Graveslab, St. Patricksrock, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, St. Patricksrock, Co. Tipperary

A limestone graveslab in the choir of Cashel Cathedral carries a square hole punched through its centre, roughly eighteen centimetres across, as though something was once anchored there or deliberately removed.

It is the kind of detail that makes a person stop and look more carefully at what might otherwise seem like a routine piece of funerary stonework.

The slab commemorates one Georgius Comyne of Wadinstowne, and is dated Anno Domini 1633, placing it firmly in the early seventeenth century. The Latin inscription, rendered in Roman capitals within a double-line border, reads in full as transcribed by Fitzgerald in 1903: HIC IACET GEORGIUS COMYNE DE WADINSTOWNE, followed by the date given in the form ANNO A PARTU VIRGINIS, meaning the year from the birth of the Virgin, a phrasing that reinforces the Counter-Reformation Catholic milieu in which much of this stonework was produced. Towards the base of the slab, the Christogram IHS appears, a monogram derived from the Greek spelling of Jesus and widely used in Catholic devotional contexts from the medieval period onward. Fitzgerald considered this to be only the lower portion of a larger slab, suggesting the upper section had been lost, but the raised border runs continuously along the bottom edge beneath the IHS, which raises the possibility that the slab is in fact complete as it stands. The question has not been definitively resolved, and that ambiguity gives the object a quietly unresolved quality.

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