Difficult pasts: Post-Reformation memory and the medieval romance

Mimi Ensley

doi:10.7765/9781526157904

Difficult pasts combines book history, reception history and theories of cultural memory to explore how Reformation-era audiences used medieval literary texts to construct their own national and religious identities. It argues that the medieval romance book became a flexible site of memory for readers after the Protestant Reformation, allowing them to both connect with and distance themselves from the recent ‘difficult past’. Central characters in this study range from canonical authors like Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser to less studied figures, such as printer William Copland, Elizabethan scribe Edward Banister and seventeenth-century poet and romance enthusiast, John Lane. In uniting a wide range of romance readers’ perspectives, Difficult pasts complicates clear ruptures between manuscript and print, Catholic and Protestant, or medieval and Renaissance. It concludes that the romance book offers a new way to understand the simultaneous change and continuity that defines post-Reformation England. Overall, Difficult pasts offers an interdisciplinary framework for better understanding the role of physical books and imaginative forms in grappling with the complexities of representing and engaging with the past.

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Difficult pasts

Post-Reformation memory and the medieval romance

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Contents

Front Matter
pp i-iv

Contents
pp v-v

List of figures
pp vi-vi

List of tables
pp vii-vii

Acknowledgements
pp viii-x

Introduction: Palimpsests – Reformation, romanceand erasure
pp 1-37

1 - Catalogues: Sammelbände, libraries and defining theromance genre
pp 38-85

2 - Collage: A recusant’s romance connection to thepast
pp 86-130

3 - Monuments: Reviving and restoring Chaucer’sSquire’s Tale
pp 131-172

4 - Museums: Temporality and timelessness in artefacts,relics and romance
pp 173-216

Conclusion: Palimpsests and gaps
pp 217-230

Index
pp 231-242

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Difficult pasts

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