Patricia Phillippy examines the crucial literal and figurative roles played by women in death and mourning during the early modern period. Using funerary, liturgical, and lamentational practices; as well as diaries, poems and plays; she illustrates the consistent gendering of rival styles of grief in post-Reformation England. Phillippy utilizes a wide range of published and archival material dating from the Reformation to the seventeenth century, to provide a study of appeal to cultural and literary historians.