The Praise of a Godly Woman

A sermon delivered at the funeral of Frances Roberts in the early 1600s, preserved as a window into how our ancestors confronted death and defined a life well-lived. Hannibal Gamon stands before his congregation not merely to mourn, but to argue that praising the dead serves the living: by fixing our eyes on virtue, we learn how to inhabit our own brief time. Drawing on biblical wisdom, Gamon constructs an idealized portrait of the God-fearing woman, one whose humility, devotion, and unshakable virtue outshine all worldly achievement. The language is period-dense, threaded with scriptural allusion and the rhetorical flourishes of its age. What makes this text linger isn't its theology but its strange, quiet intimacy: the voice of a preacher reaching across four centuries to speak about a woman most of history has forgotten, asking us to consider what we leave behind, and what of ourselves we hope will survive the grave.