Memory and the English Reformation

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.

Brian Cummings is an Anniversary Professor in the Department of English and Related Literature, University of York. A Fellow of the British Academy, he is editor of The Book of Common Prayer (2013) and author of Mortal Thoughts (2013), which won the Dietz Prize at the Modern Language Association of America.
Ceri Law has worked at Queen Mary University of London, the University of Cambridge and the University of Essex. She is the author of Contested Reformations in the University of Cambridge, c.1535–84 (2018), part of the Royal Historical Society's series New Studies in History.
Bronwyn Wallace was a Research Associate on the AHRC project, 'Remembering the Reformation', at the Department of English and Related Literature, University of York. She is the author of a number of articles on Early Modern women's writing, Catholic devotion and Queer affect theory.
Alexandra Walsham is Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of books including The Reformation of the Landscape (2011), which won the Wolfson History Prize in 2012, and Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain (2014). A Fellow of the British Academy and of the Australian Academy of Humanities, she is also co-editor of the journal Past and Present.