Epilogue: “Epitaph” for Epitaph

Abstract

What follows is a brief stopping point for a traveler coming to an end of a journey (sta viator). Epitaphs are still with us today, albeit in a diffuse, often secularized and largely textualized form. As Scodel has postulated, the practice of composing formal epitaphs for inscription appears to have reached its peak in the late eighteenth century before declining with the expansion of newspaper obituaries in the nineteenth century. Yet the remains of the early modern epitaphic tradition are to be found not in cemeteries (where the vast majority of tombstones today include only names and dates), but rather in their extra-funerary contexts. “That could serve as her epitaph,” or “An Epitaph for_” are rhetorical gestures familiar in contemporary journalism (often, for instance, summarizing a biographical account of an artist’s life or a politician’s career). These are tropes that uphold the early modern pattern of quoting epitaphs as texts, not inscriptions; just as the Tudors had already begun doing, we have exchanged an actual (inscribed) epitaph for the reference to “an epitaph.” I end here by invoking but one poignant instance of this gesture’s striking resilience. Despite the distance we have come from the early modern grave, the rhetorical impact of making “an epitaph” remains fundamental.