• Introduction: Secularization and Identity


• The Mortal Self: Dürer and Montaigne


• The Reformed Consicence: Thomas More


• The Writer as Martyr: Cranmer and Foxe


• Public Oathes and Private Selves: More, Foxe, and Shakespeare


• Soliloquy and Secularisation: Shakespeare


• Hamlet's Luck: Shakespeare and the Renaissance Bible


• Freedom, Suicide, and Selfhood: Montaigne, Shakespeare, Donne


• Soft Selves: Adam, Eve, and the Art of Embodiement


• Bibliography

Brian Cummings is Anniversary Professor at the University of York in the Department of English & Related Literature. He previously taught at Trinity College, Cambridge and the University of Sussex, and has held Visiting Fellowships in California, Munich, and Oxford. From 2009-2012 he held a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship. He is the author of The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (2002) and editor of The Book of Common Prayer: the Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (2011), both published by OUP.

Mortal Thoughts is a study of the question of human identity in the early modern period. It examines literature alongside emerging forms of life writing and life drawing and self-portraits and considers portrayals of mortality and the moment of death.