Stone Fidelity: Marriage and Emotion in Medieval Tomb Sculpture

The book explores the medieval double tomb effigies, their artistic, religious, political, and legal agendas, and their significance in the Middle Ages. It offers new interpretations of famous tombs and highlights lesser-known memorials from throughout Europe.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 354 pages
Publication date: 14 June 2022
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Pioneering investigation of the popular double tomb effigies in the Middle Ages.
2022 Historians of British Art Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period before 1600
2021 International Center of Medieval Art Annual Book Prize
Medieval tombs often depict husband and wife lying side-by-side, and hand in hand, immortalized in elegantly carved stone: what Philip Larkin's poem An Arundel Tomb later described as their "stone fidelity." This first full account of the double tomb places its rich tradition into dialogue with powerful discourses of gender, marriage, politics, and emotion during the Middle Ages. As well as offering new interpretations of some of the most famous medieval tombs, such as those found in Westminster Abbey and Canterbury Cathedral, it draws attention to a host of lesser-known memorials from throughout Europe, providing an innovative vantage point from which to reconsider the material culture of medieval marriage. Setting these twin effigies alongside wedding rings and dresses as the agents of matrimonial ritual and embodied symbolism, the author presents the double tomb as far more than mere romantic sentiment. Rather, it reveals the careful artifice beneath their seductive emotional surfaces: the artistic, religious, political, and legal agendas underlying the medieval rhetoric of married love.

Dimension: 240 x 170 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781783276943