An interest in epitaphs ought to unite historians and literary critics. The factual information that they provide about the deceased has long been of crucial concern: first to antiquarians, then to local and family historians, as shown by the range of sources drawn upon within this study. But during the period it covers, epitaphs were also held to be an important literary genre, discussed by such theorists as George Puttenham in The art of English poesie. Chapter i of this book considers the rhetorical figure of deixis or indication, exploring the paradox that a grave points to the absence of the person commemorated, yet also acts as a substitute for them. Succeeding chapters discuss a range of related issues: Elizabeth i's public anticipation of her own death, printed collections of epitaphs, the overlap between epitaphs and lapidary typographical convention, the way in which epitaphs moved the spectator to think about their own end, and the genre's obligation to demonstrate sincerity before God. Literary concerns with memorialisation, drawing on classical precedents like Horace's ode Exegi monumentum aere perennius, ensured that, throughout this period, the epitaphic mode inflected a wide variety of other genres. Thomas Gray's ‘Elegy written in a country churchyard’, one of English literature's most reflexive and paradoxical exercises in this vein, ends with an epitaph that commemorates the poet himself, while placing him among the unknown dead that his poem has valorised. The subject of this book could not but be interdisciplinary, and Newstok rises to the challenge. There is something here for a wide variety of users, though the book's terminology will initially commend it to some more than to others. The playfully Derridean introduction and the theoretical approach adopted in many sections of the book will startle many historians, but they should persevere; the recognition that epitaphs are formal and sophisticated literary constructs is, after all, a necessary first step towards mining them for historical data. One obvious example of an interplay between historical and literary concerns is how the official banishment of purgatory, and other Reformation ways of thinking about the dead, affected the ends of life stories as recounted on epitaphs: as Newstok puts it, ‘closural anxiety in the reader and writer grew during the English Renaissance as confidence waned in more liturgical modes of conclusion’ (pp. 187–8). The book's epilogue, recounting how the survivors of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans commemorated their dead, is a moving touch that also demonstrates how Newstok's methodology works for other times and places. Here, as elsewhere, the book is helpfully illustrated and well presented in most respects, though with a noticeable scattering of proof errors.