This chapter examines the post-Reformation afterlives of churchyard, wayside and market crosses. It explores how they were implicated in the Protestant war against idols alongside the manner in which many were recycled for alternative purposes, probing the new layers of meaning they acquired as they were modified and the contested legacies they left to the generations that inherited them. Particular attention is paid to crosses upon whose decapitated pedestals subsequently became the base for sundials. It argues that crosses converted into timekeepers not merely illuminate the interconnections between memory and materiality, space and temporality, in post-Reformation culture. They also offer insight into the evolving concept of the ‘monument’ itself. They afford a glimpse of the process by which things designed to provoke remembrance became things worthy of preservation as historic artefacts themselves. They became signposts to a disappearing past that had to be fossilised lest it be lost.

This contribution will consider early modern and analytic descriptions of sundials as ‘cosmographic instruments’, and consider the advantages and disadvantages of classing dials, globes, and certain paper volvelles as ‘cosmographic’ rather than simply ‘mathematical’ instruments. It will thus contribute to historiographical debates about how historians of scientific instruments and mathematical practice can best acknowledge and make use of period descriptions of instruments and disciplines without either overwriting them with our own categories, on the one hand, or appropriating them in such a way as to disguise genuine variations in terminology across different languages, cultures, and settings. The discussion will connect to broad classes of objects in the Whipple collections, but also to specific objects such as the ‘Regiomontantus-type’ dial and the ‘Castlemaine’ or ‘English’ globe, as well as drawing on some examples from the Whipple Library’s rare book collections.