ABSTRACT
This book began with the claim that monuments are unique windows on to the early modern past. They reveal how the people of the past wanted us to think about their world. The narratives they create can make a significant contribution to historical understanding of the past. One of the great epistemological dilemmas facing historians is that, when we investigate the past through its material traces, the past cannot answer back. We ask all the questions, and provide the interpretations, but the past cannot interpret itself and speak to the future. Conversations are impossible and belong to the realm of the novelist. Part of the purpose of funeral monuments, however, was precisely to tell the future how the past thought about itself, ranging from social ideals to religious doctrine to cosmology. This chapter draws the present study to a close by paying attention to the whole gamut of memories and ideas evoked by just one monument. By analysing a single tomb we apprehend how an elite family and its clients interpreted the universe they believed they inhabited. What we discover is a series of messages deliberately left for us, touching on religion, art, learning, the dead, bodies, regulation, lineage and representation.
