ABSTRACT
The general horror of death is reflected in the means by which Early Modern society sought publicly to cope with the fear, primarily through sermons on the subject, pious conduct books and religious tracts, etc. One way to overcome the conflict between fearing and accepting mortality was to visualize death, however fearful, as God's will. In a largely agrarian society, death could be represented as just one part of divinely ordained pattern of life. However well the deceased succeeded in the task of dying well, a crucial feature of the Early Modern attempt to tame death was to record deaths, to domesticate death through articulation and publication. An analysis of Early Modern deathbeds is made possible by the relatively large number of accounts of dying men and women preserved by publication. The recording of death, whether in diaries, letters or more formal published works, creates a language through which dying can be codified, controlled and made acceptable to the reader.
