Early Modern Memory

Memory was understood as both cognitive and affective in early modern Europe. A subject discussed in philosophical, medical, literary, rhetorical and theological texts, it was conceived as an intellectual function but also integrally linked with the operation of the passions and senses. Our own tendency to separate out the rational from the imaginative belies the critical role that contemporaries accorded to memory in what we call creativity. For them, it was the matrix and locus of invention.Footnote ¹⁰ Labile and transient, it traversed the boundary between fact and fiction. Used to persuade and motivate, stir the will and evoke emotion, then, as now, memory was as much a strategy for influencing the present and shaping the future as it was for recalling the past. The past itself is a projection of the preoccupations, hopes and dreams of those who remember it. It is a fabric manufactured from the subjective experiences of multiple actors, which is recurrently remade in the image of the values and priorities of the individuals and communities that inherit it.

Contemporaries conceived of ‘memory’ as a mental mechanism for storing and preserving information and for preventing its burial in the grave of oblivion.Footnote ¹¹ In the early modern era, the word was used to describe a power or faculty that stimulated and perpetuated remembrance. Deployed as both a verb and a noun, it denoted the action and fact of remembering, but also the persons, thoughts and things that were the object of this process and the temporal interval or period for which they remained in the mind. Sometimes personified, it served as a symbol of endurance and ephemerality at the same time.Footnote ¹² Fickle and prey to malfunction through the infirmities of illness and age, it could not always be relied upon to keep the past alive. Respect for its status as a secure safe-deposit box jostled with anxiety about the perennial propensity to forget.

Hence the Renaissance preoccupation with the ars memoria, the science of aiding the faulty organ of memory using mnemonic tricks and artificial devices, including commonplacing and the technologies of writing and print. Humanist scholarship, literacy and the mechanical press combined to facilitate the spread of methods that supplemented aural and oral modes of remembering.Footnote ¹³ As Tony Grafton has recently observed, contemporaries perceived the printed book as the most robust and secure of archives.Footnote ¹⁴ The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries constituted a significant stage in a broader transition ‘from memory to written record’.Footnote ¹⁵ It was a growing sense that information passed down by word of mouth was evanescent that compelled Tudor and Stuart antiquarians and their folklorist successors to pin it down on paper lest it disappear forever. Indeed, the very emergence of ‘oral tradition’ as an abstract idea dates to the early modern period. As Paula McDowell has shown, the prejudices against ‘superstition’ embedded in Reformation polemic lingered on into the eighteenth century, merging with concern about the rampant proliferation of print to engender this concept.Footnote ¹⁶

The entrance of the English Reformation into the official ledger of History was a function of the workings of human memory. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, History was above all a rhetorical craft. Understood as a didactic device for teaching virtue, it was often paired with Poetry and regarded as a strand of Literature.Footnote ¹⁷ Historians, like poets, were masters of inventio, a mode of discovery involving memory, reason and the imagination in equal measure. The truth they pursued was, at root, moral rather than empirical.Footnote ¹⁸ Historiography was an elevated pastime sharply distinguished from the more mechanical tasks of searching dusty records and gathering up material remnants of the past undertaken by ‘antiquaries’.Footnote ¹⁹ The self-congratulatory accounts of the birth of History as an objective, scientific discipline that continue to constrain our understanding of its evolution in the early modern period reversed this priority. Scholars such as F. Smith Fussner and F. J. Levy privileged the development of techniques that corresponded with professional academic practice in the twentieth century. They located it at the top of a hierarchy of practices of remembrance, denigrating alternative methods as inferior and disparaging their reliance on unwritten sources as backward and primitive. They saw its triumph in teleological terms as an index of intellectual progress.Footnote ²⁰

The tension between History and Memory implicit in discussions of the early modern ‘historical revolution’ is mirrored in the theoretical literature that launched the field of Memory Studies.Footnote ²¹ Jacques le Goff and Pierre Nora presented history as the nemesis of memory, an overpowering, manipulative process that overrode the spontaneous creation of custom and tradition characteristic of ancestral societies. Where (oral) memory established a bond between the past and present, (written) history disrupted it, cutting them adrift.Footnote ²² Accordingly, memory was regarded as a mode of subaltern resistance, invoked against the hegemonic public discourse composed by the victors and enshrined in textual form.Footnote ²³ Nora situated the two in antagonistic opposition, speaking of the ‘uprooting’ and ‘eradication’ of memory by ‘the conquering force of history’, whose ‘true mission’ was to demolish and destroy it. For Nora, like Friedrich Nietzsche before him, historical scholarship is a catastrophic force that erodes the sources of living memory and collective identity.Footnote ²⁴ He presents the demise of memory as a temporal development. This model of its supersession by history is echoed in Reinhart Koselleck’s Futures Past, which sees the passage from the present past (of experience) to the pure past (of the archive) as a product of the notion, provoked by the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revolutions, that time itself was rapidly accelerating. What this engendered was a new sense of distance between then and now, a historical consciousness symptomatic of modernity itself.Footnote ²⁵

Judith Pollmann’s Memory in Early Modern Europe (2017) has vigorously challenged this thesis. The story of ‘memory before modernity’ she tells is one in which heightened senses of novelty and disruption are regular, but also temporary and reversible features of human history and cultural experience.Footnote ²⁶ Converging with the insights that have emerged from studies of earlier disjunctures, including the Norman Conquest,Footnote ²⁷ her work alerts us to the ways in which memory cultures are repeatedly remade in response to dislocating events. The English Reformation, like its European counterparts, was one such rupture par excellence. In conjunction with other developments, it prompted a sense that the past was slipping away from the present and disappearing into oblivion.Footnote ²⁸ In some this provoked sentiments of pride and jubilation; in others, as Margaret Aston argued in a seminal essay, longing for the medieval world they had lost. Paradoxically, this was partly a by-product of the process of casting it off.Footnote ²⁹

If the current surge of interest in early modern memory refuses the false dichotomy between History and Memory, it also rejects the equally misleading distinction between individual and collective memory. It is now well established that we remember not as isolated agents but as social beings ineluctably moulded by our surrounding environments. Inspired by the path-breaking work of the French sociologist and philosopher Maurice Halbwachs, remembering has been successfully reconceptualised as a social phenomenon.Footnote ³⁰ As James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Paul Connerton and Barbara Misztal have emphasised, studying memory requires investigation of the acts of transfer and circulation between individuals and the communities, real and imagined, of which they are members.Footnote ³¹ It involves paying attention to how the past is perceived through the prism of a person’s inherited conceptions and the forms of mediation and transmission that create both vertical and horizontal senses of shared identity with other people. These delicate transactions and dynamic negotiations are the stuff of social memory. As they travel in time and across the generations, they change, passing out of the realm of lived experience into the domain of received wisdom. Jan Assmann’s discussions of the transition from ‘communicative’ to ‘cultural memory’ have been particularly helpful in highlighting memory’s diachronic as well as synchronic dimensions.Footnote ³² They have helped us to recognise the importance of examining how it was formed at the time in tandem with how it evolved over time. These scholarly developments serve as a crucial bedrock for Memory and the English Reformation.

The Memory of the Reformation

A further important foundation for this volume is recent work on the cultures of remembrance generated by the Lutheran Reformation in Germany and Scandinavia, the French Wars of Religion and the Revolt of the Netherlands.Footnote ³³ The multiple ripples cast by the partly apocryphal story of Luther’s posting of ninety-five theses against indulgences on the door of the Castle church in Wittenberg have attracted critical scrutiny in the wake of the commemorative events marking the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s protest against the Church of Rome in 2017.Footnote ³⁴ In other respects, however, the quincentenary has served to perpetuate the celebratory Protestant paradigms that continue to shape our interpretation of the Reformation. Instead of lamenting the lingering influence of confessional perspectives on writing Reformation history,Footnote ³⁵ this collection suggests that we should interrogate their genesis and development. It hopes to make a broader methodological intervention by fostering renewed awareness of the hidden debts that modern scholarship owes to contemporary memory-making and its subsequent mutations.

The pendulum swings in interpretation that have marked the historiography of the English Reformation over the last half-century illustrate this point. A. G. Dickens’ optimistic vision of a Reformation driven by a positive evangel from below that took hold swiftly and efficiently visibly bore the imprint of the upbeat account of the beginnings of Protestantism encapsulated in John Foxe’s famous Actes and monuments.Footnote ³⁶ In turn, revisionism’s insistence on the Reformation’s vulnerability to Henry VIII’s personal whims and factional manoeuvring at court found a template in Nicholas Sander’s savage history of the Anglican schism first published in 1585.Footnote ³⁷ Christopher Haigh’s emphasis on Protestantism’s uphill struggle to communicate its core theological doctrines and the active and passive resistance with which it met along the way echoed the despondency of Elizabethan complaint literature. It correlated with the picture that early modern puritans painted of grudging compliance and widespread indifference, tinged with scepticism about the capacity of a morally rigorous and bibliocentric religion to appeal to the unlearned and illiterate laity.Footnote ³⁸ In depicting the English Reformation as a curious hybrid and an unsatisfactory compromise it indirectly endorsed the conviction of the hotter sort of Protestants that it was half-baked and imperfect, a pale reflection of the godlier ones effected in Scotland and Geneva.Footnote ³⁹ In turn, Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars owed a silent debt to the undercurrent of conservative regret and the counter-narratives that circulated in early modern England. In questioning suggestions that ‘traditional religion’ was in terminal decline by the later Middle Ages and arguing for its extraordinary vitality and adaptability, it is noticeably inflected by nostalgia for the lost Catholic world it so poignantly evokes.Footnote ⁴⁰

The history of post-Reformation Catholicism has been no less coloured by sectarian perspectives rooted in the early modern period itself. Predominantly told by adherents of the Church of Rome, the story of its survival in the face of fierce persecution was, until the late twentieth century, largely a celebratory one. An extension of the hagiographical narratives created for both public consumption and private circulation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this was a history that dwelt on heroic recusants and martyred priests. Even John Bossy’s seminal English Catholic Community, which wrenched its subject out of this apologetic framework and presented it as ‘a branch of the English nonconforming tradition’, perpetuated some of the biases implicit in earlier accounts. In dating its birth to the onset of the mission in the late 1560s and in privileging those who overtly displayed their religious dissidence, it occluded the contribution of both the Marian clergy and a broad penumbra of partial and occasional conformists.Footnote ⁴¹ Alexandra Walsham’s Church Papists helped to rehabilitate the latter and to draw attention to the lingering influence exerted by the recusant history tradition. The work of Michael Questier and Peter Lake, meanwhile, has corrected Catholicism’s marginalisation from mainstream political narratives of the ‘Protestant nation’ forged in the period itself.Footnote ⁴²

Historians have become increasingly conscious of the shadows cast by cultural memory, but they have rarely made them the subject of investigation. Ethan Shagan’s Popular Politics and the English Reformation was an explicit attempt to break out of the straitjacket created by historical perspectives born of ideological commitment. It eschewed ‘the whole meta-narrative of conversion’ in favour of a model of unwitting complicity and pragmatic collaboration that downplayed the impulses loosed by the workings of the Holy Spirit.Footnote ⁴³ Brad Gregory, by contrast, has not only passionately defended the importance of belief as a motor of history, but issued a clarion call for ‘desecularising the academy’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Accordingly, he wears his own confessional colours overtly on his sleeve. Alec Ryrie’s Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (2013) is likewise avowedly written from the position of ‘a believing Christian’. It rejects secularist ‘condescension’ and ‘anachronistic abstractions’ in favour of recovering the lived religion of those who eagerly embraced the new creed.Footnote ⁴⁵ A compelling attempt to reincarnate the early modern Protestant present, it has something in common with Peter Marshall’s Heretics and Believers. Where an earlier wave of scholarship emphasised ‘England’s long Reformation’, Marshall brings his story to a close around the 1590s. His book is a richly textured narrative of how contemporaries navigated the unpredictable twists and turns of religious change as they unfolded. But he is more interested in analysing the most intense and volcanic phases of England’s religious revolution than in tracing how they became crystallised in the historical imagination of later generations.Footnote ⁴⁶ This has largely been missing from the historiographical agenda to date.

In reorienting attention in this direction, our collection reflects growing awareness that as the convulsions of the 1530s, 1540s and 1550s ceased to be part of the personal experience of the English people, disputes arose about what had actually happened and what this meant. In doing so, it draws inspiration from David Cressy’s stimulating work on the Protestant calendar and national memory. As he showed some years ago, remembrance of a series of ‘icon events’ in the reigns of Elizabeth and James nurtured a potent tradition of anti-popery, providential history and patriotism that sowed the seeds for the controversies that fuelled the crisis of the mid-seventeenth century.Footnote ⁴⁷ Recast by John Morrill as England’s Wars of Religion, the Civil Wars were the chaotic outworking of the unresolved problems at the heart of the Tudor Reformations and the divisive legacies they left.Footnote ⁴⁸ The renewed spasms of religious revolution in the 1640s and 1650s proved a no less contentious bequest to the Restoration, which continued to wrangle with the radioactive afterlife of England’s unfinished Reformation. Blair Worden, Matthew Neufeld, Erin Peters, Edward Legon and Imogen Peck have demonstrated that remembering and forgetting, oblivion and commemoration, were close partners in the process of coming to terms with violence, rebellion and regicide.Footnote ⁴⁹ Both official and seditious memories simultaneously served to foster the prejudices and antagonisms that precipitated the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, another event that posthumously acquired mythical status. Moreover, as Scott Sowerby has shown, James II’s genuine commitment to repealing the penal laws was conveniently forgotten by Whig historians: his ambitious tolerationism sat awkwardly with his reputation as a quasi-absolutist Catholic king.Footnote ⁵⁰

The manner in which the Reformation itself entered the record as a historical event remains comparatively understudied, though Alexandra Walsham and Andy Wood have probed aspects of this process in relation to polemical texts and satirical prints and legal depositions given during disputes about customary rights respectively.Footnote ⁵¹ Wood’s study of the social memory of the 1549 rebellions provides a model for the exploration of its constituent episodes and Harriet Lyon’s research on the memory of the dissolution of the monasteries fills another significant gap. It explores the Henrician regime’s self-conscious attempt to dictate how its suppression of the religious houses should be understood by contemporaries and by posterity alongside the deposits it left in chronicles, topographical writing and local legend.Footnote ⁵² Such work helps to correct a curious blind-spot in Daniel Woolf’s indispensable account of English historical culture between 1500 and 1730. It restores religion to its central place in the story of The Social Circulation of the Past in this period.Footnote ⁵³

The reorientation of perspective that has helped to bring memory to the fore has attuned historians to issues of representation. It has focused attention on the generic forms in which the past was re-presented to and reinvented by contemporaries and subsequent generations. In turn, reacting against older assumptions about the timeless genius and transcendent meaning of particular poems, plays and pieces of prose, the discipline of English Literature has become increasingly historicist in character. Examining genres previously monopolised by document-driven historians, it has challenged and breached established boundaries between the factual and the fictional and firmly relocated creativity in the historical contexts within which it arose.Footnote ⁵⁴ One side-effect of this process has been a pronounced ‘religious turn’. Where once the Renaissance was the polestar around which the discipline turned, recent work has emphatically rediscovered the Reformation as a central event in the literary history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. John King, Deborah Shuger, Greg Walker and David Loewenstein, among many others, have illuminated how religious change served as a fillip to generic innovation and rhetorical experimentation.Footnote ⁵⁵ In Grammar and Grace (2002), Brian Cummings reassessed the link between theology and literature even more fundamentally. His book highlights the procreative role of language and text in the formation of Protestant ideas and identifies scriptural exegesis as the locus of a linguistic and hermeneutic struggle.Footnote ⁵⁶ The categories of heresy, conscience, martyrdom and toleration have been scrutinised alongside other aspects of the ‘cultural Reformations’ that both accompanied and kindled the liturgical and doctrinal turmoil of the era.Footnote ⁵⁷

Several dimensions of this project are of particular importance for the present volume. One is the encouragement it has offered to approaches that problematise the inherited models of periodisation that Literary Studies shares with its sister discipline History. James Simpson has astutely interrogated the divide between ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’ and the powerful narratives that underpin the notion that the Renaissance and Reformation mark a profound rupture in literary and historical sensibility.Footnote ⁵⁸ These twin poles of early modern enquiry provide competing models of commemoration and memory: whereas the Renaissance gravitated around the rebirth of classical culture, the Reformation strove to recover early Christianity and to rehabilitate the medieval Church in its image. Both entailed an attempt to resurrect a pristine past and to efface an intervening era characterised as corrupt, backward, unenlightened and stagnant. In doing so, they deployed the arts of amnesia and anachronism.

A notable by-product of these trends has been critical investigation of historical writing itself. Setting aside the secularising narratives that have constrained our understanding of History’s own history, we are now more aware of both the tremendous boost that the Reformation provided to its production and its intrinsic subjectivity.Footnote ⁵⁹ A domain in which testimony and evidence fused with forgery and fabrication, it played a critical part in the propaganda wars engendered by the Reformation. Exploiting and harnessing History was a risky business that necessitated resort to allegory and allusion.Footnote ⁶⁰ An obsession with the empirical ‘veracity’ of historical texts such as John Foxe’s Actes and monuments distracts from the creative strategies their authors and editors employed to persuade their readers: the ‘touches of cosmetic surgery’ and the forms of ‘rhetorical sleight of hand’ by which they recast the raw material of the past into models for instruction and emulation. It overlooks the extent to which Foxe’s book was shaped by the settled conventions of the martyrological genre and its kinship with other forms of imaginative literature.Footnote ⁶¹

A further salutary effect has been to foster greater critical thinking about the construction of the literary canon itself. Alison Shell has incisively analysed the residues of confessional sentiment that condition our interpretation of texts that were excluded by its original architects. She describes the double ‘deracination’ of early modern Catholicism, bibliographical as well as actual, illuminating the ‘hierarchies of taste and importance’ that have conspired to obscure the literary output of dissident minority groups who criticised and resisted the Reformation.Footnote ⁶² Her forensic investigation of the ‘phantoms of prejudice’ that still haunt literary scholarship resonates with the objectives of Jennifer Summit’s Memory’s Library (2008). As Summit shows, the great libraries assembled by Matthew Parker, Edmund Spenser, Thomas James and Robert Cotton were not inert storehouses, but volatile spaces that gave life to the Protestant struggle to reconfigure the medieval past and to dictate how posterity would recall the present.Footnote ⁶³

Andrew Gordon has spoken of the wider transformation of record-keeping inaugurated by religious change as ‘the reformation of the archive’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Others have highlighted the role of ‘Lethe’s legacies’ – forgetting and oblivion – in creating archival bias and examined the significance of absence in the collective imaginary.Footnote ⁶⁵ The same insights underpin the revival of interest in archival history. As recent research by Jesse Sponholz, Liesbeth Corens and others has shown, the very shape and structure of the public and private repositories in which manuscripts, books and material artefacts now reside attest to the malleability of memory, while their silences reflect the complementary strategies of invention and erasure that buttressed the structures of orthodoxy and effaced rival ways of selectively remembering the Reformation.Footnote ⁶⁶ They underscore how far confessional narratives formed in the early modern period are instantiated in the libraries and archives on which we rely to reconstruct it. Ineluctably, we remain their prisoners and heirs.

In turn, the academic histories to which they give and gave rise are sites of memory. Just as Elizabethan and Stuart versions of the Reformation past projected the cultural preoccupations of those societies, so too did the revised accounts of the origins of the movement that replaced and supplemented them in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Reformation rumbled on and was replayed by the Victorians in a new key in the context of the Oxford Movement. As a recent collection of essays edited by Peter Nockles and Vivienne Westbrook demonstrates, its rough and radical edges were smoothed or sharpened as circumstances required and its connections with its Continental siblings were likewise emphasised or concealed in accordance with changing agendas. Less a focal point for Protestant solidarity than a source of unending contestation, the Reformation is repeatedly recreated in social memory.Footnote ⁶⁷

The Reformation of Memory

If the Reformation as an historical event must be recognised as an artefact of the workings of memory, in turn it is necessary to investigate the ways in which memory itself was transformed by the Reformation.Footnote ⁶⁸ Christianity revolves around remembering a critical event, the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ, and its liturgy and ecclesiastical calendar repeatedly refer back to this primal moment. As Paul Connerton has commented, the sign of the cross was itself a sacred ‘narrative made flesh’, a material object that serves as a ‘condensed commemoration’ and a symbolic evocation of a central historical fact. Christ’s death and resurrection were remade in the ritual of the medieval mass and actualised through uttering the solemn words of consecration derived from Luke 22:19: ‘do this in remembrance of me’.Footnote ⁶⁹ The precise meaning of this phrase became the subject of intense inter- and intraconfessional dispute. For Protestants such as Huldrych Zwingli (though not for Martin Luther, who clung to the idea that there was some kind of real presence) the sacrament of the Eucharist was not a sublime and mysterious re-enactment of the original sacrifice. Instead, it was an act of mere cognitive recall of something that had happened in the past. The radical rethinking of ritual theory inaugurated by the Reformation reconceptualised such rites as the seals and badges of faith rather than conduits and bearers of charismatic grace.Footnote ⁷⁰ It transformed them from efficacious instruments of salvation into memorials of the eternal decree of predestination by which God had already decided who would be saved and who would be damned.

The Calvinist theology that dominated the English Church until the early seventeenth century taught that nothing one did could change the decision about one’s fate in the afterlife that God had made long before one’s conception and birth. In this sense, as James Simpson has commented, ‘the key events in human history have, in a profound sense, already happened’.Footnote ⁷¹ By denying that meritorious works could earn believers a place in paradise, the reformers theoretically removed the possibility that people could undo the past and persuade God to rewrite his script. Salvation by faith was a work of divine grace in which humanity played no part and lacked any kind of agency. In practice, preachers told their congregations that it was never too late to repent.Footnote ⁷² The shades and modulations of this theme that Protestantism accumulated as it developed historically mitigated the ostensible severity of the doctrine of predestination in ways that rendered it compatible with the exercise of free will and that reintroduced an element of voluntarism.Footnote ⁷³ The rise of Arminianism and Laudianism offered a different set of answers to testing pastoral questions about the relationship between divine control and human responsibility in the salvation of the soul.Footnote ⁷⁴

It remains true that reformed piety turned on the search for retrospective evidence and assurance that one numbered among the tiny remnant of the elect rather than the teeming crowd of the doomed reprobate. Discerning one’s eschatalogical fate involved deploying the arts of memory; as Achsah Guibbory has observed, memory in turn became an ‘art of salvation’.Footnote ⁷⁵ It required the faithful to remember God’s compassion towards them as sinners and to recall the ways in which he had tried and chastised his children. Therein lay proof that they would, in due course, join him in Paradise.

In this task, prayer was essential. As in the Middle Ages, it was at root a mnemonic art and craft. Monastic meditation in the Middle Ages was an extension of practices that the early desert fathers called mneme theou, ‘the memory of God’. Whether carried out in the cloister, cell or church, it was a studied strategy of ‘holy recollection’ through which the religious reached a state of spiritual renewal and deeper knowledge of their true spiritual identity and fate.Footnote ⁷⁶ Through remembering that past, one might obtain a glimpse into a future of mercy and judgement that was part of the eternal present of a God unconstrained by the manacles of time. Inward remembrance was in this sense a technique of imagination. It remained a crucial aid to private devotion after the Reformation.

More traumatic for the practice of religion in everyday life was the official death of purgatory over which Protestantism presided. Its abolition as an invented tradition, a piece of false memory foisted upon the credulous populace by the corrupt papacy and clergy, had the effect of severing the living from the dead and placing them beyond the reach of human help. Intercessory prayer and indulgences were prohibited and declared pointless and futile.Footnote ⁷⁷ The institutions that had been established to service the medieval industry of salvific remembering – monasteries and chantries – were dissolved and dismantled. Their hollow shells and architectural husks stood as symbols of its obsolescence and redundancy. Commemoration of the departed ceased to be a way of protecting their souls from damnation and became a device for instructing those who survived them. Protestant funeral monuments were designed to rescue the dead not from the abyss of hell but from the extinction of reputation.Footnote ⁷⁸ Memory may have lost its soteriological efficacy in the wake of the Reformation, but the arts of remembrance nevertheless flowered afresh.

They found new outlets in art, literature and drama, and in manuscript and print.Footnote ⁷⁹ These took their cue from the mandates to memorialisation within Scripture itself: God’s admonition to his people solemnly to remember his mercies down the generations, his promise that the righteous would be kept in everlasting remembrance and his perennial castigation of Israel for neglecting him and backsliding to idolatry. Exodus 17:14 directly equated the duty of remembering with the act of inscription: ‘Write this for a memorial in a booke’, the Lord says to Moses, ‘and rehearse it in the eares of Joshua’.Footnote ⁸⁰ The Bible likewise provided powerful models for forgetting: God’s charitable willingness to forgive and forget the iniquities of his chosen children coexisted with his threat to cast the wicked out of his memory and hide his face from them.Footnote ⁸¹

The Reformation also entailed a decisive attempt to recast medieval history and to claim for itself the imprimatur of antiquity. Responding to the taunt of their Catholic enemies – ‘where was your Church before Luther?’ – Protestants vehemently denied that their religion was a novel sect, deflecting this charge back against popery itself. The Church of Rome was not the direct heir of the church of Christ but the embodiment of a belatedly fabricated brand of error. Its steady perversion and decline into darkness set the heroic heretics who had kept the candle of the Gospel alight into sharp relief. Constructing a genealogy that identified the Cathars, Waldensians, Lollards and Hussites as their forebears, the reformers traced their ancestry right back to apostolic Christianity.Footnote ⁸² Vigorously reviving Eusebian sacred history, they eagerly searched for proof that the Protestant faith had put down early roots in the British Isles. The figures of Joseph of Arimathea, reputed to have first planted the Christian religion in Glastonbury in 63 AD, and the second-century King of the Britons, Lucius, were particularly useful for the construction of this narrative of precocious conversion and unbroken continuity.Footnote ⁸³ The Anglo-Saxons, by contrast, left a more complex and troublesome legacy, which Matthew Parker and his circle were obliged to sift, gloss and excise selectively.Footnote ⁸⁴ Catholics reacted by reasserting the role of Rome in making England Christian, highlighting the mission of Augustine of Canterbury in the sixth century and ingeniously inserting St Peter into the patriotic story they composed to combat the myth-making of their Protestant rivals. Foxe’s Actes and monuments was countered by Robert Persons’s Treatise of three conversions. Marshalling the past as the yardstick against which their religion should be judged, both writers combined history with hagiography, placing more recent martyrs into the pantheon of saints who had confessed and defended the truth throughout the ages.Footnote ⁸⁵

These monuments of historical scholarship were part of a wider European project. On the continent too, Catholic and Reformed alike were involved in a contest over oblivion, using one memory to wipe out another and claiming hegemony for the version professed by their church.Footnote ⁸⁶ Coordinated by the Lutheran Matthias Flaccius Illyricus, the Magdeburg Centuries (1559–74) were systematically and exhaustively refuted by Cesare Baronio’s twelve-volume Annales ecclesiastici published between 1588 and 1607. These sacred histories attest to the part that confessional controversy played in the emergence of the footnote and other scholarly protocols, disputing claims that the emergence of History as a discipline necessitated liberation from its enslavement to religion.Footnote ⁸⁷ They also illuminate the role of the Reformation in provoking a return to the archive: indeed, they themselves were anthologies of the records upon which the respective claims of Protestantism and Catholicism to superior purity and precedence rested. They were implicated in a wider war of words that was in large part waged on the battleground of the past and in which forgetting was the ultimate weapon. As the Elizabethan Jesuit priest and poet Robert Southwell reminded the readers of his Epistle of comfort in 1587, Catholicism proved its own truth by its very visibility, while the heretics had been obliterated mentally as well as literally: ‘we see that their memory is quite abolished, their names commonlye unknowen, theire bookes perished, and no more mention of them then the condemnation and disproof of their errours recorded by Catholicke writers’.Footnote ⁸⁸ This was also the fate that awaited the notorious Wittenberg reformer and his colleagues: ‘The same doubtlesse wilbe the end of Luthers noveltyes, which being but parcels of their corruptions, revived and raked out of oblivion, as heretofore they vanished with their prime devisers; so will they now with their late revivers.’Footnote ⁸⁹ Southwell confidently looked forward to the day when the Reformation would be nothing more than a bad memory. He looked forward to the fulfilment of God’s promise that he would ‘utterly put out the remembrance’ of his enemies ‘from under heaven’.Footnote ⁹⁰

Correspondingly, Protestantism deployed its own strategies for effecting amnesia. At the forefront of these was iconoclasm, which Eamon Duffy has aptly described as the central ‘sacrament of forgetfulness’.Footnote ⁹¹ The injunctions that ordered the removal of such ‘monuments of superstition’ specifically stated that ‘no memory of the same’ was to remain in churches, houses, walls, windows, or anywhere else.Footnote ⁹² In a world in which the art of remembering depended upon the visualisation of loci, such physical reminders of falsehood could not be tolerated. Radical puritans and separatists were dissatisfied with the half-hearted character of the official drive to eradicate structures and buildings polluted and tainted by the idolatrous rites that took place around and inside them. They called for a more sweeping programme of erasure in which parish churches would themselves be ripped out of the landscape. As the separatist John Penry declared, it was essential to pluck down every ‘remnant of this harlot … so that all memory of the Apostaticall romish religion may be buryed’.Footnote ⁹³ His words went unheeded by the authorities, but during the Civil War some zealots set their sights on taking down the seats of the bishops and the architectural symbols of the hated institution of episcopacy, cathedrals.Footnote ⁹⁴ Their demise was widely anticipated in these heady years of renewed religious violence, but, albeit somewhat battered and mutilated, they too survived.

This process of compelled forgetting had the unforeseen effect of catalysing remembrance. The ruins of religious houses, chapels, standing crosses, and other forms of Christian sculpture that littered the countryside remained a touchstone for recalling the medieval past and lamenting its loss. They spurred the anger and grief of conservatives, church papists and recusants, who regarded these buildings and monuments as the victims of sacrilege. Their desiccated remains animated the efforts of antiquaries such as John Aubrey to snatch these ‘fragments of the shipwreck’ from the devouring jaws of time.Footnote ⁹⁵ In this respect, iconoclasm was double-edged and often counterproductive. The reformers’ own rites of destruction were responsible for keeping the memory of the old religion alive. The empty niches and spaces they left behind became mnemonic devices in their own right. So too did the missals, primers, processionals and other liturgical books that were further targets of Tudor destruction and censorship. Those that survived because they were perfunctorily purged stand as memorials to the hundreds that were torn to pieces and burnt to ashes. The scratched-out indulgences and saints in their calendars of feast days attest to an effort to repress that simultaneously served as a stimulus to remembering.Footnote ⁹⁶

English Protestantism resorted to a complementary strategy for reforming social memory. In keeping with the advice that Gregory the Great had issued to the abbot Mellitus in the early seventh century,Footnote ⁹⁷ officials converted hallowed buildings and objects to alternative and commonly secular uses. They recycled the sacred in ways that changed its associations and effaced its original functions. Superimposing new layers of meaning over pre-existing ones, these transformations created ambiguities of their own. Like manuscript palimpsests that bear traces of the texts that have been erased, they were only partially successful in banishing the memory of the Catholic past.Footnote ⁹⁸ The ‘steady wash’ of Protestant amnesia could not and did not blot it out of the English imagination completely.Footnote ⁹⁹

Paradoxically, the reformers’ willingness to accommodate continuities with the medieval past smoothed Protestantism’s passage and facilitated its acceptance as a permanent fact. Ronald Hutton has interpreted the transposition of ecclesiastical rituals into popular pastimes not as evidence of resistance to the Reformation but as a factor in its eventual success. In their work on beliefs about divine intervention and the dead, Alexandra Walsham and Peter Marshall similarly identify points of contact with traditional piety that served less as an obstacle to change than as an unexpected aid to its realisation.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Counterintuitively, cultural memory was the ally not the enemy of the religious revolution that transformed English society.

Events and Temporalities

Time is the organising framework for the first section. It is appropriate to begin here not merely because Protestantism precipitated a profound rethinking of the relationship between the past, present and future, but also because remembrance is a process that involves mental movement between temporal planes. It is a sense of disjuncture between different time frames that creates historical consciousness and accords certain developments their status as landmark events. Yet how this played out in the context of England’s protracted Reformation, extending across multiple generations, has yet to be fully investigated.

In the opening essay, Peter Marshall explores the rather diffident attitude of English Protestants towards Luther’s 1517 protest in Wittenberg as a foundational moment in religious history. As he shows, reluctance to recognise this is emblematic of the ambivalence about the Church of England’s relationship with the wider European movement that persists to this day. It also reflects a chronic lack of agreement about when the English Reformation actually began, let alone when it reached an end. These remain burning questions.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Harriet Lyon’s essay examines the belated invention of the ‘Dissolution of the Monasteries’ as an historical watershed. Ironically, its emergence as such was a by-product of sentiments of regret expressed by its later critics. It also occurred in defiance of the Henrician regime’s attempt to downplay the revolutionary character of its own actions and to envelop these in a tissue of amnesia.Footnote ¹⁰²

This may be seen as an index of shifting attitudes towards the king himself, whose reputation as a perpetrator of sacrilege and a byword for greed grew steadily as the period progressed. If the memory of ‘blessed’ Elizabeth I was mellowed by nostalgia after her death, Henry’s acquired a sharper and increasingly disapproving edge.Footnote ¹⁰³ Chris Highley’s exposition of two of this monarch’s more disorderly ‘ghosts’ demonstrates how his reign was resurrected by both republican and Catholic writers for very different religio-political purposes during the Cromwellian Interregnum. Remembered as a point of origin for a providential development that had culminated in the regicide and commonwealth and a fatal schism that laid the foundations for the downfall of the English crown respectively, the break with Rome and declaration of the Royal Supremacy became a temporal juncture of ongoing contestation.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

The rise of narratives in which the Reformation and its constituent episodes were identified as chronological landmarks attests to the presence and vitality of linear models of time in English society. Protestants and Catholics alike understood History as a teleological process that would culminate in the Second Coming of Christ, a conviction that found particularly striking expression in their mutual obsession with calculating the age of the world and predicting the Apocalypse.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Adam Morton’s essay probes the paradoxes of remembering the past at the end of time. Attempts to reconcile apocalyptic prophecy with recent history, the evangelical histories written by John Bale, John Foxe and Walter Lynne illustrate that consciousness of the Reformation as a moment of rupture emerged through the application of traditional practices of scriptural exegesis and historical interpretation. Paradoxically, currents of continuity with the past helped believers to experience the present as a time of unprecedented upheaval that was but a prelude to a more glorious future.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

These habits of mind, however, coexisted with rival paradigms: as Judith Pollmann has recently argued, this was a culture in which analogical and typological modes of thinking remained vibrant. These blurred and collapsed the boundary between past and present, warping and manipulating time in order to create playful and purposeful forms of anachronism.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Distinctions between ‘now’ and ‘then’ were likewise irrelevant in the context of the Christian liturgy. Mimicking the memory of God himself, this stood outside of and transcended time.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In her analysis of the English sonnets of the Litany of Loreto, Susannah Brietz Monta examines how the liturgical device of anamnesis functioned as a mode of Catholic resistance. Reanimating contested traditions of Marian devotion served not only to combat the Reformation’s attempt to consign them to oblivion but also to make present a transtemporal community of devotees. They were a prophylactic against the heretical project of forgetting even as they effaced its disruptive effects.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Protestant liturgical reform certainly played its own part in reconfiguring how contemporaries understood the passage of time. By expelling dozens of holy days from the ecclesiastical calendar it smoothed out disruptions to the working week, deflecting attention towards the keeping of the sabbath in pious remembrance of the seventh day on which God had rested after creating the world. Recent work resists the older instinct to see these processes as indicative of the secularisation or disenchantment of time,Footnote ¹¹⁰ recognising instead that the Reformation created spiritual routines that sacralised everyday life.Footnote ¹¹¹ Personal timepieces were important mnemonic aids in the performance of this piety and they proliferated alongside other devices including clocks and sundials. Erected on the stumps of decapitated churchyard crosses, the latter served as compelling emblems of transience and mortality. As Alexandra Walsham argues here, these hybrid objects encapsulate a memory culture in which visible remnants of the past remained ever-present: these doubled as reminders of proscribed rituals and beliefs and as symbols of Protestantism’s conquest of ‘superstition’ and ‘error’. In due course, they became emblems of and monuments to the passage and ravages of time itself.Footnote ¹¹²

Objects and Places

Walsham’s essay provides a bridge to the second part of this volume, which explores how physical locations and artefacts operated as sites and receptacles of memory after the Reformation. Imagining things and places, res, loci and topoi, was central to the medieval and Renaissance ars memoria which Reformation England inherited. Memory itself was widely conceptualised as a building and a container: a theatre or palace whose constituent rooms stored particular ideas and pieces of information for later retrieval.Footnote ¹¹³ The case studies in this section take their bearings from this observation, but also from the spatial and material turns. They build on the insights that remembering and forgetting take place in space as well as time and that memory is materialised in tangible, three-dimensional forms, which in turn serve as pegs and triggers to recollection. As Andrew Jones has taught us, the material world is not merely a semiotic system; it also exercises agency. It is the dynamic and bodily encounter between subject and object that produces remembrance.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The very perdurance of material culture helps to presence the past to the senses. If it provides a crucial reservoir of evidence for many contributors to this volume, this is also because the sheer survival of medieval and post-Reformation artefacts and their preservation down the centuries attests to the workings of memory. They are its archaeological traces.

Contemporary senses of the past were as much if not more rooted in space and place than fixed to particular periods or dates.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The landscape was a three-dimensional map of English history. Supplemented by man-made structures erected in villages and towns and on highways and byways, topographical features such as trees, stones and springs functioned as signposts to the first planting of the Christian faith and the miraculous feats and heroic exploits of the saints. The passionate crusade that the reformers launched against these abominable idols radically altered local cartographies and disrupted and threatened the inherited customs by which knowledge of them was transmitted to later generations. It left behind the empty husks and hollow shells of monasteries and the mutilated residues of other Christian memorials.Footnote ¹¹⁶

A range of competing meanings accumulated around the evocative ruins of these redundant buildings and broken idols, which find many echoes in the literature of the period. Stewart Mottram rereads key scenes in book VI of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590–6) as both a representation of the devastating effects of the Dissolution and a warning of the dangers of further tumultuous and violent reform. He reinterprets this poem as an anti-puritan satire fuelled by fear that the rage of the ‘Blatant Beast’ of Scottish Presbyterianism would soon be unleashed in England.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Philip Schwyzer’s essay, by contrast, offers a revisionist reading of John Milton’s Eikonklastes (1649). He explores it against the backdrop of the ambiguous legacies of Reformation iconoclasm in the seventeenth century, tracing how the incomplete cleansing of images that had marked Protestantism’s first decades came to be rationalised as a deliberate policy designed to leave ‘monuments of our indignation and detestation against them’. Convinced that this strategy had been a failure, Civil War iconoclasts abandoned partial defacement for more complete effacement. Yet Milton’s famous work attacking the memory of Charles I is not an exercise in absolute annihilation. It deliberately conserves his disfigured image as an instructive spectacle.Footnote ¹¹⁸ It is a literary example of the art of selective forgetting.Footnote ¹¹⁹

The same technique can be detected at work in the new memorials erected in the post-Reformation era. These too enshrined efforts to edit and mould memory in accordance with evolving religious and cultural preoccupations, aware that commemoration of people and events is always contentious. Peter Sherlock illustrates this in relation to two classes of monument: funerary slabs and tombs to lay and clerical Protestant worthies and tablets and pillars that offer insight into how the Reformation eventually crystallised in these media as a momentous development. Dwelling on inspiring stories of suffering and victimhood, what they leave out is any reference to the willingness to persecute and kill.Footnote ¹²⁰ Sherlock’s emphasis on the relative reticence of the public memory culture of the English Reformation about celebrating itself finds an echo in the essays by Marshall, Lyon and Ryrie elsewhere in this volume.

Moving from the church and market square into the home, Tara Hamling investigates the role of the latter as a venue and locus for remembering the Reformation. Her study of the ‘memorable motif’ of the scales of justice in which the truth of Protestantism is weighed against the falsehood of Catholicism highlights the power of ‘synoptic’ iconography in compressing the meaning of a complex and protracted process and recasting it as a singular moment of divine judgement that led to a permanent fracture.Footnote ¹²¹ In keeping with her previous, pioneering work on domestic decoration,Footnote ¹²² Hamling’s essay further qualifies Patrick Collinson’s claim that post-Reformation England was an iconophobic society suffering from ‘severe visual anorexia’.Footnote ¹²³ What emerges instead is a social world in which pictorial representation was legitimised by its ability to function as an auxiliary to memory and in which traditional imagery was hijacked to advance new theological priorities. Godly households were full of fixtures and furnishings that served as mnemonics to pious reflection on the stories and lessons in Scripture and, as here, recent history. Together with portable objects such as delftware plates and pots, tobacco boxes, lace mats and embroidered cushion covers, bedheads, chairs, cupboards and chimney pieces provided canvases for edifying messages about the duty to remember God and one’s neighbours.Footnote ¹²⁴ Passed down in families as heirlooms, they assisted in the process of converting communicative memory into cultural memory. Material culture thereby became an instrument of confessionalisation, a marker of identity, and an agent of alterity.

The proliferation of things in Protestant homes parallels the burgeoning of devotional objects in Catholic households, both openly in continental Europe and, illicitly, in England.Footnote ¹²⁵ Here relics, sacramentals and rosaries coexisted with an array of other ‘sacred stuff’, saturating daily life with stimuli to a piety that was similarly reliant on the arts of remembrance. Christian materiality was closely implicated in conflicts that were played out on the field of the past: to Catholics objects that Protestants condemned as worthless ‘trumpery’ and ‘popish trash’ were precious touchstones that linked them to God and a succession of faithful people throughout the ages.Footnote ¹²⁶

Growing scholarly awareness that Protestantism, no less than Catholicism, was a religion of things has also served to focus renewed attention on the items that survived the Reformation war against visible idols. The casualties of Protestant ire that have hitherto grabbed the limelight should not be allowed to eclipse the large category of objects – including ecclesiastical plate and vestments – that were deemed to fall into the category of adiaphora, or things indifferent, and thus escaped automatic destruction. Many remained in situ or were turned to alternative uses. Recycling, no less than iconoclasm, must be seen as a mode of sign transformation: it too was designed to reconfigure what and how such sites and artefacts provoked people to remember in mind, speech and action.Footnote ¹²⁷ Alexandra Walsham scrutinises this process here in relation to the stumps of redundant standing crosses, while Tessa Murdoch examines rock crystal reliquaries ejected from churches and monasteries. Murdoch’s research illuminates how these objects were adapted for use as salt cellars on the dinner table, as well as their rehabilitation as sacred silver for members of the recusant community. Studied in juxtaposition with ecclesiastical plate newly fashioned for Catholic use in post-Reformation England, these revitalised ‘antiquities’ provide insight into how the imaginative memory of a persecuted minority has been carried down the centuries.Footnote ¹²⁸ Like the relics of the martyrs, their migrations and transmutations exemplify the value of exploring individual object biographies.Footnote ¹²⁹ The fact that these processes are so frequently connected with important events in the human lifecycle – birth, baptism, marriage and death – underlines how closely linked they are with the workings of memory.

Inspired by Arjun Appadurai’s notion of ‘the social life of things’, historians and literary scholars are increasingly alive to the forms of matter that crossed the temporal boundary erected by the Reformation.Footnote ¹³⁰ These ‘materials of memory’, as Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass have described them, carry multiple and competing connotations.Footnote ¹³¹ To recover their significance we need to set aside some settled assumptions about the impulses that have enabled them to survive into modern times. Joe Moshenska’s essay does so by exploring the nexus between dolls and idols and by inviting us to consider iconoclasm as a kind of child’s play. He argues that this serves both to illuminate and to complicate what we remember and what we forget when confronted by the fragmentary residues of the Catholic past.Footnote ¹³²

The essays in this section thus contribute to challenging attitudes that are a legacy of the Reformation’s own rhetoric of asceticism. They encourage us to discard the ingrained idea that Protestantism was intrinsically hostile to things and that its privileging of the invisible realm of the spirit militated against the making of a material culture of its own.Footnote ¹³³ They augment the swelling body of evidence attesting to its creativity in this respect.Footnote ¹³⁴ In the new ‘indoor landscape of memory’Footnote ¹³⁵ that the Reformation engendered to replace the one it (partly) evacuated books loomed very large. Recent scholarship that has reconceptualised books as ‘material texts’ is helping us to recognise them as more than merely vehicles and vessels of meaning. It is enabling us to see them as ‘grossly material things’ whose very existence is an invocation to remembering and forgetting.Footnote ¹³⁶ This applies not just to those items that escaped being thrown onto bonfires of vanities and survived, albeit bearing scars – mass books, primers, processionals and antiphoners – but also to the vernacular Bibles and prayer books that became synonymous with Protestant piety.Footnote ¹³⁷ This reformed book culture was rivalled by a voluminous Counter Reformation literature printed illegally in England and smuggled across the Channel from the Low Countries which flourished as a surrogate for regular access to priests. If Catholic books were ‘dumb preachers’, they were also silent remembrancers.Footnote ¹³⁸ On both sides of the confessional divide, texts became totems – symbols of attachment and badges of belonging to particular faith communities.Footnote ¹³⁹ The rites of destruction and selective defacement to which they were subject show that censorship was a crucial weapon in the Reformation project, as Brian Cummings shows in his essay on the ‘wounded missal’.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Bibliophobia and book-burning bear compelling witness to the contest to claim hegemony in religious and social memory.Footnote ¹⁴¹ By personifying texts as criminals themselves, they also reflect the persistent slippage between object and subject that was a feature of this culture.Footnote ¹⁴²

Lives and Afterlives

The essays in the third section of this volume probe memory in its biographical and autobiographical mode. They explore the historical and literary afterlives of individuals and groups who were caught up in the Reformation in tandem with the textual and pictorial genres by and through which such experiences were remembered and represented. Religious identity and its discontents served to stimulate an enormous spate of life-writing in this period. Too often analysed as a key to unlocking the rise of individualism, the texts that this engendered should rather be approached as modes of memorialisation in which self-fashioning fused with social remembering and in which the boundaries between public and private were inherently porous.Footnote ¹⁴³

The conventions and rhetorics of personal commemoration were reshaped by theological and cultural change in significant ways. Protestant hostility to the idolatry implicit in the cult of saints seriously compromised traditional hagiography: discredited as unreliable fables, the lives of medieval holy men and women collected in such famous anthologies as Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea became the butt of corrosive laughter and mocking sarcasm.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Excised from the official calendar of ecclesiastical feast days, many were ritually consigned to oblivion. The comprehensive attempt by the Henrician regime to erase the memory of the twelfth-century archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, has been the subject of considerable attention, while the work of Helen Parish has illuminated how renowned figures such as St Dunstan were systematically remodelled in the hands of evangelicals as proud prelates, workers of false miracles and usurpers of temporal authority.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The notorious legend of the cross-dressing pontiff, Pope Joan, was likewise reanimated as a polemical weapon in the wake of the Reformation, creating a myth that was a potent cocktail of sexual scandal, misogyny and ferocious anti-popery.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Thomas Wolsey and Stephen Gardiner were also recrafted as pantomime villains.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

Corrupt priests, licentious monks and dastardly persecutors were easy targets of the campaign to reimagine the medieval past. England’s own monarchs, by contrast, presented a more ambivalent legacy that could not so easily be cast off, as Susan Royal shows here in relation to the soldier prince, Henry V. His famous victory over the French made him the subject of one of Shakespeare’s history plays and militated against his omission from evangelical histories. Protestant historians and chroniclers were reluctant to discard the more patriotic aspects of this warrior king’s biography even as they felt obliged to gloss his overt Catholic piety and his role in burning prominent heretics.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The lustre that the latter, especially the lollards, acquired in texts such as Foxe’s Actes and monuments has already been well documented. The ‘rich brown varnish’ that the reformers applied John Wyclif, elevating him on a pedestal as ‘the morning star of the Reformation’,Footnote ¹⁴⁹ also coloured the rather motley crew of heretics whom they celebrated as their predecessors. The editorial practices of Foxe and others not only occluded the diversity of their opinions in the interests of presenting these victims of persecution as a united and homogenous group.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ They also neatly airbrushed out of their history books evidence of the bitter divisions that racked the early Protestant community, including the dissenting faction known as the Freewillers.Footnote ¹⁵¹

Those who survived the turbulent middle years of the sixteenth century were no less prone to forms of selective remembering and forgetting. They ‘forged new consciences’ and ‘identity scripts’ to cope with the dilemmas posed by these difficult decades.Footnote ¹⁵² Looking back in later life, men and women who had weathered the storm of Mary’s reign by partially conforming carefully rewrote their lives to align them with the sacrifices made by those who had chosen to go into exile or courageously embraced death at the stake.Footnote ¹⁵³ Ceri Law’s essay discusses this in relation to Matthew Parker’s ‘scroll’, a vellum list of memoranda in which she detects a process of refashioning compromise and nicodemism as a kind of quasi-martyrdom.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ In this text, the stigma of conformity is quietly transformed into a story of constancy and suffering. A conscious attempt by Parker to control his own memory, it adds further dimensions to Adam Smyth’s insight that ‘autobiography’ was an expansive and plastic category, encompassing both classic ego-documents such as diaries and memoirs and more bureaucratic records such as churchwardens’ accounts and parish registers.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

The strategies at work in Parker’s scroll resonate with the way in which the martyrs themselves endeavoured to shape how they were recalled by posterity. They not merely anticipated but also facilitated their future integration into a narrative that linked their sufferings with those of the first Christians by adopting the apostolic form of the pastoral letter. Johanna Harris’s essay offers fresh insight into the role that epistolary communication played in memorialisation of the Reformation as a movement that effected a return to the revered practices of the primitive Church, as well as in creating a devotional culture that turned on reading and repeating these inherited texts.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ It contributes to renewed interest in the genre of letter-writing as a key medium for transmitting news of the Reformation and in the role that correspondence played in forming lines of communication between those who launched the movement and their disciples and followers.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

In commemorating men and women who were the casualties of the religious changes inaugurated by the Reformation, Catholics revived older hagiographical tropes. As Anne Dillon has shown, the printed texts they prepared for public consumption bore the hallmarks of humanist caution, stripping out the stupendous miracles that had exposed the Church of Rome to Protestant ridicule in favour of an emphasis on heroic virtue. By contrast, the inspiring narratives that circulated in manuscript around the Catholic underground were encrusted with the traditional motifs of supernatural intervention that signalled sainthood.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Situated in succession to the nation’s ancient missionary martyrs, from St Alban onwards, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century martyrs became part of a sacred lineage that stretched forward to shape the identity of those who revered their memory in later generations. Victoria Van Hyning’s essay focuses attention on the dual role of texts and relics in the making of Thomas More’s reputation after his execution for rejecting the Royal Supremacy in 1535, tracking their transmission to his direct descendants and to the religious houses that subsequently became their custodians. The transmutations to which the story of his hair-shirt has been subject over time parallel the ways in which More’s own life has been creatively misremembered. Attesting to a powerful impulse to connect with his ascetic piety and courageous resistance, they shed fresh light on the mechanics and dynamics of his memorialisation over the longue durée. They illustrate the manner in which the recipients and keepers of this precious garment absorbed some of his sanctity, establishing a chain of spiritual and biological kinship that has been essential to maintaining More’s powerful legacy down the centuries.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

Among Protestants too, the family was a crucial agent in the making of biographical memory. Intended as exemplars for instructing future members, the portraits of reformed ancestors and worthies scrutinised by Tarnya Cooper demonstrate how important remembering and preserving this heritage was, in turn, to their heirs. They helped to establish the social and religious credentials of emigrés and to vindicate the disputed institution of clerical marriage. They also shed light on the manner in which individuals navigated the ambiguities of the doctrine of predestination and projected forward evidence of their status as people whom God had elected to eternal salvation.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Anxieties about the fate of one’s pre-Reformation ancestors were even more fraught: Protestant memories of their dead medieval relatives were marked by a mixture of pious hope and charitable forgetfulness.Footnote ¹⁶¹

Visual memory, then, remained vital after the Reformation, despite the worry that portraiture carried the risk of encouraging idolatrous veneration of the dead.Footnote ¹⁶² This also helps to explain the curious hiatus in biographical writing in the mid-sixteenth century. As Protestant inhibitions in this area dissipated, it re-emerged as a strategy for the spiritual edification of the living. The ‘lean-to’ lives appended to funeral sermons became detached from their parent texts and migrated into popular anthologies of eminent Christians such as those compiled by Samuel Clarke. Models of piety and moderation, the divines and worthies he and others memorialised shade into stereotypes, though it remains possible to penetrate the veil of convention by reading between the lines and against the grain.Footnote ¹⁶³ Nevertheless, such texts arguably tell us more about the contemporary politics of commemoration than they do about their ostensible subjects. They draw attention to how posthumous reputations changed in response to the prevailing ideological climate.

Protestantism may have severed the living from the dead, but the latter still spoke from the grave in the guise of their books, which contemporaries revered as their shrines, monuments and tombs.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Literature and poetry was a space in which marginalised voices could articulate sentiments of loss that constituted a counter-current to the official culture memory. Cathy Shrank develops this suggestion in relation to Samuel Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamund (1592), which she presents as a recuperative endeavour in which ‘female revenants’ evoke the world of Catholic devotion and the saints’ cults which the Reformation sought to abolish. Spokesmen for traditions that zealous Protestants dismissed as ‘old wives tales’ in a discourse of denigration inflected by both gender and age, they meditate on the contested legacy of the medieval past still visible in the English landscape.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ They underline the convergence between personhood and place, religious identity and location, which was one of the hallmarks of the post-Reformation culture of memorialisation despite its insistence that the ghosts of departed souls had no place in the Protestant universe.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

Rituals and Bodies

The final section of this volume concerns the role of rituals and bodies in the work of memory. The medieval Latin liturgy was suffused with practices and rites that were part of an inherited mnemonic system. Bowing, kneeling, kissing, sprinkling holy water, dispersing incense and making the sign of the cross in the air are all examples of habitual memory. They are ceremonies and postures that help to recollect the past in and through corporeal action. Too often subordinated to inscription as a superior medium of cognition, as Paul Connerton has argued, embodiment and incorporation must be reintegrated into the history of remembering and forgetting. Memory is forged through performance and involves muscular action.Footnote ¹⁶⁷

This is graphically embodied by the defaced liturgical book at the centre of Brian Cummings’ contribution. The extraordinary scars it bears attest to a savage attempt to cancel out the superstitious rites of medieval Catholicism that required strenuous physical effort. Paradoxically, their presence has legitimated its preservation in York Minster’s archive.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ The iconoclasm to which this book has been subject belies Protestantism’s self-proclaimed status as a transcendental religion of spirit, inherently allergic to external spectacle. The idea that it swept away a rich Catholic culture of symbolic behaviour, leaving an empty vacuum in its place, is also questioned by Arnold Hunt’s essay. As he demonstrates, although Protestants discarded many medieval rituals as signs of superstition and idolatry, others were retained and rehabilitated in the reformed liturgy. Enshrined in the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer, their troubling presence stirred conflict within the Church of England throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The ongoing controversy over what Hunt calls ‘the retrofitting of Catholic gesture’ engendered competing anthropologies of popular memory.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Reclassified by polemicists as ‘relics’, the residues of practices that were expelled from the church and reproduced in domestic settings as recreations were eventually absorbed into the emerging category of ‘folklore’. The folklorists’ fascination with recovering traces of English and British ‘primitivism’ disguised the roots of these rites in popery.Footnote ¹⁷⁰

As Edward Muir has commented, the Reformation itself was a ‘ritual process’, during which the meaning of the sacraments and the relationship between signs and what they signified was fundamentally reconfigured.Footnote ¹⁷¹ This was especially true of the central rite of the Eucharist, but infant baptism was reshaped too.Footnote ¹⁷² Repudiated by the early Anabaptists as lacking foundation in Scripture, it was replaced by a rite that took place in adulthood. In due course the performance of the latter became a shibboleth of membership of this sect.Footnote ¹⁷³ Rachel Adcock’s essay treats ‘believers’ baptism’ as one of the ways in which the Baptists of revolutionary England negotiated the experience of defeat through communities of memory. A powerful mode of counter-commemoration, it too helped to make the past present in order to herald Christ’s imminent arrival.Footnote ¹⁷⁴

Remembering as a strategy for building the solidarity of a minority movement also features prominently in Emilie Murphy’s examination of English Catholic musical miscellanies. Mingling triumphant protest and hope with lament and loss, melodies and motets helped to fix memories of the martyrs in the minds of their hearers. Giving voice to a strain of nostalgia that was combined with righteous recrimination, the songs she studies highlight the links between oral tradition and its transcription in the making of memory.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Writing itself must be recognised as a bodily action that can bring the past back to life. The manuscript now known as the ‘Rites of Durham’, for instance, is not an antiquarian recording of a dead world but an attempt to raise it, Lazarus-like, from the grave of oblivion.Footnote ¹⁷⁶

Murphy’s attention to sound reminds us that memory is also inseparable from the experience and expression of the senses and passions. The emotional and sensory dimensions of remembering are a recurring theme throughout this volume.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ One consequence of the recent flowering of scholarship on these topics has been a backlash against the lingering idea that the Reformation was an arch-enemy of sensual experience. Recent work by Matthew Milner, Alec Ryrie and Joe Moshenska has taught us to see Protestantism as a ‘feeling faith’, whose adherents sought palpable assurance of their election and proof of the sincerity of their belief. Their outlook drew its intensity from remembering the traumas of the Reformation past. Later generations strove to experience these vicariously. Protestants and Catholics alike were affective communities. The religious upheavals of the early modern era must be seen as chapters in the histories of sympathy and empathy, as well as hatred and fear. Despair, joy, abstention and desire played equal if different parts in competing post-Reformation cultures of worship and devotion.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Contemporaries themselves conceptualised memory as a mediating faculty between the body and exterior impressions and these intersections deserve further attention.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste remained vital aids to religious remembrance. As Hunt emphasises, the Reformation was not simply a reformation of doctrine and theology, but also a reformation of the body.Footnote ¹⁸⁰

Finally, we should return to the liturgy of the Church of England, which W. H. Auden once called ‘the link between the dead and the unborn’.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Its legendary timelessness belies the extent to which the Book of Common Prayer is an artefact of a particular moment in time. It is at once an organic, living creature endlessly capable of adapting to new conditions and a mnemonic to the moment in the Reformation past which brought it into being.Footnote ¹⁸² Liturgy’s role as a vehicle of public and private memory has been surprisingly neglected, as Alec Ryrie notes. His essay centres on the striking absence of much effort to commemorate the English Reformation in its own liturgy. Henry VIII’s overthrow of the usurped power of the pope in 1534 was not celebrated as an anniversary; nor did other mid-sixteenth-century events that are now perceived as landmarks on the path to England’s rebirth as a Protestant nation appear in the Church of England’s official calendar. Ryrie argues that the omission of the Reformation from the liturgy was a deliberate choice rather than an accidental oversight, a product of the peculiar vagaries of the Tudor religious settlements. Ryrie’s investigation of the liturgical politics of forgetting returns us to where this Introduction started: to the belated entry of the Reformation as an historical event into written record and social memory.Footnote ¹⁸³