E-Thesis 122 views 394 downloads
Redeeming Death: Mortality, Portraiture and the Quest for Salvation in Tudor England and Wales / JESSICA MCGRATH
Swansea University Author: JESSICA MCGRATH
-
PDF | E-Thesis – open access
Copyright: The Author, Jessica Rosenthal Mcgrath, 2025.
Download (7.7MB)
DOI (Published version): 10.23889/SUthesis.69793
Abstract
This thesis investigates how the visual culture of commemoration in the Elizabethan parish church changed in response to the theological upheavals of the Reformation, namely the refutation of the belief in purgatory and the introduction of a predestinate approach to salvation. The specific focus of...
| Published: |
Swansea, Wales, UK
2025
|
|---|---|
| Institution: | Swansea University |
| Degree level: | Doctoral |
| Degree name: | Ph.D |
| Supervisor: | Poertner, Regina |
| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa69793 |
| Abstract: |
This thesis investigates how the visual culture of commemoration in the Elizabethan parish church changed in response to the theological upheavals of the Reformation, namely the refutation of the belief in purgatory and the introduction of a predestinate approach to salvation. The specific focus of this thesis is on a selected body of nine painted works commissioned for display in provincial parish churches across southern England and Wales during the period c.1585-c.1603. These paintings are complex cultural products, and this thesis will present and interrogate the ways that they function as forms of spiritual and social self-fashioning. These paintings are rare examples of objects that sit at the intersection between late-sixteenth century civic and memento mori domestic portraiture, and funeral monuments found within the parish church setting. A composite object type, often functioning as both a commemorative portrait and a church monument, these painted church portrait memorials were created and commissioned during a time of immense political and spiritual upheaval. As such, a primary aim of this thesis is to evidence the late sixteenth century English and Welsh provincial lay experience of mortality and salvation as inherently nuanced and complicated; with the existence of a cross-confessional populace and soteriological beliefs from across the religious spectrum influencing the possible meanings and functions of these memorial paintings, and the way that viewers may have responded to them. The overarching aim of this thesis is to highlight painted ecclesiological memoria, created outside of the court-based, London environment, as an important area of sixteenth century scholarship. Some of these paintings are relatively well known and others have been little published: the Memorial to William Smart in Ipswich; the Portrait of Sir Henry Unton once in Faringdon; the Memorial to Thomas and Mary More in Adderbury, the Memorial to a Child of the Harewell Family in Besford; the Cornewall Family Memorial in Burford, the Memorial to Margery Downes in Bishop’s Frome, and the three Stradling Family Memorial Panels once in St Donat’s. This thesis will explain and evidence the various factors that influenced their patrons and which account for the different representational strategies employed by the artists: from medieval ecclesiological art and memoria, to the culture of sixteenth century civic and domestic portraiture, and the challenges of a life lived against the backdrop of the Reformation. |
|---|---|
| Item Description: |
Author: Jessica Rosenthal Mcgrath |
| Keywords: |
Death, Mortality, Portraiture, Tudor, Reformation, Salvation, Theology, History, History of Art |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Funders: |
AHRC, Collaborative Doctoral Partnership, Swansea University and National Portrait Gallery |