The Rest Is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance

The Rest Is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance by Robert N. Watson explores how anxieties about death as utter annihilation—rather than passage to an afterlife—shaped English Renaissance culture, especially during the Jacobean era. Watson argues that the Reformation’s dismantling of rituals like purgatory, combined with scientific discovery, rising individualism, and schism within Christianity, eroded consolations about immortality and intensified fears of oblivion. T...