The Center for Early Cultures Presents
a Lunchtime Lecture with:
William Engel, Sewanee University
Living With Death in Shakespeare’s England
Even in the wake of a global pandemic, modern culture tends to depersonalize and institutionalize death, making it easy to avoid sustained reflection on the concrete finality and individuality of our own end. In this regard, Renaissance England could not have been more different from contemporary times. It made remembering death a daily, pressing matter, according to the Latin reminder "memento mori" (“remember you must die”); and so too John Lydgate’s Dance of Death, the basis for a mural at old St. Paul’s Cathedral, which personalized an individual’s relationship with the Grim Reaper, enjoining people of all social stations specifically to imagine the future event of their departing from the world.
Friday, February 16, 2024
12:00-1:00 p.m.
Humanities Gateway 1010
Please RSVP for Light Lunch
(RSVP by or before Monday, February 12th!!!)
William Engel is the Nick B. Williams Professor of Literature at Sewanee: The University of the South. He has published ten books in which he seeks to recover how writers of the past engage with the tricky nature of memory and the certain knowledge of our mortality.