Known by the Work of His Hands, and: Graven Images: New England Stonecarving and Its Symbols, 1650-1815, and: The Marble City: A Photographic Tour of Knoxville's Graveyards (review)

The analysis of gravestones remains one of the mainstays of material culture scholarship. Some of the principal traits of material culture study—namely, the focus on individual artists, personal biography and repertoire, and on regional variation, historical change, and ethnic identity, are reflected in these three recent books on gravestones and stone carvers. Known by the Work of His Hands is a well-researched study of Pennsylvania German gravestones, rooted in local history and written with much patience. Claire Messimer's study emphasizes an individual carver's repertoire and how this reflects the general patterns of design and motifs of his time. The task is made difficult by the fact that the stone carver, Joseph Brownmiller (JB), has been dead for over a century, and has left neither a book of accounts nor a personal diary. By looking at historical documents, including tax records, Messimer is able to discern his economic status and thus make educated guesses about the kinds of tools and materials he used and whether he had the means to hire an apprentice or helpers, for example. Because all gravestones are dated, she can contextualize a shift in designs, not only within a broader context of style, but also within the context of JB's life, thus asserting that later in life, as an older man working alone, he would naturally produce styles easier to carve due to his decreasing physical abilities. Following the broader scholarly fashion in material culture studies of producing personal biographies of artists and their artistic repertories, Messimer provides a nice model of how one can use public historic records to correlate works of art with the artist's political, economic, social, and religious life.

The classic exemplar of the method of looking at icons on gravestones and relating them to religious texts in an effort to reveal their meaning was perfected by Allan Ludwig in his Graven Images, first published in 1966. The third edition of this work contains a new preface in which Ludwig offers an annotated bibliography of key books and articles about gravestones in New England published in the last thirty years. Ludwig ends his new preface with a helpful inventory of recent works on African-American stone carving. This edition provides the young scholar with a time-tested model of scholarship and analysis and the seasoned scholar with new reflections on old work.

In Known by the Work of His Hands, Messimer practices Ludwig's iconographic methodology of deciphering motifs to unlock their meanings to the mourners and beholders. Messimer looks very closely not only at the shape and size of the gravestones, but also at the motifs depicted on them. Many standard motifs, such as the angel, the willow, and the rose, are borrowed and altered in shape and design to reflect a Pennsylvania German Lutheran ideology. She also describes chronological variation, noting changes in the motif designs, the shape of the stones, and the placement of the graves and the general layout of the cemetery. For example, the shift in the notion of the family as a unit can be detected, and contrasted to the Lutheran view of one "family," by the arrangement of gravestones in familial clusters.

What is written on a gravestone is as important as what is depicted on it, both being reflections of culture. Accordingly, Messimer also examines the words engraved on the stones. The stones carved by JB were...