The Stones Cry Out: Early New England Epitaphs in Context

Join us to learn about how epitaphs give voice to eighteenth-century Congregationalists’ changing attitudes towards dying and death.

Using illustrations of gravestones and transcriptions of the epitaphs, John Hanson will explore the ways these monuments provide evidence of the gradual shift in early Congregationalists’ attitudes towards salvation from pious doubt, to reasonable hope and comfortable assurance.  Epitaphs provided a means for bereaved survivors to summarize their lived experience of dying and death. They focused on themes that characterized the Congregational worldview, including death’s constant presence in their lives; the imperative to sanctify the event for one’s spiritual benefit; the ritual of deathbed confession, repentance, and reconciliation; the importance of resigning oneself to God’s sovereign will; and the consoling belief that death was a welcome release from the troubles and infirmities of this world.

For more information, please email programs@14beacon.org.

SPEAKER BIO

John Hanson has been collecting and analyzing early New England epitaphs for years, examining where the verses originated, how their source texts were accessed, and the cultural and religious context in which they were chosen and carved on gravestones. He is the author of Reading the Gravestones of Old New England (McFarland, 2021) and has published and spoken extensively on his research. He received his AB cum laude in English and American Literature from Harvard and is a member of the American Antiquarian Society. John is from Massachusetts and currently lives in Boston and the Berkshires.