A landmark illustrated history of rural church monuments - the
forgotten national treasures of England and Wales
Deep in the countryside, away from metropolitan abbeys and cathedrals,
thousands of funerary monuments are hidden in parish churches. These
artworks - medieval brasses and elegant marble effigies, stone tomb
chests and grand mausoleums - are of great historical and cultural
significance, but have, due to their relative inaccessibility, faded
from accounts of our art history.
Over twenty-five years, C. B. Newham FSA has visited and photographed
more than eight thousand rural churches, cataloguing the monumental
sculptures encountered on his quest. In Country Church Monuments, he
presents 365 of the very best, each accompanied by detailed photographs,
biographies of both the deceased and their sculptors and a wealth of
contextual material. Many of these works commemorate famous historical
figures, from scheming Tudor courtier Richard Rich to Victorian prime
minister William Ewart Gladstone. But more moving are the countless
others - minor aristocrats, small-time industrialists, much-loved
mothers, fathers and children - who, if not for their memorials, would
wholly be lost to time.
As Newham blows the dust off these artworks and breathes life into the
stories they tell, a new aesthetic history of rural England and Wales
emerges. Country Church Monuments is a poignant record of the art we
make at the borders of life and death, of our ceaseless human striving
for eternity.
