The Disappearance of the Dead From Real and Imaginary Epitaphs of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century England

Abstract : This article pinpoints the decisive moment of the two hundred year "life" of the poetic genre of the epitaph, with the context both of funerary monuments and social history in England. By following the history of epitaphic inscriptions, this article records the change in the relationship of the living and the dead from early modern England to what we would call our modernity. The dead, already disappeared but still among the living in early modern England, underwent a second and irrevocable disappearance once the value of the permanence of the dead succumbed to the value of the ephemerality of the living in a society based evermore on accelerating change and the privilege of the present over past and future.