This informative and meticulous study results from Carsten Dilba's doctoral dissertation, completed in 2005 at the University of Bonn. Its focus is not just the Eleanor Crosses. Instead Dilba argues forcibly for an entire memorial programme initiated by Edward i through the decade after Eleanor's death in 1290. This programme was designed specifically to emulate, and compete with, similar loci of collective memory associated with the French Crown.
The study is split into six parts. The aim in part one is to come to conclusions regarding the historical context for Eleanor's memorials, employing the detailed building accounts left by her executors. Part two covers the historiography of the funerary architecture, and part three interrogates its function and precedents. Dilba expands on all this in part four, in which he analyses in depth the various components of Eleanor's memorials, including her visceral tomb in Lincoln Cathedral and her heart burial at Blackfriars, London.
In part five, Eleanor's commemoration is placed in a wider context. Particularly insightful is the re-evaluation of the near-contemporary tombs of other Plantagenet family members in Westminster Abbey, notably Aveline of Lancaster (d 1274), her husband Edmund Crouchback (d 1296) and William de Valence (d 1296). Dilba proposes that these were executed by craftsmen who had worked on the crosses, within a conscious memorial programme devised in emulation of the Capetian dynastic burials at St Denis. Further, the main inspiration of the Eleanor Crosses were the ‘Montjoies of Saint Louis’, erected where the funeral cortège of Louis ix had halted in 1271.
Yet in part six, Dilba concludes that Edward i's memorial programme resulted from particular religious and social historic processes. Westminster Abbey was conceived as a generational mausoleum (along the lines of Frogmore and Windsor for the Saxe-Coburg/Windsors), rather than emphasizing a longer continuity, as at St Denis – and the crosses were not direct copies of the Montjoies. The historical context of Eleanor's death initiated an extravagant and unique display of royal power and piety, underscored through repetition (the twelve crosses and use of the same artists on other structures), variation (employment of different, but connected, architectural forms) and augmentation (increasing sophistication of structures regarding intercessory opportunities as those offering prayers journeyed towards Westminster).
Aside from the painstaking detail of Dilba's research, one of the book's main strengths is its hundred pages of well-presented charts, colour plates, figures, maps and tables, which describe the wide-ranging and comprehensive nature of the study and its attention to vanished, as well as extant, monuments. Nor should its readership be confined to medievalists. The inscription on figure 79, the destruction of the Cheapside cross in 1643, tells us that ‘at the fall of the tope crosse drommes beat trumpets blew … cappes warre throwne in the Ayre and a greate Shoute of People with joy’, before its ‘Leaden Popes’ were ritually burnt, accompanied by ‘ringinge of Bells’. The memorial programme of Eleanor of Castile clearly fulfilled its purpose, as the author points out. Despite such destruction, its power remains strong even today, more than 700 years after her death.
