Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman by Lucinda M. Becker (review)

Abstract

MLR, 100.3, 2??5 777 agree, 'A Common-wealth their Government shall be' (p. 199); given that the crabs inhabit a prostitute, surely 'Common-wealth' is primarily a bawdy pun. A more serious problem is this book's wider argument about the persistence ofthe baroque within the neoclassical: this seems to rely,on the one hand, upon an extremely wide definition of the baroque, and on the other, upon a definition of neoclassical art as dull, frigid,and static, a dubious assumption that Canfield seems to invoke solely in order to reject it. Indeed, given that some ofthe material here derives from articles up to three decades old, it is hard not to see Canfield's thesis as apost hoc means of uniting otherwise disparate material. Another problem with his approach is its paradoxical conservatism: despite Canfield's evident alertness to ideological or artistic tensions within ostensibly orthodox works, by redefining them as baroque he gives them a new kind of coherence, containing their subversive potential. Canfield's book works best ifread as the sum of its parts rather than as a thorough going account ofthe baroque. J.Paul Hunter remarks in his foreword, 'Teachers will find much useful here: classes could readily be structured around the issues [Can? field] isolates' (pp. 11-12), and I think he is right: this book provides perceptive and stimulating readings of a wide range of texts. London South Bank University Tom Rutter Death and theEarly Modern Englishwoman. By Lucinda M. Becker. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 2003. x + 226pp. ?45. ISBN 0-7546-3349-7. With this book, Lucinda M. Becker attempts an exploration of the gendering of death in early modern England. Becker's assumptions of how gender (and, indeed, human behaviour) works are somewhat mechanistic. She posits pervasive and potent norms?notably chaste, silent, and compliant womanhood and the ideal of 'dying well'?and assumes that these norms fully govern and explain both early modern women's preparations for dying and the many texts that concern themselves with women's deaths. The overarching argument is that both early modern women and the chroniclers of their deaths care, beyond anything else, about achieving a 'lasting image' of a good death. Women are schooled, mostly by printed manuals, about what it takes to die well and feel compelled to follow the model. In a final chapter, Becker discusses instances where women take the 'opportunity' of death to bolster their image further by writing, by leaving religious instructions fortheir children, for instance. Undoubtedly, the pervasive reinforcement of social norms, including patriarchy, is a defining feature of early modern culture. What Becker's study lacks, unfortu? nately, is a sustained engagement with the details, the diversity, the complexity, and the ambiguities with which the norms are re-created in local contexts and specific texts. There is too much reliance on the simple identification of 'common trends'. I often found myself wanting either more critical analysis or more of the biographical, historical, or cultural picture in which a given death plays a part. Becker states in her introduction that she will be engaging with religious differences only in very broad terms. The broad brushstrokes lead to some lost opportunities. Quaker women's deathbeds, forinstance, are discussed at some length as an example of women enabled to speak at an extreme moment. The persecution of Quakers and the debate over women's speech within the movement are gestured at, but the arguments are not placed within the evolving and changing story of the Quaker movement from the 1650s on. At what point in this complex story do published deathbeds become important and why? Furthermore, Quaker deathbeds here look very much like everyone else's. Since Quaker discourse so oftenopposed the 'deadness' ofworldly 778 Reviews things, practices, and honours to the life- and light-filled utterances and experiences that made up their testimony, one might reasonably expect that something more distinctive could be said about the Quaker response to death. A less excusable omission is that ofCalvinist predestinarian theology, which receives not even a gesture. So many of the deathbed accounts and posthumous publications discussed in this book issued from Puritan or Nonconformist women and their ministers...