ABSTRACT
Monuments have one primary task: to attract visitors and make them remember the dead. In early modern England the visitor could be a lowly parishioner, the descendant of the person commemorated, a neighbouring family of gentle origins, a tourist, or a student of antiquities. The act of memory – and it was always an act, whether emotional, spiritual or physical – might be manifested as a mass, a prayer, education in social ideals, a rehearsal of a genealogy, the expression of grief, or the recollection of familial duties. Yet the purpose was one and the same, to remember, and through memory to improve the lot of both the living and the dead. To achieve their purpose, monuments told and still tell stories about the people they commemorate. They recreate the culture and society of the people who produced them, communicating everything from social, political and religious ideals, to the nature of gender relations and the shape of creation itself.
