Rooted sorrow : dying in early Modern England /

This study of the ars moriendi tradition as it applies to literary and pictorial expressions of the late 16th and early 17th centuries is largely a pulling together of previously published journal articles. As a result, it is highly repetitive both in presentation and in wording. Its potential audience is also problematic, as it seems aimed at those critics who could have read both the articles and the secondary sources used in the book. Unlike Arnold Stein's very readable The House of Death (CH, May'87), it is often awkwardly expressed, and, in spite of a rather lovely afterword, it separates itself from a wider audience by claiming the loss of the religious and philosophical foundations of beliefs that were held in the earlier period: a questionable position if recent polls and studies are right about current religious beliefs. Setting forth the earlier traditions, it covers books of the period, three Shakespearean plays whose connections to the tradition seem rather forced, and elements of Spenser and Milton; it also emphasizes the element of comfort in Donne's sermons and poems, although not in that order. It is replete in such problems as having a quote from Luke which does not appear in Luke and describing Spenser and Milton as "widely separated in time" (Spenser died at age 47, just nine years before Milton was born). B. W. Whitlock; emeritus, Midwestern State University