The eighth volume in the acclaimed paperback series . . . the only county series that can legitimately claim to represent the past and present of a nation.

Contributions by
Lynn Abrams, Katherine Bradley, Graham Busby, Paul Cockerham, Treve Crago, Bernard Deacon, Amy Hale, Zoe Hambly, Dorothy Mindenhall, Philip Payton, Ronald Perry, Sharron P. Schwartz, Garry Tregidga and Simon Trezise

An illustrated account of the medieval funeral monuments in Tou; France - in the cathedral, the museum and the collegiate church of Saint-Gengoult.

St Botolph s remains as a testament in stone to Boston s glory days. It is the tallest parish church tower in the world, with a height of 83m. The nave is 74m long and 32m wide, larger than many cathedrals. The papers in this volume give a thorough overview of the town in the later Middle Ages, the architectural history of St Botolph s, the religious guilds which played such an important part of the lives of the townsfolk and, above all, the monuments. To this has been added a detailed illustrated catalogue of the medieval monuments."

Memorialisation and the Cornish Funeral Monument Industry 1497-1660 presents an extensive appraisal of several cohesive style groups of monuments, being the products of specific monument workshops in Cornwall, SW England, from the end of the fifteenth century to the Commonwealth. People used memorials to make statements. By examining every Cornish monument from 1497 to 1660uthe good, the unprepossessing, and the downright baduit is only then, with this mass of information, that one can truly contextualise motivations across the social spectrum and comprehend the contemporary meaning of the monuments to the countyAes inhabitants. These statements provide direct contemporary evidence as regards the identity of the commemorateduespecially their Cornishnessuand crucially how they sensed their identity then, rather than how we judge it now. In this work the tombs themselves are described, their iconography, design sources and sculptural perspectives are explored, and the motives of the patrons are deduced. The author goes on to discuss the methods and motives of Cornish memorialisation, identifying an unusualu if not uniqueusustained surge in monument commissions from Cornish workshops towards the end of the sixteenth century, using slate. The overall context of individual commemoration in Cornwall is analysed using wills and probate accounts as a guide to other means of remembrance, both pre- and post-Reformation, building on the motivations for tomb erection. This paradigm of Cornish memorialisation is compared with trends in Kilkenny, Ireland, and Finistere, France, to open up a matrix of memorialisation in the Celtic / Atlantic periphery. One of the discourses of a tomb which is frequently overlooked is its location in the church itself, therefore the author analyses monument positions to reveal how factors such as lineage status, and monumental continuity, affected the positioning of tombs. In the Appendices, the database of Cornish monuments acts as a reference tool to the arguments in the text of this book. The monuments of Kilkenny and Finistere are similarly itemised, together with analyses of masonsAe and helliersAe probate documents, wider sets of Cornish wills, and lists of individually priced burial locations in St Neot and Liskeard. Numerous illustrations of the monuments themselves are also presented, most of which have never been pictured before.