The Ephemera Of Eternity : The Irish Catholic Memorial Card As Material Culture

The following text 'The Ephemera Of Eternity : The Irish Catholic Memorial Card As Material culture is written by 'Mary Ann Bolger' . Mary Ann Bolger is a lecturer in Design History and Theory at Dublin Institute of Technology . She is a graduate of joint MA in history of design at the royal college of art and the Victoria and Albert Museum , London . 

She starts her text with describing the Irish Culture describing the relationship between the Irish culture to death . But the majority of this text focuses on the political uses of death and the funeral and on the folk tradition of the wake . She then focuses on the design of the memorial card , it is a mass produced object intimately associated with Irish catholic mourning . It has become throughout the twentieth century though largely undocumented , aspect of Irish Catholic funeral practice . A memorial card is a single or bi-folded card about two inches by four , with a holy picture on the obverse , typically an image of a christ , the virgin or a saint , sometimes reproductions of famous often counter-reformation , art works . O n the reverse sides one finds the name , date of death and address of the deceased and few short prayers .

A brief history of memorial cards : 

Memorial cards have only been a part of Irish Catholic Funeral practice since the 1870s , but the use of printed obituary cards in a catholic context seems to date to the first half of the seventeenth century . It was in the first decade that advertisements for catholic memorial cards first appeared in Ireland , during what the historian Emmet Larkin termed the devotional revolution . 

Evidence of the surviving cards appears that the repositiories supplied lithographed french and german holy cards with reverse either left blank or stereotyped with standard prayers to the Irish print trade . The modernisation of Irish Culture ,devotional revolution was a part of moderm form of production . Certainly the religious goods depots provided an economical way for Irish printers to produce high quality illustrated cards . 

Nowadays the trend is changing they mostly use photos of people rather than the potraits which represents the identity of the following family . The development of these memorial cards can be seen stylish and continuous as we can see earlier portraits were used but in todays world they use photos which is influenced by the printing techniques and styles . But at the end i like the tradition of the Catholic Ireland of the memorial cards but i think nowadays it is getting more modernised and commercial .