Abstract

Many histories of the civil war and biographies of Margaret Lucas Cavendish recount the story that, in 1648, parliamentary soldiers desecrated the Lucas family tomb, scattered the remains of Cavendish’s mother and sister, and tore out the corpses’ hair to wear in their hats. Tracking down the sources of this widely repeated story, this essay examines the role of textual accounts in producing the effect that bodies precede them. Events and stories, flesh, facts, and fiction, prove to be very difficult to untangle.

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