Passions on the Protestant Deathbed in Thomas Becon's The Sycke Mans Salue (1553)

The deathbed was a critical moment in the life of sixteenth-century Protestants. It was not only a battle against the Devil’s temptations and for assurance of salvation, but a battle against one’s emotions: fear, despair, and sorrow. This thesis takes a new history-of-emotions approach to Thomas Becon’s (1512-1567) The Sycke Mans Salue (1553) and the wider ars moriendi genre to which it belonged. This was a genre that had been popular among lay readers for over a century. With the religious upheaval of the Reformation years contributing to deathbed anxieties, there was a clear need for a new, reformed ars moriendi for the next generation of readers. Becon’s highly influential The Sycke Mans Salue represents the first attempt by an English Protestant writer to meet this need. Deathbed manuals have long been thought by historians to have helped spiritually and emotionally prepare Christians for the moment of death. However, the question of how the dying navigated and shaped their emotions is one that has rarely attracted scholarly attention. Using Monique Scheer’s practice theory and Barbara H. Rosenwein’s “emotional communities”, this thesis sheds new light on how a dying Protestant was expected to manage undesirable – even damnable – emotions and arrive at a godly state of feeling. It illuminates the role that the people present at the deathbed and specific devotional practices played in the modulation of emotions, from the carnal to the spiritual. With sacramental support withdrawn by Protestants, it was not the priest who spiritually and emotionally readied the dying as in pre- Reformation Catholicism, but their friends, family, and neighbours. Likewise, devotional practices were more than a demonstration of faith but were a means of cultivating and shaping emotions in early modern Protestantism. By utilising concepts from the history of emotions for the first time in the study of Becon and the ars moriendi, this thesis offers a new interpretation of the emotional lives and communities of sixteenth-century Protestant England.