The funds are for a brief period of study at the Newberry library in the academic year 2019/2020, where Dr. Brazeau will be looking through archival holdings at the Newberry for rare editions of lagrime and weeping poetry. He will be working with a colleague from Northwestern University (Dr. Anne Boemler) on a co-authored project entitled “Tears in Heaven.”

This article will explore the genre of weeping and lagrime poetry between Italy and England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. These poems were a strange mix of lyric and narrative, frequently focusing on figures such as Saint Peter or Mary Magdalene. As such, they provide engaging descriptions of inner monologue and emotions, opening a unique and rare window onto interior devotional experience in the period. Moreover, they were often marketed as a type of “interactive” poem, whereby the reader could read (and weep) along with the protagonist. This research will also inform the development of a future interdisciplinary module on the problem of Death, Dying, and Mourning that Dr. Brazeau is currently in the process of developing.