Contents: Connecting women and death: an introduction, Beth Fowkes Tobin and Maureen Daly Goggin; Part I Mourning Practices: Widows and courtesans, ¿pizzocchere¿ and nuns: women in mourning in the Venetian Republic, 1400-1800, Isabella Campagnol; Fashioning death/gendering sentiment: mourning jewelry in Britain in the 18th-century, Arianne Fennetaux; Emotions and rituals: responses to death among the nobility in modern France, Elizabeth C. Macknight; Stitching (in) death: 18th- and 19th-century American and English mourning samplers, Maureen Daly Goggin; ¿The thing they knew¿: social exclusion at Southern wakes in Eudora Welty¿s The Wanderers and The Optimist's Daughter, Laura Patterson; 'Confessional' poetry and the material culture of death, Gillian D. Steinberg. Part II Memorializing: Columbia mourns: the distaff side of Washington¿s long farewell, Meredith Eliassen; More than ¿a heap of dust¿: the material memorialization of three 19th-century women¿s graves, Elizabethada A. Wright; Domesticating death in the sentimental republic: commemorating and mourning in US civil war nurses¿ memoirs, Ashley Byock; ¿Une fleur que ses yeux ¿ints ne peuvent plus contempler¿: women¿s sculpture for the dead, Marjan Sterckx; Spectacle, maintenance, and materiality: women and death in modern Brittany, Maura Coughlin; A conversation with Aunt Carol: the fluid functionality of funeral programs in African-American culture, Michelle J. Pinkard; From private places to public spaces: mourning and death in the art of four 21st-century women, Kathryn Beattie. Part III Bodily Practices: Reading material culture: British women¿s position and the death trade in the long 18th century, Michelle Iwen; Hadley chests: a reflection on the chaos and sacrifice of childbirth, B.A.

Harrington; ¿Feel how soft her hair is¿: Amish women¿s practices on the female body, Violet A. Dutcher; Representing corporeal ¿truth¿ in the work of Anna Morandi Manzolini and Mada.