Death and Tenses: Posthumous Presence in Early Modern France

This book is probably the first to explore a question that crops up in everyday situations and throughout history: in what tense should we refer to the dead? This question relates both to the recently deceased and also to those who died in antiquity, and is explored in this book through many kinds of texts (mainly in French but also in Latin) produced in sixteenth and seventeenth-century France. Did tenses refer to the dead in ways that contributed to granting them differing degrees of presence (and absence)? Did tenses communicate something about posthumous presence (and absence) that could not easily be communicated by other means? This book compares its early modern examples with modern French and English, asking whether changes in more recent beliefs in posthumous survival have led to different tense usage.