ABSTRACT
Visual, narrative, and poetic representations of grief explore and attempt to assuage it, often investigating God’s Providence, the bereaved’s religious convictions, or the ways of holy dying so privileged in Protestant England. A memorial tradition also appears in Protestant rhetoric remembering the dead as ‘saints.’ This codification implied sainthood not in the official sense of a canonized martyr, but more generally as ‘one of the blessed dead in Heaven,’ or simply as, ‘a Christian.’ 1 Women writers whose sisters died in childbirth referenced this trope, but also connected their sisters’ deaths to feminine righteousness and maternal martyrdom. Given the complex communal aspects of childbirth in the period, sisters attended each other’s lyings-in with some frequency; among the literate classes, a sister’s presence at the birth may also have been augmented by correspondence before and after the labor. Sisterly intimacy deepened by assisting or discussing childbirth becomes particularly compelling when memorials for lost sisters enact a sororal discourse of sainthood. The autobiographical writings of Alice Thornton (1625–1706) describing her sister Lady Catherine Danby’s death, and the poem of Lady Jane Cavendish Cheyne (1623–69) about the death of her sister, Elizabeth Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater, both utilize motifs of female sainthood to dramatize the bonds between sisters and suggest a compelling veneration of women who died in childbirth.
