remembrance from Shakespeare to Milton moves beyond that space to see remembrance as shaping dynamic systems within which early modern men and women experienced loss and recollection. Removing monuments from parochial or antiquarian concerns, this study re-imagines them as pervasively involved with other commemorative works, not least the writings of our most canonical authors. These far-reaching, flexible chapters combine three critical strands - religion, materiality, and gender - to describe the arts of remembrance as material and textual remains of living webs of connection in which creators and creations are mutually involved.