ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the female experience of death in Early Modern England and to argue that women had a unique and discernible relationship to death in the period. The book is based predominantly upon published texts rather than writings in manuscript form. One profound difficulty in the selection and use of primary material is an ever present awareness that any text is necessarily, to a greater or lesser extent, an artificial construct. An awareness of the artifice involved in producing published works brings with it an understanding of the problems of making any twenty-first-century assumptions about the female experience in Early Modern England. One of the challenges of studying death in England in this period or, indeed, in any period since, lies with the diversity of cultural experience.
