ABSTRACT

This chapter complements the previous chapter’s focus on reading the dying and dead body with an examination of witnesses’ accounts which were produced for early modern court cases where a will was in dispute. Central to discussion here is the spoken and written word and its social and cultural significance in the production of social identity during the dying process. Bronfen and Goodwin focus on the relationship between the deceased and testamentary texts, highlighting the social agency of the dead as mediated through writing practices. They move on to probe to the nature and authority of the ‘voice’ which the will might provide for the corpse:

[t]o give a voice to the corpse, to represent the body, is in a sense to return it to life: the voice represents not so much the dead as the once living, juxtaposed with the needs of the yet living.