Monuments

Throughout the early modern period, women exercised significant control over how they and their kin were represented by commissioning, designing, and overseeing the construction of funeral monuments for themselves, family members, and others. Authorized by Queen Elizabeth I as protected sites for genealogical self-documentation, heraldic tombs grew increasingly opulent under her successors. Gradually, wealthier members of the middle class began to commemorate themselves and their loved ones in more modest and often more heartfelt tombs. Elite and middle-class women used monumental forms to represent themselves, preserve female alliances, and affirm the affective worth of female subjects—girls, single women, servants, widows, female friends, and kinswomen—who were often undervalued by their culture. Comprised of prose inscriptions and poetic epitaphs as well as architectural, sculptural, and heraldic elements scripted by women and executed by artists, monumental writing captures and conveys women’s voices as they confronted death.