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This chapter discusses the Justice of the Peace Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, who was another important character in the progress of the Popish Plot. It considers Godfrey's posthumous talismanic presence in anti-Catholic plot discourse. Godfrey is noted to have witnessed Titus Oates' deposition of ‘evidence’ relating to the plot.

This section examines the use of tenses to refer to the dead in the abundantly practised genre of the epitaph, mainly in verse. Although most of the epitaphs considered were written to be read on the page rather than on a tombstone, it is argued that they still formed part of the ritualized cycle of event and replay. In other words, the notion of ritual is extended to reading. Tenses in epitaphs communicated a subtly gradated spectrum of degrees of posthumous presence, ranging from boldly asserted presence or absence—at the two extremes—to many in-between states. The ‘feel’ of presence or absence communicated by them provided important nuances, supplements, or correctives to the semantic surfaces of epitaphs. Tense-use in epitaphs often problematized posthumous presence, whether by denying or attenuating it or else by foregrounding the cognitive effort needed to perceive it.

Part II showed that tenses were fundamental to early modern rituals of dying, burying, and mourning. One strand within such rituals was the representation of the actions and words that the deceased had performed and produced during his or her life. In Part III the role of tenses in this strand is examined more closely, but with the focus no longer on the ritual dimension. This first section of Part III focuses on how dead people’s non-verbal actions were represented as providing them with posthumous presence, through three interconnected routes: (i) the system of exemplarity; (ii) history-writing; (iii) one of the deceased person’s faculties—his or her will—being extended and continued through the actions of the living.

Part IV explores how many of the contexts and strands of tense-use for the dead that have been explored separately so far were combined in practice by two of the greatest vernacular prose writers of the European Renaissance. The first is François Rabelais. This chapter starts by outlining the general economy of tenses with which the dead are referred to in his fictional chronicles. Then, two sequences of Rabelais’s chapters are analysed in detail. Each stretches and tests that economy of tenses in particularly intense ways in order to explore posthumous survival or non-survival. The first sequence is Chapters 3–8 of Pantagruel (1532); the second is Chapters 17–28 of the Quart livre (1552).

The second case study of a major vernacular writer is Montaigne. The tenses of his Essais (first published 1580–95) communicate wavering and hesitation as to how much presence to attribute or deny to ancients, to the more recently dead, or to what Montaigne represents as the now-dead phases of his own life. The distinctiveness of his tense-use rests partly on a paradox. On the one hand, his emphasis on the tenuousness or even the non-existence of the present moment leads him to use the Présent in a way that drains its referents of stable content. Yet, on the other hand, this very undermining pulls readers with unusual power into a communing with this now-dead author.

Modern uses of tenses to refer to the dead in French and English are sketched, in necessarily selective and provisional terms, since no survey has yet been found to exist. First, grounds are suggested for arguing that modern tense-use drives more of a wedge between the living and the dead than does much tense-use in early modern French. Examples are taken from literature and historiography. Secondly, those grounds are qualified, using examples from the same two discourses with the addition of journalism.

This section examines the use of tenses to refer to the dead in selective examples from funeral sermons. Whereas theologians attempted to pin down the exact kind of posthumous presence attributed to Christ by tense at the Eucharist, in funeral sermons—devoted to the non-divine dead—tenses could sometimes serve not just to delimit posthumous presence in a precise way but also to communicate its uncertainty or vagueness.

Following the analysis of how tenses helped imbue the deceased’s actions with posthumous presence, this section explores how tenses did the same for the words that the deceased had actually or allegedly spoken while alive. The focus is on the representation of dead orators, both from classical antiquity and from more recent times (in the parlements of France). The tenses with which Du Vair describes both groups tend paradoxically to attribute greater posthumous presence to the more temporally remote group (the ancient orators). Others attributed a stronger posthumous presence to the oratory of recently deceased parlementaires. And, in the paratexts of humanist editions and translations of ancient orators, tenses created an oscillation between (what humanism construed as) present object and absent context, with the once-spoken words sometimes ‘breaking through’ from their originary context into the present.

This section creates a framework within which Part II will analyse tense-use. The framework is that of early modern rituals associated with death—both its liminal phase and its aftermath. The notions of event and replay are introduced: some rituals were concerned more with the event of dying, and others with replaying that event; many rituals blurred the distinction between the two. Rituals mediated posthumous presence that was often conceived of as the passing on of a gift.

This section examines the fierce Reformation debates about the meaning of the present-tense est in the phrase uttered by the priest or pastor during the celebration of the sacrament of the Eucharist: Hoc est corpus meum (This is my body). The very nature of Christ’s dying-in-order-to-live-on was believed to turn on the exact meaning of this est. Calvinists accused Catholics of misconstruing the nature of Christ’s posthumous presence by surreptitiously relying on figurative interpretation of the est as an instance of temporum enallagē, while being paradoxically oblivious to what were instances of that figure in the Bible.