Epitaph

Early modern women writers produced a rich array of poetic epitaphs across the media of funerary monuments, manuscript, and print. The epitaphs of Elizabeth Russell (née Cooke; also Hoby) and Katherine Philips demonstrate how funerary monuments enabled some women to publish funerary verse; while those preserved and circulated in manuscript by Elizabeth Cary, Anne Southwell, and Lucy Hutchinson evidence how other women utilized the medium’s comparative privacy to comment upon contemporary political figures and events. This entry then turns to epitaphs in printed collections of poetry, those of Anne Bradstreet, “Eliza,” Anne Killigrew, and Elizabeth Tipper, reading them as an important part of authorial self-fashioning in print.