Horace Walpole and the post-reformation funeral monument: the limits of antiquarianism

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Society is an appropriate occasion upon which to consider how attitudes towards funeral monuments have changed over time. Reflecting on the fundamental contribution made by Horace Walpole to the study of English monuments of the post-Reformation period, this article sets his work within the context of mid-eighteenth-century antiquarianism and seeks to reveal the aims and limitations of that methodology by taking as a case study a pair of early-seventeenth-century monuments in Salisbury Cathedral.