About the author

John Weever (1575/6–1632) endeavoured to launch a literary career in London, where he became embroiled in the Poetomachia, the notorious quarrel of the Elizabethan playhouses. He wrote three books of a satiric bent and two of a religious nature, before publishing his work on epitaphs three decades later.

About the text

If the seventeenth century saw the ascendancy of the epitaph as a genre, Weever's 900-page folio constitutes the genre's greatest treasure trove and shrine. This massive contribution to early modern antiquarianism catalogues funeral monuments from the dioceses of Canterbury, Rochester, London and Norwich by compiling transcriptions and observations gleaned from Weever's studies and travels. In his epistle to the reader, Weever acknowledges the network of scholars and libraries that made possible his work and even goes so far as to invite his readers to collect, on his behalf, notes of local inscriptions; he not only travelled extensively throughout England and Scotland but also visited continental sites in order to gather material for his research. His book, however, should not be anachronistically read through the prism of any modern presupposition of historical objectivity. It disposes textual artefacts into a compendium stamped with his own style and personality – somewhat in the vein of those polymathic digressers Burton and Browne. Weever enunciates an early imperative for the preservation and conservation of stone records out of a desire to protect the nation state through memory.

The arts of memory

The two excerpts are taken from Weever's prefatory discourse, where he expounds upon the history of ancient and medieval burial rites, funeral monuments and sepulchres, besides the vandalism and violation done to these structures. The first excerpt – the beginning of the opening chapter ‘Of monuments in general’ – spans the broad terrain that the word ‘monument’ covers in the period. All cultural work seems to have a monumentalising capacity. Ultimately, Weever privileges inscription over visual image not just because he had a poet's ear for verse but because he was following the lead of his fellow antiquarians, who conceived of the monument in terms of epigrammatic wit. Weever thus offers little description of the architecture of the tombs he visited, concentrating instead on the epitaphs that they bore. In this regard, his project walks a fine line.