Elizabeth Hodgson, Grief and Women Writers in the English RenaissanceEric Parisot, Graveyard Poetry: Religion, Aesthetics and the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Poetic Condition

Abstract

The changes wrought by the British Reformations extended well beyond the institutions of church and state. Tracing the ways those changes affected post-Reformation literature has, in recent years, become something of a cottage industry within literary studies. The two books reviewed here contribute to this flourishing ‘religious turn’. Both books explore poetic responses to death, and despite considerable differences between the periods they deal with, both find that developments in theology and spirituality had crucial effects on their chosen bodies of literature. This is especially true of Protestantism’s rejection of purgatory, as each author points out (Hodgson, 2; Parisot, 18). Elizabeth Hodgson’s book considers a diverse assortment of works spanning the early sixteenth to the late seventeenth century, but its principal concern is the poetry of loss written by four women: Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, Aemilia Lanyer, Lady Mary Wroth, and Katherine Philips. The book’s thematic focus is wider than its title suggests, because it discusses both the inner feeling of grief and the outward expression of mourning without distinguishing them (as Hamlet does so pointedly).