Monuments and Memory in Early Modern England (review)

This is a groundbreaking study of funerary architecture and the meanings, explicit and implicit, found in the often wildly elaborate tombs and cenotaphs erected in English cathedrals, churches and college chapels after the Reformation. Peter Sherlock's study brings this strikingly visual source material into the realm of historical study and historical anthropology and he is dealing with source material of extraordinary richness and diversity.

Most significantly, Sherlock explores the implications of the Reformation for the meaning and function of tombs, as well as their vulnerability, as the Elizabethan government could not adequately legislate to protect monumental art from reformist vandalism and destruction.

His survey begins in the era after the Henrician and Edwardian reforms and especially after Elizabeth I legislated in 1560 to protect ancient, and not so ancient monuments, from iconoclastic defacing. His choice of a terminus ante quem and terminus post quem seems to have been governed as much by stylistic as historical concerns. His survey ends in the late-seventeenth century when the style of English tombs was being transformed by a burgeoning classicism which brought monumental design into a different visual aesthetic to that of the post Reformation era and especially of the distinctive Jacobean tomb monuments.

In studying and interpreting tomb monuments, Sherlock is dealing with source material which mostly emanated from an elite social stratum. One had to be at least a churchwarden to obtain room in the privileged space of a church building for commemoration; the monuments under examination typically were those of the aristocracy, gentry and episcopacy, especially the larger monuments.

The monuments Sherlock discusses have often already been extensively described and catalogued, typically in county archaeological or antiquarian journals or by the thorough surveys of churches and their furnishings undertaken many decades ago by Nikolaus Pevsner. Sherlock also acknowledges that he is writing in the wake of earlier historical and art historical surveys of this material, including those of Howard Colvin and Erwin Panofsky, as well as the pioneering study of Early Modern tomb monuments by Nigel Llewellyn, and Peter Burke's study of memory and ritual in the Early Modern period. But Sherlock's study, an elaboration of his doctoral thesis and several journal articles, breaks new ground in the readings he makes of these artifacts and the meanings which he finds to reside in them as regards cultural memory, religious identity and artistic impulses.

Sherlock makes several claims to originality in this study, including the religious import which he insists remained in the meaning and iconography of the tombs in the post-Reformation period. In contrast to earlier interpreters of these artifacts, Sherlock argues that the designers and commissioners of the tombs intended them to convey religiously-charged meanings. Whereas modern interpreters of Renaissance iconography have argued that the Renaissance indicates a shift in focus from the mechanics of salvation and the fate of the soul to material commemoration, Sherlock argues that English tomb monuments stressed their function as agents of earthly posterity, but also expressed the ascent of the soul to heaven. While he mostly examines the monuments for what they could and were meant to transmit to posterity, he argues that monuments could also repress information and were designed to do so.

This book explores and interprets tomb monuments as transmitting messages to posterity, in terms of their epitaphs, funerary architecture and religious import. Sherlock therefore makes clear that he is examining tombs as the interactive, yet permanent, aspect of Early Modern funerary ritual, which remained when the cenotaphs, coffins, hangings and hatchments may all have passed away. As such, he makes clear that his book is intended to be a dialogue between past and present. He also incorporates some theoretical insights from Pierre Nora and Maurice Halbwachs' writings on sites of memory and Sherlock stresses the novelty of applying this theoretical content to an Early Modern study.

Although he examines the tombs as being intended to provide messages to posterity, he...