ABSTRACT
Thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England was the site of a thriving effigy industry, and prominent among its carved products were representations of knightly patrons. 1 In 1980, H.A. Tummers published a study of English secular tomb figures in which he cataloged 143 surviving military effigies from the thirteenth century alone. 2 The sheer number of armored tomb figures speaks to the increasing self-promotion among English knights during this period: their proliferation points to their protoypes' struggles to achieve autonomy from, and social parity with, the nobility. In this dynamic social process, the military effigy acted as the site for a gendering unique to the knight, and in contradiction to lived experience.
