The Domestic “Fruite of Eves Transgression” In Stuart Funeral Sermons

Abstract

Threnoikos, or the House of Mourning, a compendious and widely circulated 1640 anthology of funeral sermons, reveals just how English Protestantism generated its own newly domesticated saints in the seventeenth century. Through its formal and generic conventions, its adoption of housewifely analogies for eulogistic preaching, and its striking narratives of the deaths of English “daughters of Eve,” Threnoikos signals how, and under what constraints, moderate divines in the Stuart era were bringing death home.