In this book, Sally Badham sets out to explore late medieval English memoria and related religious practices; in other words, the strategies that men and women used to secure pre- and post-mortem intercession in the hope that it would ensure the speedy release of their souls from Purgatory after their deaths. Her study draws on a wide variety of sources including the material remains of commemorative objects, probate evidence and contemporary religious and secular literature. She provides an extensive and coherent account of different categories of memoria including good works, repairs to church fabric, church fittings, decoration and ornaments, collegiate churches and chantries, religious guilds, funerals and funeral monuments. The book is lavishly illustrated with photographs of some of the objects and buildings that she discusses in the text.

As Badham acknowledges, she is covering some well-worn ground and much of her content will be familiar to anyone who has encountered late medieval mortuary culture through secondary literature or through engagement with probate material and parish records such as churchwardens’ accounts. Nevertheless, as she points out, most historians focus on a limited range of memoria (for example, funeral monuments) or offer close analysis of a single parish or group of parishes. The strength of Seeking Salvation is that its coverage — both in terms of the range of memoria and geographical area — is so extensive. The author is able to achieve this because she relies heavily on the work of other scholars, in particular in her use of wills, which are mostly taken from published collections – such as the four volumes of Sussex wills edited by Garraway Rice and Godfrey and published by the Sussex Record Society between 1935 and 1941. This reliance does not undermine Badham’s achievement; she handles a complex array of primary and secondary material with apparent ease.

As the term memoria suggests, what medieval men and women most wanted when planning their post-mortem strategies was to be kept in the memory of those they had left behind, so that they would continue to receive their prayers long after their deaths. Badham shows how men and women protected their memories by inscribing church building works or commemorative objects such as windows, wall paintings, liturgical vessels and vestments and tombs with their names, heraldic devices, merchants’ marks or rebuses. An example of one of these is Sir Ralph Shelton whose rebus, still visible in the stained-glass windows of his parish church of Shelton (Norfolk), was a shell on top of a barrel or ‘tun’. In a society where the majority of the population was illiterate, the use of visual insignia was especially important. Some donors were able to go further by commissioning commemorative objects that included an image of themselves, such as the bench-ends displaying images of John Chapman and his wife in the church of Swaffham (Norfolk).

Badham’s analysis of burial location and funeral monuments serves as a useful reminder that, for late medieval men and women, the place of burial and choice of monument were often part of complex strategies of post-mortem commemoration. An obvious example of this would be a tomb erected in a chantry chapel established by the testator, but Badham suggests that tombs were possibly also meant to interact with other artefacts in the church, such as images of saints or commemorative stained-glass windows long since disappeared. Despite the high survival of medieval monuments, it is hard now to get a sense of this relationship, not only because of the loss of associated devotional objects but also because many tombs are no longer in their original locations — moved within the church because they were in the way or, in some cases, moved from another church when the building was demolished or renovated.

One quibble is with the way that Badham uses quotes. She says in her introduction that she has transcribed those written in the vernacular as written, or as they had already been rendered in print by another scholar, yet has translated the Latin into modern English. However, with some vernacular quotes a modern translation has been provided and with others not. It is not always clear why this has happened. Moreover, because she uses printed primary sources as they were originally edited, there are inconsistencies in the presentation, most notably in the use of abbreviations. In my opinion, it would have been better to cite all sources in modern English. But this is a minor annoyance in what is a robust, scholarly and stimulating book. What I enjoyed most about reading it was that it reminded me of the glorious heritage of medieval religious art that still survives, either in situ or in museum collections, despite the depredations of time. For a small number of medieval men and women their memoria continue to function, even if not quite in the way that they originally intended.