SCOTT L. NEWSTOK. Quoting Death in Early Modern England: The Poetics of Epitaphs Beyond the Tomb.

Abstract

Scott L. Newstok’s Quoting Death in Early Modern England offers a compelling and well-researched study of the functions and myriad forms of epitaphs in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Ten years after Nigel Llewellyn’s influential study of post-Reformation monuments, new scholarship on man’s efforts to perpetuate his memory in the face of what Sir Walter Ralegh called ‘eloquent, just, and mighty death’ continues to thrive. Both Peter Sherlock’s Monuments and Memory in Early Modern England (2008) and Keith Thomas’s The Ends of Life (2009) were published too recently to influence Newstok, but these books form an exemplary triad. All three are concerned with the ‘individualistic turn’ (p. 19) toward self-conscious memorialisation, and the attention to Fame rather than intercessions with the dissolution of traditional religion. Newstok’s subject is, uniquely, the epitaph’s shift from text to concept via quotation, or from the ‘locative’ tombstone (‘here lies…’), to the ‘mobile text’ quoted in other texts, to the abstract notion of a legacy independent of concrete texts. The study of these other texts constitutes most of Newstok’s argument, which considers the use of epitaphs in public speech, in historiography, in poetics, in drama and finally in elegy. Methodologically, both Newstok and Thomas are retrospective ethnographers (in the latter’s self-description); both concatenate gathered shards of evidence into narrative arguments, which are compelling even when that evidence feels dislocated from its context. The sense that one could linger over passing references and quotations at greater length is inevitable in arguments such as these, which present an impressively resourceful collection of evidence. Yet this strength is also an admitted weakness: the mosaic’s design is deliberately provisional, with fragments left out. Newstok’s paratexts alone—his acknowledgements and epigraphs—bespeak his prodigious consultations both of past documents and present authorities. Their admixture reflects not the new historicist mingling of texts and sources; it reflects the early modern cultural origins of this movement’s desire to speak with the dead, to extend Newstok’s own claim. Everything ‘new’ is old again, and making new books and arguments is possible when methodologies mature: when it is possible to entertain both the circulation of social energies (say) and individual rhetorical motives.