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This section examines the use of tenses to refer to the dead in a genre that was just as codified as epitaphs but more oriented toward the pain of bereavement: consolation literature. The analysis is mainly limited to two examples: a verse epistle that Marguerite de Navarre addressed to her nephew, the new king Henri II, following the death in 1547 of François I^er (her brother and Henri’s father); and a piece that Guillaume Du Vair wrote, probably in 1584, on the death of his thirty-year-old sister that year in a cholera epidemic. Tenses did not always contribute in consolation literature to producing neat cut-off points between what part of the dead person was present (in various senses) and what was past or absent (in various senses), but they enabled writers to explore the difficulty, and sometimes the pain, of trying to establish or recognize such cut-off points.

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.

Two broad approaches to human nature found in early modern writers are discussed. The first approach, descriptive, focuses on identifying and describing the key properties of human nature, and frequently aims to use this description as grounds for ethical norms (as in the Aristotelian and Stoic traditions). La Bruyère’s Les Caractères takes this approach, but his characters are as much social as psychological types, and their behaviour is interpreted in terms of relationships rather than individual dispositions. His ‘essentialism’ is a vehicle not only of moral but of social critique. Finally, there is a discussion of how far women and children are incorporated into this vision of human nature. The second approach, problematic, emphasizes the difficulty of identifying the intrinsic properties of human nature. This is sometimes linked to a stress on the difficulty of self-discovery. But the contribution of Augustine’s theology is also crucial: original sin has transformed and corrupted human nature.

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.