The Sparham Corpse Panels: Unique Revelations of Death from Late Fifteenth-Century England

Abstract

AbstractTwo late fifteenth-century rood-screen panels in Sparham church, near Norwich, display images of corpses that are apparently unique in surviving medieval art. One is painted with two standing corpses dressed in finery, the other with a corpse arising from a tomb within a church, with a font to one side. Both panels are notable for their surviving inscriptions, and others now lost. Together, these works constitute one of the most significant English contributions to the genre of death imagery, yet their uniqueness and artistic importance has not been recognized to date. Using a range of medieval and antiquarian sources, this article aims to provide a comprehensive account of the Sparham panels’ physical and historical context, iconography and meaning. The strong possibility that they functioned as a ‘surrogate sepulchral monument’ is discussed at the end of the paper.