"The text and the occasion mingled together make a chequer-worke, a mixture of black and white, mourning and joy": Visual elements of the printed funeral sermon in early modern England

It is the intention of this article to draw attention to printed images and visual elements of the sermon in early modern England, which have not constituted a serious area of focused enquiry thus far. Although scholars have long recognised the centrality of the sermon to post-Reformation worship, its printed form and the way it was read has remained a secondary consideration, too often regarded as an inert "postscript" to the original performance. This essay will therefore highlight the visual signals provided for the reader's interpretation and edification in the preacher's absence. It brings the printed image in one of the most disseminated religious literatures of the period to the fore, questioning its role in relation to the text and considering its ambiguous status in a era which the Christian religion was constantly negotiating its relationship with images. Focusing in particular on the portrait of the deceased and the representation of epitaphs in two seventeenth-century funeral sermons, it offers a reinterpretation of these texts as illustrated books which shared fundamental values with the portrait miniature in gift culture, and with the funeral monument in its visual and textual aid to remembrance of the exemplary dead.