This
work surveys all the existing funeral monuments in the united kingdoms
of England, Scotland, and Ireland. The title page mentions the special
need to mark the burial places of eminent persons interred in the grounds
of dissolved monasteries as well as those of royalty and nobility who died
abroad. Weever undertakes, then, a great task of recovery of the
pious dead so that they may be reintegrated into his paean to a reformed
vision of the resurrection. The epigraph to the volume speaks to
Weever's avocation: "Lancashire gave him breath / And Cambridge education
/ His studies are of Death / Of heaven his meditation." The frontispiece,
engraved by Thomas Cecill, portrays Adam as a skeletal Old Man on the left,
while on the right the New Man of Christ represents hope. Beneath
these two figures is an image of a funeral procession. Here too,
the image distinguishes between the left signifying death and the right,
life: an open grave, presumably for the man in the procession, appears
in the left foreground, while the right foreground contains a grave from
which an undecayed man rises, presumably an allusion to Christ's Resurrection.
As a whole, the engraving urges the viewer to reject his own Adam in favor of Christ by paralleling all aspects of the two figures: the skeleton versus the resurrected body, the shovel versus Christ's staff of victory, the apple versus the cross. In this context, Adam is associated with the Fall and mortality, whereas Christ is seen as trampling on the serpent that caused the Fall. With these parallels, the engraving instructs the viewer to put his complete trust in Christ.
For further information, consult Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
