Memory and the English Reformation

Recasts the Reformation as a battleground over memory, in which new identities were formed through acts of commemoration, invention and repression.

Alexandra Walsham (Edited by), Bronwyn Wallace (Edited by), Ceri Law (Edited by), Brian Cummings (Edited by)

9781108829991, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 November 2020

425 pages
24 x 16 x 4 cm, 1.2 kg

'Scholarly interest in the social and cultural construction of memory has never been higher, … Memory and the Reformation is a remarkable collection of essays that does exactly what it sets out to do—show the reader how memory has been repudiated, rehabilitated, valorized, and memorialized, intellectually and materially.' Autumn Reinhardt-Simpson, Reading Religion

The dramatic religious revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries involved a battle over social memory. On one side, the Reformation repudiated key aspects of medieval commemorative culture; on the other, traditional religion claimed that Protestantism was a religion without memory. This volume shows how religious memory was sometimes attacked and extinguished, while at other times rehabilitated in a modified guise. It investigates how new modes of memorialisation were embodied in texts, material objects, images, physical buildings, rituals, and bodily gestures. Attentive to the roles played by denial, amnesia, and fabrication, it also considers the retrospective processes by which the English Reformation became identified as an historic event. Examining dissident as well as official versions of this story, this richly illustrated, interdisciplinary collection traces how memory of the religious revolution evolved in the two centuries following the Henrician schism, and how the Reformation embedded itself in the early modern cultural imagination.

Introduction. Memory and the English reformation Alexandra Walsham, Brian Cummings and Ceri Law
Part I. Events and Temporalities: 1. Nailing the reformation: Luther and the Wittenberg door in English historical memory Peter Marshall
2. Remembering the dissolution of the monasteries: events, chronology, and memory in Charles Wriothesley's chronicle Harriet Lyon
3. Remembering the past at the end of time Adam Morton
4. Henry VIII's ghost in Cromwellian England Christopher Highley
5. Remembering Mary, contesting reform: the English sonnets of the litany of Loreto Susannah Monta
6. Converting the cross: monuments, memory, and time in post-reformation England Alexandra Walsham
Part II. Objects and Places: 7. Dolls and idols in the English reformation Joe Moshenska
8. Monuments and the reformation Peter Sherlock
9. Memorable motifs: the role of 'synoptic' imagery in remembering the English reformation Tara Hamling
10. Revitalizing antiquities: sacred silver and its afterlives in post-reformation England Tessa Murdoch
11. Re-reading ruins: Edmund Spenser and Scottish Presbyterianism Stewart Mottram
12. 'Monuments of our indignation': John Milton and the reception of Reformation iconoclasm in the seventeenth century Philip Schwyzer
Part III. Lives and Afterlives: 13. Compromise refashioned: memory and life-writing in Matthew parker's roll Ceri Law
14. Heresy, history, and Henry V Susan Royal
15. The letters of the martyrs: remembering and reclaiming the apostolic form Johanna Harris
16. Competing lives and contested objects: Thomas More's hair-shirt and the production of memory Victoria van Hyning
17. Visual memory, portraiture and the Protestant credentials of Tudor and Stuart families Tarnya Cooper
18. Legends, shrines, and ruined tombs: memory and Reformation in female-voiced complaint Cathy Shrank
Part IV. Rituals and Bodies: 19. The wounded missal: iconoclasm, ritual and memory in Reformation Yorkshire Brian Cummings
20. Gesture, meaning and memory in the English Reformation Arnold Hunt
21. Believers' baptism, commemoration, and communal identity in revolutionary England Rachel Adcock
22. Making memories in post-Reformation English catholic musical miscellanies Emilie Murphy
23. The liturgical commemoration of the English Reformation, 1534–1625 Alec Ryrie
Index.

Subject Areas: Church history [HRCC2], British & Irish history [HBJD1], European history [HBJD], Regional & national history [HBJ], History [HB], Humanities [H]