In 1631 John Weever complained that ‘by some of our epitaphs more honour is attributed to a rich quondam Tradesman, or griping usurer, then is given to the greatest Potentate entombed in Westminster’: a contrast to the past, when decorum was observed in fitting the monument to the patron’s rank. Many of the papers in this book show how wrong Weever was. The aspirational middle has always defined itself by useless luxury items, and nothing is more uselessly luxurious than a lavish tomb.
The essay topics here range from Cyprus to England and from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. In her introduction, Anne Leader acknowledges the difficulty of arriving at a definition of ‘middle class’ over such wide geographical and temporal spans: the Pisan merchants (discussed by Karen Rose Matthews) of 1200–1400, who were re-using ancient sarcophagi to signify their proud republicanism, are very different from the ambitious merchant tailors (described by Christian Steer) of later medieval London, who acquired large country estates far from the capital, and who chose to be buried there, obscuring the commercial origins of the family fortune for their noble descendants. A similar degree of aspiration is seen in the informative and amusing essay by Ann Adams and Nicola Jennings on fifteenth-century Castile, Flanders and Burgundy, which (unusually in this book) attempts a definition of the middle classes and sets the subject in a European context. Meredith Crosbie’s essay on the juxtaposition of two monuments in Madonna dell’Orto, Venice, shows a merchant monument facing down, in position and design, the aristocratic monument to which it is opposed. A different type of cultural assimilation is examined by Agnieszka Patała in her survey of the way that the immigrant Nuremberg merchant community in Breslau/Wrocław chose to be commemorated, although this essay would have benefited from reference to studies of similar immigrant communities and earlier studies of commemorative strategies.
Ruth Wolff discusses the use of the imago doctoris in cathedra on northern Italian legal monuments of the fourteenth century, including the history and imagery of the tomb of Pietro di Dante (d. 1364; son of the poet) in Treviso. Anne Leader writes about the choice of religious houses as locations for burial in Florence, arguing that this ensured a funerary location surrounded by perpetual prayer (a point made in several essays). This would have benefited from awareness of work outside Italy, such as Phillip Lindley’s on religious houses as locations for elite tombs in England, as well as the work done on stemme in other Italian cities.
Two essays use testamentary evidence: Harriette Peel, in her interesting examination (despite sloppy editing and mis-labelling) of two monuments at Bruges, argues that political alliance overcame class differences; and Sandra Cardarelli on the 1478 holograph Testament of Cione di Ravi, a member of a minor noble family that was in decline, who sought by commemoration to assert his family’s claims to status.
The remaining essays introduce new areas to thanatology. Barbara McNulty writes about the adoption by Cypriot families of the icon depicting saints and donors as a vehicle for commemoration. Charlotte A Stanford focuses on the way in which bequests of food were used to keep the donors in the prayers of the religious communities to which they were made: an elegant amalgamation of the desire to perform post-mortem charity with the fundamental purpose of monumentalisation during the period covered by this book – to shorten, through the prayers of the living, the time that the dead would spend in purgatory.
Despite the scholarship of the papers, such books are anachronisms. They provide young scholars with the publications they need in establishing their careers (it is high time that universities – stuck in the nineteenth century – began to accept online publications in their research activity indexes and assessments of scholarship), but books like this cannot do justice to a subject that demands lavish illustration; they waste natural resources (there are twenty-five blank pages) and take up shelf space. All these essays would have benefited from the opportunities of good electronic publication. As it is, the book, although being well bound and printed on high-quality paper, contains far too few illustrations (all grey scale), which are muddy and sometimes indecipherable.
Although computer programs less than a half-century old are now unreadable (while the Codex Sinaiticus is still doing fine), scholarship such as this is fairly ephemeral and limited in its audience: surely a great argument for embracing online publication with its limitless potential and rapidly decreasing costs.
