Memory, Climate, and Mortality: The Dudley Women among the Fields

By 1624, “through the injury of time and weather,” George Montaigne reported, “there had a general wrack befallen the ancient parish church of St. Giles in the Fields.” The temporal decline of monuments is a common early modern theme, but Montaigne’s indictment of weather’s ill-effects suggests an awareness of the period of climatic change now known as the Little Ice Age. Rather than arguing that climate determined the fate of monuments, this chapter looks beyond cause and effect to describe an interconnection between memory, climate, and mortality as played out in the memorial network created by Alice, Duchess Dudley, and her five daughters. This chapter recovers material and memorial connections joining the Dudley women’s memory work in an ecology that situates the church building and its monuments within a web of social, somatic, and climatic conditions in which these women lived and died. Mobilizing climate as an agent in, rather than a mere a backdrop to, memorial activities redirects the Dudley women’s project from familiar devotional and monumental gestures toward a wider field of social values that both led and responded to environmental changes on a global scale.