...Amy Appleford © 2008 by Duke University Press 2008 a The Dance of Death in London: John Carpenter, John Lydgate, and the Daunce of Poulys Amy...

...Judith M. Bennett The partnership of death and maidenhood—found in many cultures, present as well as past, east as well as west—is examined here in the particular context of late medieval England, when mortality was exceptionally high and maidens unusually numerous. Drawing on a wide range...

...Valeria Finucci This special issue of JMEMS addresses different ways of thinking through death and dying in the medieval and early modern period, including different philosophical and legal positions concerning the relationships between the body and its parts, corpses and burial sites, the bodies...

...Maya Mathur The Life and Death of Jack Straw chronicles the main events of the 1381 Rising in England and has traditionally been viewed as a warning about the dangers of rebellion from below. While recent studies of the play have challenged this perspective, they have focused chiefly on the drama’s...

...Benjamin A. Saltzman Mourning the death of a friend posed a problem for late Anglo-Saxon monasticism. Newly reformed under the authority of the Benedictine Rule and the Regularis Concordia , religious were precluded from developing personal friendships so as to protect a world in which all things...

...Nicholas McDowell Mortalism, the doctrine that the soul sleeps or dies with the death of the body to be reawakened or resurrected at the Last Judgment, was adopted by Luther but became a significant feature of the continental “radical Reformation” rather than of the Calvinist theology that shaped...

...Patricia Phillippy Following three-year-old Henry Montagu’s death in 1625, his father installed a memorial comprised of three objects in Barnwell All Saints Church. In addition to an alabaster monument, Sidney Montagu incorporated into his memorial program a thirteenth-century piscina (a basin...

...Sharon T. Strocchia This essay examines suicidal behaviors in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Catholic convents in light of the new attitudes toward voluntary death emerging across Europe between 1500 and 1700. Focusing on Italy, which housed the greatest number of enclosed religious women...

... was acquitted provisionally after three years in jail. Remarkably, she had the strength to produce an account of her ordeal and to bring her case before the highest court of justice in the Empire. The historical literature on witch trials has long been polarized by the quest for the most “accurate” death tolls...

...Alex Davis Our sense of the distinction between the “medieval” and the “early modern” is structured by two notions: that the early modern period is characterized by the death of a chivalric culture that is dominant in the medieval period; and that the early modern is distinguished from the medieval...

.... The polyglot heterogeneity of medicine’s vocabulary, the diversity of its audience, and the life-and- death context of its use contributed to the tension between the discourse’s aspirations and its limitations. This essay argues that widespread experiences of medicine’s jargon in the late fourteenth...

...” — is the ideal site to explore this jettisoning of materiality, maternal origin, and all reminders of death and decay. In particular, the essay examines moments of the abject’s revelation in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy , contending that the discovery space is one way...

... of the executions of four priests: Edmund Campion and Alexander Brian in 1581, Edmund Geninges in 1591, and Robert Southwell in 1595. In the narratives of these deaths, we can see how English Reformations not only occasioned new relic-making by English Catholics, but also, paradoxically, resulted in relic cults...

... their signatures as their voice. These fictions of production circulated as prosopopoeiae within women’s lifetimes alongside writers’ own scribal and print textual productions, as well as in the centuries following their deaths in the service of editorial, antiquarian, and historical projects. The complexity...

... is shuttled to-and-fro between parties as various antagonists attempt to reduce the saint to the status of an object. While superficially victorious, the saints finally fall prey to the binary logic of hagiography: to triumph over interrogation, torture, and death, the saint ultimately sacrifices her own...

... standpoint body and soul maintained a bond after death, the relics of heretics must have seemed as frightening as those of the saints seemed blessed. The essay thus stresses the close relationship between saints and heretics through the exceptional characteristics attributed to their bodies. © 2015 by Duke...

...Alastair Minnis On July 1, 1555, John Bradford was burned at Smithfield, one of the Protestant divines executed during the reign of Mary Tudor. Shortly before his death he wrote a treatise entitled The Restoration of All Things to counsel a devout woman of his circle. This expounds Romans 8:21–22...

...Amy Appleford Richard Whitford's A Work for Householders constructs a model of household governance organized around the contemplative life of the lay householder and his pastoral command over his familia. A Work for Householder 's companion text, A Daily Exercise of Death , centers on willed self...

... the fate of souls after death felt particularly urgent and important evidence for the afterlife was provided by spirits traveling back and forth between this life and the next. Insisting on a bodily experience of a spiritual space, rather than a visionary one, the knight Owein provided powerful eyewitness...