Death, Church, and Family in England Between the Late Fifteenth and the Early Eighteenth Centuries

Abstract

In Catholic Europe, continuity outweighed change in theology, liturgy, and devotional practice. Despite the influence of the new currents which flowed through the post-Tridentine church, the most vigorous forms of’Baroque’ piety had their roots in the later Middle Ages. This chapter traces the main effects of religious change over a longer period. It is concerned with the death-bed and the last will as well as the funeral, burial, and the means of commemoration. The Reformation set in train a series of changes in the English ‘way of death’, some of which took immediate effect while others were much more gradual. It is widely agreed that the sixteenth-century reforms reduced the prominence and authority of the clergy in English society. Variety and continuity must be emphasized as well as change. There was an immense diversity of individual experience of death, shaped by social class, religious belief, the nature of the terminal illness, and the attitudes of close relatives.