At its best — and its best is very good — this is a book that sheds light on the difficult interplay between a material phenomenon (the sudden proliferation of epitaphic writing that began with the end of the Middle Ages) and its textual, theatrical and rhetorical modifications. It is the slippery relationship of literature to history and chronicle writ large. Newstok's study is provocative, moreover, in stretching the boundaries of the literary to their furthest point . . . Newstok's idiom is tremendously appealing . . . His frame of reference is economical and tight. He excels above all when examining tensions and paradoxes . . . His meticulous research restrains sweeping, absolute claims, despite the fact that writing about death is so vulnerable to generalisation.

— Katherine Rundell, Essays in Criticism

Scott Newstok . . . breathes new life into the subject of death. In addition, who could have imagined that such a small container as the epitaph could hold so much? Clearly, Newstok did, and he reveals as much in his scholarly, yet immanently readable and often entertaining, study of this brief, but paradoxically expansive, literary genre. It is an admirably researched and thoroughly documented study.

— Greg Bentley, Seventeenth-Century News

Newstok’s work is of great value to historians as well as literary critics. . . . As a book that explores the changing ways that people dealt with death and the memory of the dead as England moved away from a ‘medieval’ way of looking at the world, Quoting Death will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students.

— Carole Levin and Michael Hewitt, Sixteenth Century Journal

Quoting Death exemplifies new formalism at its best. Ludic and strikingly original . . . An innovative stylist, Newstok writes in short, carefully honed sections that stand apart as brilliant mini-essays in their own right. In the speed and intellectual elegance with which he moves from historical specifics to profound meditations on aesthetics and the pathos of humanity′s efforts to overcome death, Newstok becomes a latter-day Thomas Browne.

— John Watkins, Studies in English Literature

This is an exceptionally learned and sophisticated piece of writing. … provides an impressive, even disorientating amount of data, and he ties this data into clear and persuasive arguments; there is a theoretical agility about the book, which is refreshing to lock minds with, and also an intellectual authority and intensity. … this is a book that repays close attention, and is something that can be learned from.

— The Shakespeare Institute Review

A summation of these points cannot do justice to the depth of this books insight and analysis . . . this study provides an important contribution not only to the understanding of epitaphs, but to the larger literary and social context to which they belong. In this sense, it is a valuable epitaph to epitaphs, recovering their many significations, even if the here to which they refer is somewhat indeterminate, if not gone altogether.

— Sarah Covington, Renaissance Quarterly

The subject of this book could not but be interdisciplinary, and Newstok rises to the challenge. There is something here for a wide variety of readers.

— Allison Shell, Journal of Ecclesiastical History

This lively and thought-provoking book . . . is an ambitious and largely successful study, encouraging us to understand not merely how Renaissance epitaphs transcended their traditional Christian commemorative functions, but how a variety of concerns with "epitaphic closure" were intimately related to an emergent idea of authorship itself.

— Peter Marshall, Times Literary Supplement

Newstok should be commended for the sheer range of literary and historical references that he brings to bear in the book, as he effectively demonstrates the wide influence of epitaphic writing and thought in the early modern period. Future scholars will therefore find his bibliography particularly useful. Much of the material is unexpected, and a great deal is unfamiliar. The book is also well illustrated, with images of tombs and title-pages, and elegies and epitaphs. . . . Newstok has found an important subject and an interesting approach in his book.

— Angus Vine, Journal of the Northern Renaissance

Newstok’s thought-provoking book is, thus, not only indispensable for Shakespeareans, but for all readers who are intrigued by the early-modern period with its hybrid genres, its surprising linguistic twists and its sustained interest in the liminal spheres between life and death.

— Norbert Lennartz, English Studies

Scott Newstok offers some real innovative research which throws new light upon the cultural significance of the genre of the epitaph in the Renaissance. . . . By focusing on the re-citation of epitaphs in texts belonging to various genres, Newstok’s book goes beyond mere analyses of the epitaph as a generic tradition unto itself. . . . We are presented with a great deal of interesting material which illustrates the Renaissance practice of epitaph quotation in elegiac verses, dramatic works, historical chronicles, royal public speeches and treatises on rhetoric.

— Paola Baseotto, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik