Search Results

This chapter traces the long campaign on the part of Elizabethan and Jacobean bishops, theologians, and ordinary clergy to eradicate from the nation all traces of purgatory and intercessory prayer, such as bell-ringing in churches at Halloween. It looks at the provision of new rules and ceremonies, and the attempt to provide a new framework for the liturgical and ritual commemoration of the dead. Puritan objections to alleged remnants of intercessory prayer in the official liturgy are discussed, as are concerns and anxieties around funeral sermons and the provision of doles to the poor at funerals, the continuing practice of iconoclasm against tombs, and official attempts to inhibit it. The chapter also discusses a resurgence of interest in praying for the dead in Laudian circles in the early 17th century.

This chapter examines how the afterlife was reconceived in the Protestant religious imagination of the post-Reformation decades, suggesting that images of hell were easier to conjure than those of heaven. The ascendant doctrine of predestination implied that few would be saved, but examination of funeral sermons and epitaphs suggests that confidence in the salvation of individuals was widespread, even among ‘godly’ clergy, and parishioners were usually reassured that even their popish ancestors could be saved. Although the new doctrine insisted on a complete lack of communication between the living and the dead, this had the effect of heightening interest in the theme of the reunion of loved ones in the afterlife, and, despite the caveats of the theologians, heaven was seen as a very human society. Theologians also showed more concern than ordinary people with the final resurrection of the body.

Compared with marriage rites, Methodist burial rites and performances of funerals changed relatively slowly over two centuries. Such conservatism, however, masks the shifts in pastoral and theological understandings of bereavement, dying, death, resurrection, and eschatology that took place during that time among Methodists and within the wider society. These adjustments can be measured by the contents of funeral sermons, topics addressed in hymnals, changes in funerary customs for both the living and the dead, and alterations in the ritual text.

Both liturgically and architecturally, sermons were central to Dissenting life. Listening to the Word was at the heart of Dissenting worship and pulpits were frequently in prominent positions within the meeting house. While printed sermons have, understandably, been the focus of much work in this area, manuscript sermons also offer important insights into how sermons were used, the occasions on which they were delivered, and the reactions of their auditors. While many Dissenting sermons were devoted to themes in practical divinity—how to lead a good life (or die a good death)—they could also enable Dissenters to demonstrate their loyalty to the state or to engage in philanthropic activity. Unlike their Anglican counterparts, Dissenters were more inclined to give extemporary sermons but sermon notes allow historians to gain some insights into how the majority of sermons, which were not printed, might have been received.

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.

This chapter shows how the destruction of Victoria’s household through the deaths of her mother and husband in 1861 tested her faith, prompting an anguished search for spiritual and material sources of consolation. While this alarmed her friends and advisers, it also created a new template for popular attitudes to the throne, as preachers encouraged their congregations to feel emotional community with the mourning Queen. Victoria’s insistence that she had a religious obligation to pile up ever more baroque monuments to her husband’s virtues, ranging from the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore and the Albert Memorial Chapel to a series of pious memoirs, eventually generated resistance and scepticism. Nonethelessas later chapters will show, her widowhood became an enduring symbol of her soft power, which allowed preachers to wax eloquent on her lonely suffering.

Anna Magdalena Bach's Notebook of 1725 is a heterogeneous collection containing virtuosic and profound keyboard suites, light dances, and a number of sacred songs whose theme is death. The disarmingly fashionable style of these pieces hardly seems commensurate with the mortal musings of the poetry they set. While scholars have generally seen the Notebook’s less demanding offerings—including the songs—as a testament to Anna Magdalena’s taste for the galant style, little has been said about her apparent penchant for reflecting on, and preparing for, death through the music she chose for her Notebook. Yet it can hardly be coincidence that these musical confrontations with death and dying were inscribed during a period during which many of her own infant children died. By reading the songs' poetic texts and their musical settings against the voluminous writings on the art of dying found in the Bachs' theological library, we can recognize—and learn from—the centrality of the ars moriendi in the family's domestic life and especially in Anna Magdalena's musical practice.

Chapter 7 analyzes the reception of Featley through the lens of his post-1660 biographers and seeks to contribute to this debate and to inject further complexity into our understanding of Featley. It examines how these authors, particularly John Featley (Daniel Featley’s nephew), depicted him retrospectively in their biographical accounts. In this way, it explores the methodological dilemma of how to evaluate and utilize contrasting narratives that shed light on how competing parallel narratives served to bolster each opposing camp during the English Civil War. Most importantly, it examines how one of these “afterlives” “died” by 1660 while the other lived on through Featley’s post-Restoration biographers. This explains how later biographers were able to shape the ecclesiastical landscape of the post-Restoration Church by selectively utilizing these royalist narratives of interregnum events. In this way, it demonstrates how post-Restoration biographical accounts tell us as much—if not more—about the theological positions and concerns of the biographers and post-Restoration religious politics as about their biographical subjects.

Protestant memory and humanist pedagogy encouraged Elizabethan and Jacobean rhetoricians to use exemplarity for instrumental ends. The former precipitated a shift from stylistic to behavioural examples, and provoked controversies among writers like John Donne, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare about misinterpreting the dead; Protestants inverted the late medieval ‘cult of the living in service of the dead’ to make the dead serve the living, free to interpret their biographies for moral import. Meanwhile, humanist rhetoricians emphasized the pragmatic application of knowledge to conduct, valuing efficacy in the present over true resemblance to past exemplars. This induced Philip Sidney to defend poetry on the rhetorical basis that it could be effective at fostering virtuous action.