The Eloquent Dead: Elizabethan and Jacobean Monuments

A talk about four monuments dating to the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, in the Chapel of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge: Dr Christina Faraday

The Chapel of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, contains four impressive Elizabethan and Jacobean monuments: to John Caius, re-founder of the College; William Webbe, Fellow Commoner; Dr Stephen Perse, Fellow and benefactor; and Dr Thomas Legge, Master and successor to Caius. This talk will analyse the monuments alongside nearby contemporary examples, and consider them as indicative of the College’s desire to consolidate its corporate identity in the first half-century after the refoundation, and of the deep diffusion of classical and rhetorical influences in a post-Reformation Cambridge College.

Dr Christina Faraday is a Research Fellow in History of Art at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, specialising in the art and culture of Tudor and Jacobean England. She is a BBC New Generation Thinker and contributes regularly to a variety of popular media outlets, including Apollo and BBC Radio 3. In 2021 an article she wrote for The Telegraph was shortlisted for the British Journalism Awards. Beyond the University of Cambridge, she teaches courses for the Institute of Continuing Education at Cambridge and The Wallace Collection, where her aim is to bring the history of art and ideas to life for audiences of a variety of ages and ability levels.

Event is organised by the Church Monument Society.