Machine generated contents note: List of IllustrationsNotes on Contributors -- Acknowledgments 1 Widow's Peek: Looking at Ritual and Representation -- Allison Levy PART I: REPRESENTING WIDOWHOOD: MOURNING MODELS --2 'Widowhood was the time of her greatest perfection': Ideals of Widowhood and Sanctity in Florentine Art -- Catherine Lawless --3 Memento Mori: Death, Widowhood and Remembering in Early Modern England -- J. S. W. Helt --4 Mourning Widows: Portraits of Widows and Widowhood in Funeral Sermons from Brunswick-Wolfenbuettel -- Marina Arnold PART II: RE-PRESENTING WIDOWHOOD: FASHIONABLE CHOICES --5 Casting Her Widowhood: The Contemporary and Posthumous Portraits of Caterina Sforza -- Joyce de Vries --6 A Widow's Tears, A Queen's Ambition: The Variable Historyof Marie de Medicis's Bereavement -- Elizabeth McCartney --7 Conceptualizing the Kaiserinwitwe: Empress Maria Theresia and Her Portraits -- Michael E. Yonan --PART III: WIDOWHOOD AND REPRESENTATION: BUILDING MEMORIES --8 Individual Fame and Family Honor: The Tomb of Dogaressa Agnese da Mosto Venier -- Holly S. Hurlburt --9 Margaret of Austria and the Encoding of Power in Patronage: The Funerary Foundation at Brou -- Laura D. Gelfand --10 A Widow Building in Elizabethan England: Bess of Hardwick at Hardwick Hall -- Sara French --11 Constructing Convents in Sixteenth-Century Castile: Toledan Widows and Patterns of Patronage -- Stephanie Fink De Backer PART IV: WIDOWHOOD AND RE-PRESENTATION: CONSTRUCTING HISTORIES --12 Trecento Rome: The Poetics and Politics of Widowhood -- Cristelle L. Baskins --13 Framing Widows: Mourning, Gender and Portraiture in Early Modem Florence -- Allison Levy --14 Contested Narratives: Elisabeth of Austria and a Relic of St Leopold -- Amelia Carr AFTERWORD --15 Last Rites: Mourning Identities (?) -- Allison Levy Index.