Manuscript, Monument, Memory: the Circulation of Epitaphs in the 17th Century

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Poetic epitaphs are important texts in any investigation into literary representations of death and memory in early-modern England. Seventeenth-century antiquarians such as Stow, Camden and Weever were anxious to preserve these inscriptions for posterity, aware that the engravings were vulnerable both to natural wear and iconoclastic attacks on tombs; they surveyed monuments, transcribing epitaphs and printing them, rightly considering multiple paper copies to be more enduring than a single stone. Epitaphs, some originally copied from tombstones, some composed solely for the page, also appeared in large numbers in printed poetry miscellanies suggesting that 17th-century readers wanted to read epitaphs alongside other popular forms such as the sonnet and the epigram. Recent studies on early-modern monuments and literary epitaphs focus on two mediums: the tombstone and the printed page; they tend not to engage with manuscripts. This article examines what might be added to the field by considering the appearance of epitaphs in manuscript miscellanies: do we discover unique texts; can we uncover additional biographical context about printed or monumental inscriptions; what do the choices of texts preserved tell us about attitudes towards epitaphs among 17th-century readers? To provide some illustrations of the value of such investigation, I consider the circulation of three oft-copied epitaphs: one devout, one a bawdy jest and the other libellous. Telling stories of adaptive survival with a strong sense of the weaving backwards and forwards between manuscript, monument and memory, they are at once individual case studies but illustrative of broader social and circulation trends.