This Body of Death

This Body of Death explores how the lyric poetry and other nonnarrative literary forms of early modern England shape our understanding of what it means to be mortal. Previous studies of the nature of death in this period have looked almost exclusively at narrative source material: plays, theological accounts, historical reports. Those narrative forms, consequently, have emphasized death, the narrative dimension of mortality—an event in time, life's climactic ending. Eileen Sperry looks instead t