The AskHistorians Podcast is a project that highlights the users and answers that have helped make /r/AskHistorians one of the largest history discussion forums on the internet. You can subscribe to us via iTunes, Stitcher, or RSS, and now on YouTube and Google Play. You can also catch the latest episodes on SoundCloud. If there is another index you'd like the cast listed on, let me know!
This episode was recorded by u/AnnalsPornographie, I'm just uploading it for him.
This Episode:
Today we are joined by /u/amandycat, who is flaired on AskHistorians as Early Modern English Death Culture, which has to be one of the more stark and interesting flairs we have on the subreddit. She is better known to her friends and family as Amanda Brunton, a PhD student at Anglia Ruskin University in the UK. Today we discuss all sorts of interesting and morbid things, like deaths, funerals, and how people liked to talk shade about the dead. An hour on the culture and history surrounding death and death culture in Early Modern England and it's not even Halloween!
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Aw man, I'm just realizing I missed my chance to make a Grateful Dead joke in this podcast. Shame. Thanks for a great episode /u/amandycat and one more follow-up I didn't even think of then!
Do you know if there are any major differences in types of epitaphs between different religious sects?
I came across this epitaph a while back and it really stuck with me because it's different than the resting in the arms of Jesus type stuff I normally see.
My interest in British epitaphs comes from doing geneology research on people who left in the 1600 and 1700s. Are there many collections outside of graveyards for these records? Especially related to specific regions?
This was a excellent episode! I just listened to it, and some of those epitaphs had me snickering at work.
Oooh, I'm psyched to listen to this. I mostly know about this topic by proxy from my father loves genealogy and mostly from those Early Modern English transplants-- New Englanders. Something about Calvinist religion and early modern English just made for some damn fine epitaphs.
If you'll indulge me, my favorite epitaph from Concord, MA (a town of deeply Puritan stock, and incidentally my hometown), written a bit later in a poem in 1849 and put to stone in 1910: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/fd/22/91/fd2291cc5223ca4ca981f65188a8316f.jpg
Great episode! My follow-up questions for the podcast guest would be:
Is the concept of an epitaph an English invention? Did other European countries on the Continent also write epitaphs during the Early Modern Period? Finally, have you encountered any epitaphs that were written for beloved pets?
Sort of off-topic, but why was Wolf Hall one of the books for Patreon sponsors? I'm not criticizing, it's fantastic, but it seems a bit different from most other book options. Have fiction books been given as options much before?
