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Article: 'Rooted Sorrow': Dying in Early Modern England.
- Article from:
- Renaissance Quarterly
- Article date:
- March 22, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 The Renaissance Society of America. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The two books under review come to very different conclusions about how death was met in the English Renaissance imagination. In "Rooted Sorrow": Dying in Early Modern England, Bettie Anne Doebler argues that the English Renaissance provides a salutary alternative to a late-twentieth century culture that in her view represses death. Renaissance literature concerning death, according to this reading, was properly consoling and accepting of the final hour; the Renaissance, Doebler writes, can therefore help us "minister to the rooted sorrow of our own mortality" (249). In stark contrast, Robert Watson's book, The Rest is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English ...