Helen J. Swift

Posthumous Reputation Unravelled in Sixteenth-Century Epitaph Fictions

Epitaphs record a person’s death, a life that was. Literary epitaphs of the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries provided an opportunity, through the medium of verse and prose fiction, for anticipating death and projecting into the future the afterlife that will be constituted by a person’s posthumous reputation. This paper re-assesses writers’ goals in contriving an epitaph fiction. Far from aiming at monumentally immobilising reputation as an immutable product of their writing, as most critics have argued, they manifest a keener interest in unpicking the processes by which someone’s identity is transmitted; they expose the precariousness and malleability of what is being communicated to posterity. I unpack epitaphic processes of identity construction and their precarities by focusing especially on the plurality of identity narratives that results from competing agencies shaping a person’s afterlife. I then pick up on their questioning of the nature of reputation as an afterlife, how the mode of posthumous being that is envisaged is (or is not) defined in terms of life and death. The paper concludes with a reflection on how late-medieval epitaph fictions may usefully inflect critical thinking on afterlives.