Abstract
One funereal text to which we will return in Chapter 3 is the seventeenth-century memorial volume for John Friend.1 In March 1673, John Friend, a gentleman commoner at St Edmund’s Hall, Oxford, died of a fever. His father Nathaniel Friend commemorated his short life in a manuscript anthology which included examples of John’s childhood precocity, school exercises, university disputations, and even signatures clipped from his books and pasted into neat rows. Friend hoped that his careful narrative would prove ‘Exemplary’, composing it as a ‘patterne fit to be imitated by any’ and ‘for the continuation of the remembrance of the passages of his life, thereby to put mee in mind of him as often as I shall read’ it (1–2). But reading ‘may likewise renew my griefe of the untimely loss of him, yet hath it much of Consolation & content’. The more exacting and detailed the commemoration, the more grief it can awaken; and yet such details also fill him with a sense of ‘content and satisfaction’.
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Notes
Vittorio Gabrieli, ‘A New Digby Letter-Book: “In Praise of Venetia” ‘, National Library of Wales Journal IX.2 (Winter 1955): 138.
Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State, 1951), p. 39.
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See also Henry W. Sams, ‘Anti-Stoicism in Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-Century England’, Studies in Philology 41 (1944): 68.
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Diogenes Laertius, ‘Epicurus’, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1925), x. 124–5. Seneca, Epistles 24, The Workes, p. 211.
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The idea of life as a loan, a debt paid by death, was a commonplace of both Christian and Stoic consolation. See Richmond Lattimore, Themes in Greek and Latin Epigraphs (Urbana, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1962), pp. 170–1.
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Purgatory continued to be an option for Catholics, of course. It helped Elizabeth Cary make sense of her daughter’s baleful remarks on her deathbed. The Tragedy of Mariam, ed. Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1994), p. 202.
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Simon Jarvis, ‘Prosody as Cognition’, Critical Quarterly 40.4 (Winter 1998): 3–15 (6).
Henry King, The Sermons, ed. Mary Hobbs (Rutherford: Scolar, 1992), p. 123.
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© 2006 Andrea Brady
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Brady, A. (2006). The Rhetoric of Grief. In: English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554870_3
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