Patricia Phillippy is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University. She is the author of Love's Remedies: Recantation and Renaissance Lyric Poetry (1995).

"Phillippy illuminates the complexity of interacting forces contributing both to the development of gendered norms and to the opportunities they could provide to early modern women. This is a thoughtful, creative study...Phillippy is impressive in her historicist approach to her chosen texts...Her book's value...also lies in its eclecticism. It will surely stimulate future scholarship following different trajectories. This complex, careful, and wide-ranging work will appeal to a broad, if advanced audience, while also serving as a corrective to more simplistic explorations of the relationship between gendered norms, historical context, and cultural expression." Megan L. Hickerson, King's College, London, Canadian Journal of History

• Acknowledgements; List of illustrations; Introduction; 1. A map of death; Part I. Disposing of the Body: 2. The body of history: embalming and historiography in Shakespeare's Henry VIII; 3. Humility and stoutness: the lives an deaths of Christian women; 4. London's mourning garment: maternity, mourning and succession in Shakespeare's Richard III; Part II. Sisters of Magdalene: 5. 'I might againe have been the sepulcure': maternal mourning and the encrypted corpse; 6. 'Quod licuit feci': Elizabeth Russell and the power of mourning; 7. The mat(t)er of death: the defense of Eve and the female Ars Morendi; Codicil: 'A web of blacke'; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Patricia Phillippy is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University. She is the author of Love's Remedies: Recantation and Renaissance Lyric Poetry (1995).

"Phillippy illuminates the complexity of interacting forces contributing both to the development of gendered norms and to the opportunities they could provide to early modern women. This is a thoughtful, creative study...Phillippy is impressive in her historicist approach to her chosen texts...Her book's value...also lies in its eclecticism. It will surely stimulate future scholarship following different trajectories. This complex, careful, and wide-ranging work will appeal to a broad, if advanced audience, while also serving as a corrective to more simplistic explorations of the relationship between gendered norms, historical context, and cultural expression." Megan L. Hickerson, King's College, London, Canadian Journal of History

• Acknowledgements; List of illustrations; Introduction; 1. A map of death; Part I. Disposing of the Body: 2. The body of history: embalming and historiography in Shakespeare's Henry VIII; 3. Humility and stoutness: the lives an deaths of Christian women; 4. London's mourning garment: maternity, mourning and succession in Shakespeare's Richard III; Part II. Sisters of Magdalene: 5. 'I might againe have been the sepulcure': maternal mourning and the encrypted corpse; 6. 'Quod licuit feci': Elizabeth Russell and the power of mourning; 7. The mat(t)er of death: the defense of Eve and the female Ars Morendi; Codicil: 'A web of blacke'; Notes; Bibliography; Index.