Nigel Llewellyn. Funeral Monuments in Post-Reformation England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xxviii + 471 pp. $120.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-78257-9.
Reviewed by Robert Tittler (Department of History, Concordia University Monuments and Manifestos)
Published on H-Albion (August, 2001)
Nigel Llewellyn's long-awaited study of post-Reformation English funeral monuments proves to be even more than the comprehensive treatment of the subject which one had expected. It also offers a virtual manifesto on behalf of the new art history against the agenda and shibboleths of the traditional.
As Llewellyn points out in his opening chapter, English art and architecture of this era has always received short shrift, even from its own art historians. Dedicated to the idea that Art History had chiefly to do with exploring the development of formal styles through time, that artistic merit in post-medieval visual art depended upon the reception of neo-classical forms, and that aesthetic considerations came before all others in the assessment of worth, they have traditionally found little to say about painting before Holbein and then Rubens, architecture before Jones, and sculpture before Nicholas Stone.
As a compound art form, funeral monuments proved triply awkward. Judged by conventional criteria, neither their standard of sculpture, or of painting, or of architectural setting, could hold much of a candle to monuments in the Italian, French, Flemish or other traditions. Both contemporary observers and modern scholars have thus treated such objects lightly. Some have persisted in trying to treat them in the context of established polite, and thus neo-classical, traditions. Others have written them off as unworthy of critical attention, or left them to the usually non-academic admirers of the vernacular in general or of parish churches.
Like a few other current investigators of post-Reformation material culture who have worked on such issues as country houses or town halls or civic portraits, Llewellyn takes a different tack altogether. He aims not to situate his funeral monuments in the canon of Western art, or to judge them by the conventional criteria of that canon. Instead he treats them as primarily ritual rather than aesthetic objects, privileging their social and anthropological significance over their artistic qualities, and locates them as indigenously English, as opposed to broadly continental, in form. In order to delineate this alternative discourse, he prefers the label "post-Reformation" to the traditional neo-classical connotations of the term "Renaissance." The sequence of his treatment has much more to do with evolving English notions of death, memory, and commemoration than with the reception of neo-classical style from abroad or with the influence of one tomb-maker upon another.
Integrated with this extended exploration of the monument as functional object, Llewellyn engages in additional and quite full discussions of, among other subjects, methods and materials, the economic and geographic structure of the industry, the nature of patronage, contemporary concepts of death and commemoration, and both the secular and visual qualities of post-Reformation English culture. Needless to say, this makes for a big discussion and big book. It is lengthy (but not wordy), extensively (if awkwardly) documented, copiously illustrated, and richly considerate of all sorts of issues germane to the subject.
Yet, though it may be churlish to note them in the face of such exhaustive research on the monuments themselves (can there be a single monument unseen by Llewellyn?), the effort, like even the grandest of monuments, also has its small flaws. One of them derives from the exercise of writing big books over long gestation periods. It is that conceptual frameworks and interpretive assumptions which were still current in the early going have sometimes been qualified, augmented, or superseded by the end. This an even greater risk (as this reviewer has learned) when one takes on disciplines contextual to one's own.
It is indeed in these fields where he has sometimes been victimized by the pace of scholarly publication. In his important treatment of the attitudes and rituals concerning death, for example, little of Houlbrooke's, Cressy's, or Litton's work or of Harding's on the related issue of burial location,[1] have been utilized to build on the theoretical underpinnings provided here by works of the late l970s and early 80s by, among others, Huntington and Metcalf, Humphreys and King, and Block and Parry.[2]
Similarly, the slightly tentative efforts to deal with the role of monuments as mnemonic devices might well have gained by reference to the expanding literature on collective memory, and of the role of material objects therein, running from Pierre Nora, through Davis and Starns, Schwartz[3] and others of the 1980s and on to works of the last decade such as those by Carruthers, Fentross and Wickham, Lowenthal, and Pennebacker et al.[4] These lapses do not nullify the broad thrust of Llewellyn's interpretations or by any means discredit his methodology. They do compel us to proceed with a degree of caution on some of the finer points, and they leave open to further exploration several aspects of the subject.
It must also be said that, though Cambridge University Press proved generous in allowing the copious illustrations required by the subject, it should be taken to task for other editorial decisions in a book of this hefty importance (and sale price!). With as many as 450 endnotes in a single chapter, it unreasonably challenges the reader's manual dexterity to print almost all notes with only the last name of the author and date of publication. While one finger marks the text, a second must track the notes, while a third probes the bibliography.
But despite these caveats, Llewellyn's offering amply justifies even the extraordinary labour which he clearly expended in its preparation. This is an Alp of a book.
NOTES
[1]. Ralph Houlbrooke, ed., Death, Ritual and Bereavement in Early Modern England (l989) which is cited but slightly used, though it may have appeared too late for Llewellyn; idem, Death, Religion and the Family in England, 1480-1750 (l998); David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual and the Life Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1997); Julian Litten, The English Way of Death, the Common Funeral since 1450 (London, l99l); Vanessa Harding, "Burial Choice and Burial Location in Late Medieval London," in, Death in Towns: Urban Responses to the Dying and the Dead, 1500-1650, ed. Stephen Bassett (Leicester, 1992), pp. 119-35.
[2]. R. Huntington and P. Metcalf, Celebrations of Death, the Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual, (Cambridge, Mass., 1979); S.C. Humphreys and Helen King, ed., Mortality and Immortality: The Archeology and Anthropology of Death (London, 1981; Maurice Block and J. Parry, ed., Death and the Regeneration of Life, (Cambridge, 1982).
[3]. B. Schwartz, "The Social Context of Commemoration, a Study in Collective Memory," Social Forces, 61, 2 (1982): 374-97; Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de Memoire (7 vols., Paris, l984-86); N.Z. Davis and R. Starns, ed., Memory and Counter-Memory, a special issue of Representations, 26 (Spring, 1989).
[4]. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990); James Fentross and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (London, l992); David Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Glencoe, Ill., 1996); James W. Pennebacker, David Paez, and Bernard Rime, ed., Collective Memory of Political Events: Social Psychological Perspectives (Mahwah, N.J., 1997).
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-albion.
Citation:
Robert Tittler. Review of Llewellyn, Nigel, Funeral Monuments in Post-Reformation England.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
August, 2001.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5409
Copyright © 2001 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.