Camden and Church Monuments

Abstract

This article examines the epigraphic scholarship of William Camden through close readings first of his guidebook to Westminster Abbey, and then of his other works in which he discusses the histories of church monuments, epitaphs, and inscriptions. Camden emerges here as the pivotal figure between the continental epigraphic tradition, which sprung up in the mid-sixteenth century, and brought together philologically minded antiquaries focused on classical inscriptions, and a vein of specifically English church antiquarianism that appeared in the seventeenth century, and which turned instead to medieval and post-medieval remains, often with genealogical and heraldic motivations in mind. Camden’s epigraphic works have received little attention from modern scholars, certainly in comparison with either the Britannia or the Annales, but as this article shows, that neglect ignores both their significance for the history of scholarship and their considerable contemporary impact.