Variation in the Architecture and Design of Gravemarkers in Great Britain and British North America 1600 1800

Abstract

This thesis explores how the architecture and design of gravemarkers in its study area (the whole of Great Britain and the Thirteen Colonies) varied over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Based on very extensive fieldwork it first reviews and categorises the setting and form of all types of gravemarker, the motifs they bear, and who made them, in the process producing the first comprehensive list of those who can be proved to have made gravemarkers (some 705 in all). It goes on to set gravemarkers in the context of Early Modern material culture through the comparison of the motifs used on them with the same motifs found elsewhere.

Based again on robust fieldwork it then identifies regional styles, largely for the first time, and appends case studies of a number. It considers the reasons for regional variation, and then looks at other causes of variation, and at factors tending towards uniformity.
It concludes, first, that gravemarker design was part of the general material culture of the period and has few peculiar features, second, that (pace a number of scholars) religion was not a very significant factor in design or variation, and third, that there was an overall ‘grammar’ of design, within which variation was principally regional but also socio-economic and based on function and personal choice.