Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the Text
- List of Illustrations
- Dedication
- Introduction: Constructing Maternal Knowledge
- 1 Flesh and Stone: Dissecting Maternity in the Theatre of Anatomy
- 2 The Cabinet of Wonders: Monstrous Conceptions in the Theatre of Nature
- 3 Strange Labours: Maternity and Maleficium in the Theatre of Justice
- 4 Speaking Stones: Memory and Maternity in the Theatre of Death
- Postscript: Our Maternities: The Historical Legacy
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
4 - Speaking Stones: Memory and Maternity in the Theatre of Death
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the Text
- List of Illustrations
- Dedication
- Introduction: Constructing Maternal Knowledge
- 1 Flesh and Stone: Dissecting Maternity in the Theatre of Anatomy
- 2 The Cabinet of Wonders: Monstrous Conceptions in the Theatre of Nature
- 3 Strange Labours: Maternity and Maleficium in the Theatre of Justice
- 4 Speaking Stones: Memory and Maternity in the Theatre of Death
- Postscript: Our Maternities: The Historical Legacy
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Voce Pia Mater: Memorialising Mothers and the Death-Ritual in Early Modern England
Mothers and sculptors work
By small rehearsed caresses in the block
Each to redeeming ends,
By shame or kisses print
Good citizens, good lovers and good friends.
Lawrence Durrell, ‘Notebook’In a gloomy corner of St Edmund's Chapel in Westminster Abbey stands the monument of Elizabeth Russell who died in 1600 at the untimely age of twenty-five (Fig. 4.1). The first seated effigy of its type to be erected in an English church, it was commissioned by Elizabeth's sister Anne and as such offers a visible testimony of the enduring bond between two women. Garnished with a simple yet poignant epitaph which reads ‘She is not dead but sleepeth’, Russell's stony doppelganger adopts what one eighteenth-century commentator described as a ‘very melancholy posture’. Countless visitors file past this arresting figure on a daily basis, stopping perhaps to admire the quality of the carving or the richness of the age-coloured marble, entirely unaware that it remains at the heart of an enduring mystery.
It has not yet been explained why this tomb, dedicated to an unmarried woman, became the template for a number of similar memorials in the early years of the seventeenth century, all of which were, intrigu-ingly, devoted to mothers who had fatally succumbed to the rigours of childbirth. The earliest of these can be seen in All Saints' Church in Fulham and is dedicated to Lady Margaret Legh who passed away in 1603, a mother to nine children, three of whom died in infancy (Fig. 4.2).
- Type
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- Information
- Shakespearean MaternitiesCrises of Conception in Early Modern England, pp. 212 - 267Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2008