Honour in Life, Death and in the Memory: Funeral Monuments in Early Modern England

Abstract

In the parish churches and cathedrals of England and Wales stand many thousands of early modern funeral monuments. Typically, these are elaborate structures of carved stone, often painted and decorated in bright colours and trimmed with gilding. Their complex programmes of inscribed text, allegorical figures, heraldic emblazons and sculpted effigies are set within architectural frameworks. With a few exceptions, such as the famous memorials to Queen Elizabeth, William Shakespeare or John Donne, these monuments are relatively little studied and little known. However, they were extremely costly to their patrons and prominently displayed in churches in purpose-built family chapels or against the wall of the sanctuary. Contemporary comment reveals that they were accorded high status by both specialist commentators, such as antiquaries and heralds, and by the patrons who invested in them so heavily. All-in-all, they represent what was the most important kind of church art made in the post-Reformation England, a period when there was a great deal of general uncertainty about the status of visual experience and particular worries about the legitimacy of religious imagery.

SOCIAL ASPIRATION AND THE MALLEABILITY OF PORTRAITURE IN POST-REFORMATION ENGLAND: THE KAYE PANELS OF WOODSOME, YORKSHIRE,c. 1567

“…By the early decades of the seventeenth century such displays came more often to appear in the conventional sculptural or painted representation of surviving children in an attitude of reverence, not on the painted panel hung in the home but rather in the ecclesiastical setting of the parish church. 50 Inscribed texts now sometimes became so lengthy as to warrant a dedicated space of their own, visually demarcated from the rest of the panel, and placed across the bottom or, in the Kaye panels, in a remarkable variety of positions on the panel surface. Once mostly meant to encourage intercession for the deceased, 51 such texts grew in length and gave way to personal biographical detail of a secular sort.…”