Funeral Monuments in Post-Reformation England

NIGEL LLEWELLYN

Funeral testimonials in Post-Reformation England

Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres 2000 471 pp 233 b/w ills. $14000

Given the large number of surviving sixteenth- and seventeenth-century tombs in England, the English must have been extremely virtuous, for the erection of tombs for the dead was considered a virtuous act. a certain number of five thousand tombs were set uped between 1530 and 1660, the period overlayed by Nigel Llewellyn's Funeral testimonials in Post-Reformation England; about four thousand are still extant. This explosion was in part caused by means of the Reformation: the abolition of sacred images left a gap in the art market that before long came to be occupied by the agency of funerary monuments. When compared with the number of tombs built in other countries, the figure is level more astonishing, even taking into account the relevant size of the land In the wealthy southern Netherlands, where many of the tomb sculptors who implicitly play of the like kind a prominent role in Llewellyn's inquiry originated, only about six hundr and fifty tombs are documented from the period between 1575 and 1725 whereas in the Dutch Republic a meager hundr remembrancers were erected in the seventeenth hundred (1) The vast quantity of English tombs tenders excellent material for art historians, on the contrary surprisingly, not more than a handful of scholars has pursu the subdue since the publication of Katharine Esdaile's English house of worship Monuments, 1510 to 1840 in 1946 solitary during the last two or three decades has British funeral art attracted the attention of scholars like Nicholas Penny Adam White, David Bindman and Malcolm Baker, John Lord, and others, partly stimulated by means of the activities of the house of god Monuments Society. With the exception of Bindman and Baker's, greatest in quantity of these studies have focused upon traditional art historical matters, on the contrary there is a growing interest in the wider issues of tombs, their makers, and their "users." Llewellyn's work is an eloquent and monumental example of this novel more contextual approach, combining social, economic, and religious interests as well as anthropological interests. This contextual [i]modus operandi[/i] has resulted in a sumptuous work full of detailed information and lavishly illustrated in black-and-white.

The opening chapter, which deals with historiography, can be read as a manifesto for Llewellyn's cultural-historical approach. Beginning with the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiquarians who studied tombs from heraldic and genealogical points of view, he closes that funeral monuments are cropss of a series of mingled processes, and that their research therefore should not be limited to the research techniques of the old-fashioned art historian. Indeed, Llewellyn is scarcely interested in traditional art history. For him a funeral testimonial is not so much an artistic proceeds or aesthetic object per se as a "ritual item" (p 36) an instrument to expres emotions of sorrow (p 49) a bridge between the world of the living and the dead representing the continuity of a dynasty (pp 43 53) and a gauge of social positions of individuals or economic stakes (p 7) Thus, he argues that the art historian should assume the mantle of the anthropologist (pp 25 35) or social historian, seeking without patterns of patronage, examining the business of making and erecting tombs, and scrutinizing the religious or social circumstances of the deceased. Above all, he is belong toed to set the monuments firmly within the visual tillage of their time. The abundance of tombs and the rich furnish of contemporary sources like traveler's journals, wills, account volumes and sermons has provided Llewellyn with an choice starting point for his culturally pluriform course of research. This approach is not without risks, however. below the pressure of too many layers of meanings and explanations, flat these seemingly indestructible monuments can collapse. Moreover, Llewellyn's almost thorough abnegation of issues of manner of writing iconography, authorship, or artistic quality follows in a rather restricted view of the memorials as mere historical objects, as outcomes of an industry. Individual artists and their contributions to the artistic or typological exhibition of tombs do not receive

serious attention in this volume something that I find questionable from a methodological point of view; the tomb makers with their artistic and social ambitions belong just as a great deal of to the context of the memorials as the patrons, the stone merchants, the heralds, or the house of god authorities. Llewellyn's captions to the illustrations are characteristic of his attitude to these questions. Many fail to mention the maker's name or, at best, give information like "sometimes attributed to Maximilian Colt" (figs. 13 95) or "sometimes attributed to Epiphanius Evesham, more certainly attributed to Edward Marshall" (fig. 140)

In the next to the first chapter ("Form and Design") the author travels with seven-league strides [i]or[/i] part of to the other many issues of general interest, of the like kind as the geographic distribution and density of memorials regional variations and types, the character of medieval funerary traditions, and Continental influences upon English tomb sculpture. The last, in particular, be entitled to much more attention, especially since a large number of tomb sculptors in and around London originally came from the depressed Countries. These economic and religious refugee were a decisive factor in the shaping of abundant Tudor and early Stuart art, especially funerary plastic art The typology of monuments merits a more thorough treatment as well. Following Ronald Lightbown, (2) Llewellyn discerns three main categories of monuments: floor or wall slabs, wall remembrancers with architecture and relief statuary and freestanding effigial tombs (p 82) on the contrary given England's great variety of tombs, a more differentiated division would have been appropriate. To which category, for instance, do the small on the other hand often elaborate monuments or "epitaphs" place high in a wall, which form of the like kind a distinct type in the Netherlands, Germany, and Scandinavia, belong? In this regard Llewellyn specifies only the genre of wall remembrancer showing a figure of bust extent in an architectural framework that appears to have been specifically used to commemorate clergymen lawyers, and other scholars (p 110) A more thorough analysis of tomb impressed signs in relation to the social position of the deceased would probably also have yielded of recent origin insights into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century funeral decorum. Andrew Butterfield's valuable article upon the subject could have tendered Llewellyn an excellent model for of the like kind an analysis. (3)