ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the complex place of the emotional language of bell-ringing for the dead in England between c.1500 and c.1700, using two examples at the extremities of the early modern soundscape of tolling bells. In early modern England bells announced the cycles of life and death. Through the discussion of the two case-studies of the death of Henry Howard in 1614, and an Essex Cobbler in 1606, the chapter demonstrates that bells tolling for the dead both united and divided parish communities along the fault lines of the rituals of death, burial and mourning. Bell-ringing could simultaneously unite and divide parishes, as the performance of the ritual sounds of death, burial and mourning, were particular to each emotional community. The intentional use of bell sounds and the reaction to them in the context of death rituals fits this model very well.
