Title: "Rooted sorrow"
First published: 1994
Description: "Rooted Sorrow" is a literary and cultural study of death and dying through selected images, events, and words that interact in expressive forms between 1590 and 1631. In the first half the book sets up the prismatic method by which the author examines several of Shakespeare's plays in terms of the survival of the late medieval ars moriendi tradition. The devotional tradition of the ars embodies an oft-repeated ritual of preparation for dying, with especial emphasis on the temptation to despair.

The second half of the book develops a poetics of comfort for mourning survivors that reveals both the necessity of lament and the faith in immortality by which culture arrived at acceptance. Ironically the harsh anger of grief becomes a crucial station on the way to the acceptance of death.

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The book as a whole is a chronicle of the intelligent struggle of those persons in England who faced a world inhabited by a pervasive sense of death and its triumphs. It is ultimately the courage of the struggle with its affirmation of the power of life over death that Milton brings out in his great allegory of that image. His narrative transforms the violent figures of Sin and Death that dominate the hellish vision of the early section of the poem into the later figure of Death as release.

Doebler shows that in early texts (as in life) the tension between those two images is never fully resolved.
Subjects: Death, Death in literature, English literature, History, History and criticism, Intellectual life, Literature and society, Social aspects, Social aspects of Death, English literature, history and criticism, early modern, 1500-1700, Death, social aspects, Sociology, Attitude to Death
Places: England
Time periods: 17th century, Early modern, 1500-1700
LC classification: PR438.D44 D63 1994