ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the complex role of the maternal mourner in early modern England as an ideologically-charged icon of feminized, immoderate mourning whose troubling presence compromises the political and spiritual teleologies of Muggins’ text, of early modern characterizations of the plague as God’s punishment of sins, and of post-Reformation mourning more generally. In early modern women’s works, the juncture of maternity and mourning enables a conceptual shift from passive to active responses to death, from unproductive excess to profitable moderation–that is, from female to male –that is also the trajectory of royal succession with the death of Elizabeth and accession of King James. Unlike the numerous elegies and memorials issued by London publishers in the wake of Queen Elizabeth’s death in March, 1603, William Muggins’ Londons Mourning Garment, published in the same year, mourns the loss to the plague of nearly 38,000 citizens between July and November.
