Tracing a transfiguration of death in seventeenth-century religious literature

The central focus of my dissertation's final chapter was on how two of George Herbert's poems ('Death' and 'Heaven') could have succeeded in dispelling mortal fear in his aged Christian reader by presenting death as a transcendent event to be welcomed, rather than something to be feared. Of course, this transfiguration in attitude is aligned with the progression in the presentation of death seen across the Old and New Testaments. Here, death is transformed from a finite event in which the body is simply recommitted to the dust from which it was created (Genesis 3:19, and see also 'The Order for the Burial of the Dead' in John Booty's edition of the 1599 Book of Common Prayer), to its position in the New Testament as a transcendent event for the Christian soul that, according to Scripture, was provided by Christ's self-sacrifice and the resulting doctrine of soteriology.

One of the most interesting things that I observed when looking at Herbert's 'Death' (which I have reproduced below from Helen Wilcox's edition), is how the poem follows this Biblical chronology of transforming death into a positive event. In relation to this, it also constructs a powerful pictorial representation of death's transfiguration by drawing upon its personified form as a skeletal figure that was seen in the meditatio mortis tradition of the Renaissance. In Herbert’s poem, the figure of death is gradually transformed from being the fear-inducing figure of this artistic tradition, where it is 'nothing but bones', to a figure that, 'since our Saviors death', is 'clad' with 'beauty' and can be 'much sought for as a good'.

When researching other primary sources which support or echo this transfiguration that Herbert enacts, I came across a fascinating source entitled Death's Universall Summons (EEBO) published in 1650. Whilst obviously published some time after Herbert's death in 1633, this anonymous work presents a discourse between 'the great Messenger of Mortality' and 'a presumptious Sinner', and it concludes with this man's 'chearful Entertainment of Death' (p. 1). Apart from a similar transfiguration of a Christian individual's attitude to death, what also struck me was this illustration included on the pamphlet's title page:

I would suggest that this skeletal figure (who is certainly an allusion to the meditatio mortis tradition seen in Renaissance art such as Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors) is very similar to the terrifying figure that Herbert alludes to in the first half of his poem. Furthermore, like the conclusion of Herbert's poem where his speaker welcomes death 'as a good', this dialogue also concludes with the Sinner confidently stating that 'my Friend [Death] I do Embrace' (p. 8). Because of Christ's own transfiguration of death, the Sinner has realised that the Christian can, in the spiritual and physical sense respectively, 'go Live for-ever, yet for-ever Die!' (p. 7) by greeting this personified figure of death.

I was so excited when I came across this obscure pamphlet in my research around Herbert's poem, and I'd love to hear if anyone else has found any other similar transfigurations of death in some of the more obscure religious literature of the seventeenth-century (whether poetic or otherwise!).

‘Death’

Death, thou wast once an uncouth hideous thing,

                           Nothing but bones,

      The sad effect of sadder groans:

Thy mouth was open, but thou couldst not sing.

For we considered thee as at some six

                           Or ten years hence,

      After the loss of life and sense,

Flesh being turned to dust, and bones to sticks.

We looked on this side of thee, shooting short;

                         Where we did find

      The shells of fledge souls left behind,

Dry dust, which sheds no tears, but may extort.

But since our Savior’s death did put some blood

                           Into thy face,

      Thou art grown fair and full of grace,

Much in request, much sought for as a good.

For we do now behold thee gay and glad,

                           As at Doomsday;

      When souls shall wear their new array,

And all thy bones with beauty shall be clad.

Therefore we can go die as sleep, and trust

                           Half that we have

      Unto an honest faithful grave;

Making our pillows either down, or dust.

• George Herbert, ‘Death’, in The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. by Wilcox, p. 648. 
• Death's Universall Summons: or, A General Call; to all Mankind, to the Grave: in a Dialogue Betwixt a Presumptious Sinner, and the Great Messenger of Mortality (London: [n. pub.], 1650), in EEBO.
• The Book of Common Prayer: 1559 The Elizabethan Prayer Book, ed. by John E. Booty.

© Jenna Townend 2013