Special issue: Monuments in Conversation: Westminster Abbey in the Long Eighteenth Century.

Liverpool University Press is pleased to inform you of the latest content in 'Sculpture Journal', a highly regarded publication that is essential reading for those working in and researching sculpture in all its aspects from prehistory to the present across the globe.

This special issue of 'Sculpture Journal' offers the first sustained, collective study of Westminster Abbey’s sculptural canon, repositioning the Abbey not as a series of isolated monuments but as a densely interconnected pantheon shaped by centuries of artistic, religious, and political forces. Emerging from the 2024 Henry Moore Institute conference Monuments in Conversation, the issue invites readers to re-evaluate how monuments function within this singular space—and how their meanings shift through changing contexts, technologies, and audiences. In a detailed Q&A, guest editor Gemma Shearwood provides insight into the motivations behind the issue, its methodological innovations, and the perspectives it brings to pantheon studies.

Read the Q&A and browse this new issue online > https://liverpooluniversitypress.blog/2025/12/01/monuments-in-conversation-inside-the-westminster-abbey-special-issue-of-sculpture-journal/

If you would like to read content from 'Sculpture Journal', please consider recommending a journal subscription to your librarian. Institutional subscriptions provide full online access to the complete archive—nearly 30 years of scholarship dating back to 1997—and support the ongoing publication of this vital resource.
>https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/action/recommendation?doi=10.3828/sj

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Table of contents

INTRODUCTION
GEMMA SHEARWOOD

RESEARCH ARTICLES

Imperial conversations: linking the Caribbean, South Asia and North America through the monuments to William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, Vice-Admiral Charles Watson, and George Montagu Dunk, 2nd Earl of Halifax, c. 1801, 1933 and 2026
GEMMA SHEARWOOD

‘Even their ashes’: female selfhood and same-sex love in the monument to Mary Kendall and Catherine Jones, c. 1712
SARAH MONKS

Caught between monumental traditions: Grinling Gibbons’s monument to Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell
CHARLOTTE DAVIS

OPEN ACCESS
Placing poets: Cowley’s ‘Dust’, Thomas Sprat and the making of Poets’ Corner, 1667–1713
CLAUDINE VAN HENSBERGEN

Monumental death: thinking about the conservation of monuments through Louis-François Roubiliac’s Nightingale monument
IZABELLA GILL-BROWN

Sir Francis Chantrey’s ‘delicate and honourable conduct in all matters relating to the Abbey’, 1814–41
M. G. SULLIVAN

Experiencing and re-experiencing the monument to William Shakespeare
SAMANTHA LUKIC-SCOTT

A sphere of influence: the monument to Sir Isaac Newton by William Kent and Michael Rysbrack
MARJORIE COUGHLAN

From memorial to museum piece? John Flaxman’s monument to George Lindsay Johnstone
MICHAEL SMITH

Afterword: in our time? Scaling/queering the Westminster Abbey sculptural pantheon
JASON EDWARDS

REVIEWS

NOAH F. DASINGER: Lorenzo G. Buonanno, The Performance of Sculpture in Renaissance Venice

ALBERT GODETZKY: Ethan Matt Kavaler, Actors Carved & Cast: Netherlandish Sculpture of the Sixteenth Century

JENNIFER S. GRIFFITHS: Ara H. Merjian, Fragments of Totality: Futurism, Fascism, and the Sculptural Avant-Garde

CONTRIBUTORS