No abstract

The great majority of Scottish parish churches owe their present appearance to reconstructions carried out from the later eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. It was the view of the authors of this paper, however, that in many cases those reconstructions had been relatively superficial, and that medieval work might have survived under what could, in some cases, be little more than a modern veneer. To test this view, a survey was carried out of all medieval parish sites within the dioceses of Dunblane and Dunkeld. The findings from that survey are summarized in this paper.The loss of medieval parish churches in Scotland has been so great that there is a widely held view that too few survive for a detailed understanding of pre-Reformation parochial architecture to be reached. In a paper published in 1939, for example, it could be suggested that there were no more than about sixty substantially medieval churches in the whole of Scotland that were still in use for worship.1 As a result of our work in a number of areas of Scotland, however, the authors of this paper have come to the view that a higher proportion of the existing stock of parochial churches than might appear either embodies medieval fabric or has been closely governed by medieval predecessors.2 It is also our view that more of the abandoned churches for which structural remains survive are likely to be of medieval date than is generally assumed. Here it should be remembered that the economic situation of the Church in the aftermath of the Reformation meant there was initially little alternative to retaining the majority of medieval parish churches with little change, 3 and it was only once the fortunes of the Church began to improve that it became possible to consider the general provision of more suitable buildings. The question should be asked how those more suitable buildings were created.To test these views it was determined that a critical analysis should be undertaken of the fabric and parochial history of all churches and church sites that served parishes of 1. Anderson 1938-9. 2. The detailed results of this project are presented on a website at ,http://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/ corpusofscottishchurches.; this paper is based on the conclusions set out in the introductory sections of that website. The website should be consulted for fuller architectural and historical accounts of all of the churches. 3. Howard 1995, 177-88.

Two late fifteenth-century rood-screen panels in Sparham church, near Norwich, display images of corpses that are apparently unique in surviving medieval art. One is painted with two standing corpses dressed in finery, the other with a corpse arising from a tomb within a church, with a font to one side. Both panels are notable for their surviving inscriptions, and others now lost. Together, these works constitute one of the most significant English contributions to the genre of death imagery, yet their uniqueness and artistic importance has not been recognized to date. Using a range of medieval and antiquarian sources, this article aims to provide a comprehensive account of the Sparham panels’ physical and historical context, iconography and meaning. The strong possibility that they functioned as a ‘surrogate sepulchral monument’ is discussed at the end of the paper.

Westminster Abbey's relics, and objects functionally related to them, were kept in the shrine chapel of St Edward the Confessor, where the kings and queens of England were customarily buried. They constituted a discrete collection, curated by a dedicated monastic officer titled 'the keeper of St Edward's shrine and the relics of St Peter's church'. Inventories of the chapel, made when the office changed hands, survive from 1467, 1479 and 1520. These documents are analysed here for what they reveal of the contents of the collection, monastic interest in it, and the way the relics and related objects were cared for. As an important aspect of the chapel's spatial configuration, the problem of where precisely the relics were located, is also investigated. By examining the routine management of a single, important collection, the article aims to contribute to a more holistic understanding of the cult of relics in the late Middle Ages. Introduction: Westminster's relic-inventories and their value This article uses three late medieval shrine-keepers' inventories from Westminster Abbey to examine the collection of relics and related objects kept in the chapel of St Edward the Confessor. The contents of this collection were important to the monastery and its patrons in many ways, but with the exception of the shrine itself, and the relic of the Holy Blood, they have attracted little attention in published scholarship. 1 Yet the subject is accessible, for the surviving inventories, coupled with other sources, provide a complex and evocative picture of what they record. Importantly for the theme of this volume, they are clearer than other

No abstract