Religious Change and the Renaissance Elegy

Study of the Renaissance English elegy can be enhanced by considering both the medieval antecedents of the genre and the shifts in religious thought and practice brought about by the Protestant Reformation and by examining continuities as well as changes. Medieval English elegies, drawing on Catholic traditions, commonly registered a sense that living and dead persons can interact with one another. In later years, Protestant reformers would claim that purgatory and the cult of saints impugned the sovereignty of God and that the Bible offered no evidence for the Roman understanding of works as a means to salvation. Therefore, a fully purified faith could find no place for purgatory, the intercession of saints, or prayers for the dead. These attacks on traditional religion would shape poetic responses to death and mourning, including Henry King's “An Exequy” and Milton's Lycidas. (S.W.)