ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the significance of the Elizabethan funeral monument as a material object that reflected changes in piety and pious representation. The place of the gentry funeral monument within post-Reformation church space needs to be carefully evaluated. Prominent local families had always dominated church space both within the congregation and in the erection of tombs and brasses. The chapter proposes to contextualize the effigy monument within Protestant and humanist-inspired processes of remembrance and the formation of identity. It discusses that the ‘secular’ facets of monument design had a concomitant spiritual meaning and will similarly highlight the ideologies of Christian humanism and Protestantism that informed the identity constructed by the gentry in life and for perpetuity in their tombs. Sir Roger Manwood’s monument occupies a significant place within a system of the formation of identity and commemoration that covered a diverse range of media.
