The Mat(t)er of Death: The Defense of Eve and the Female Ars Moriendi

Abstract

D escribing Philip Stubbes’s A Chrystal Glassefor Christian Women , which presents “the godly life and Christian death” 1 of Stubbes’s twenty-year-old wife Katherine, Kate Aughterson suggests that the work—as if against its author’s will—becomes “complexly dialogic” when it offers evidence not of “Katherine Stubbes’s internalisation of the ideology of womanhood,” but of her “resistance to dominant ideological discourses.” 2 Apparently prompted by a desire to find in the early modern woman’s voice a subversive chord that would signal the work’s feminism and frustrate Stubbes’s authorial and patriarchal monologism, Aughterson portrays Katherine as an autonomous speaker whose forays into extradomestic theological debate and public deathbed confession of faith (that is, both performed before witnesses at her death and later published by Stubbes) run counter to her culture’s—and her husband/author’s—insistence on women’s chastity, silence, and obedience. While Aughterson’s motives may appeal to, and be shared by, many critics of early modern women’s writing, her interpretation is troubled by Stubbes’s own promotion of his subject as a “rare and wonderful example ... who whilst shee lived, was a Myrrour of womanhood and now being dead, is a perfect patterne of true Christianitie.” 3 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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