At the end of 1600, the elderly Flemish Jesuit Franciscus Costerus (1532–1619) returned from a pilgrimage to Rome—there had been another Jubilee—carrying two images of Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) and a letter from Claudio Acquaviva, the Society of Jesus’s Superior General. The first larger image had been painted on leather, the second smaller one was oval in shape. The Belgian province, the Society’s largest, was home to several older Jesuits who had met Ignatius in their youth. Acquaviva, who had joined the Society a decade after the death of its founder, wished to hear ‘the judgement of the fathers of this province who at some point have seen this blessed man.’Footnote ¹ This proved difficult to organize, both on account of the value of the paintings and the frailty of the witnesses, who were not all as sprightly and up for travelling as Costerus had been (on his death in 1619, Costerus was the last surviving Jesuit to have known Ignatius personally).

The Jesuit to whom Acquaviva directed this request was Olivier Manare (1523–1614), a person well-accustomed to being in charge of everything: his enemies accused him of running the Belgian province as his personal fief.Footnote ² Manare had been vicar general following the death of Acquaviva’s predecessor, Everard Mercurian, and had been favoured to succeed him but, as a later Vita put it, ‘God chose another.’Footnote ³ With his usual forcefulness, Manare did not wait until his fellow witnesses had expressed their views to share his own, and he felt quite confident to speak for those who had. The larger image, he said, did not resemble Ignatius at all, only his mouth and nose captured his likeness a little bit. The smaller oval image had made his face too long, as all posthumous paintings had done.Footnote ⁴ When a week later, the views of all five witnesses had been collated, they all agreed that the larger portrait had captured almost nothing of the ‘blessed Father’s true likeness’, while they also agreed that the oval image made Ignatius look too young.Footnote ⁵ Three of the five, led by Manare, judged that Ignatius’s forehead was not wide enough, that the cheeks were not sufficiently prominent, and that the lower part of Ignatius’s face – ‘from his lower lip to his chin inclusively’– should be made shorter.Footnote ⁶ They all agreed, however, that the face itself should be longer. Even then, Manare was not convinced that even the second painting could be rescued: he added a note claiming the picture was too artful and not life-like enough, a point he also made in a separate personal letter.Footnote ⁷

When Costerus learned that Manare was planning to return the oval image he had carried with him, he took action. ‘This good father,’ Manare explained to Acquaviva, ‘when he heard the judgement of the other fathers, and personally weighing everything up, sought to obtain another image from a painter according to his own heart and which should be very similar to the Blessed Father.’Footnote ⁸ On 31 December, Costerus sent this new image, ‘reformed according to the judgement of five fathers’, to Rome. The Jesuit insisted on the value of the group’s memories. The men were not ‘boys but older when they spent time with him [Ignatius] and they contemplated his face neither rarely nor in passing.’ Eliding his own role in its composition, he declared to the Superior General ‘I have never seen [an image] which represents the Blessed Father more truly.’Footnote ⁹ Costerus kept a copy so that it could perhaps be reproduced, and the result is very likely – given the date, the engraver, the oval shape, and the facial features – (a version of) the figure above.Footnote ¹⁰

We may well wonder why Claudio Acquaviva thought it fit to consult Manare, Costerus, and the sexta- and septuagenarians of the Belgian province. After all, even though Acquaviva never met Ignatius, he knew exactly what the founder of the Society looked like – he had access to Ignatius’s death mask, kept, as it still is today, in the very rooms that the founder of the Society once inhabited.Footnote ¹¹ Acquaviva could possibly have worried that this mask did not adequately capture the founder’s likeness. At least that was what Manare, our Belgian patriarch, claimed in his letters. The mask and the wax head that was made from it could not capture the future saint’s eyes, nor could they capture his skin: ‘the blessed Father’s colour was neither black nor clearly dark, but he also was not white; he was in between black and white.’ The precise skin tone was not the only problem here, because Ignatius was also radiant. In Manare’s memory, his skin possessed ‘a certain supernatural splendour, which added remarkable grace that delighted the onlooker just as that blessed man Philip Neri, the leader of the Oratory, observed very well, as he told me and Father Mutio Vitelleschi [Acquaviva’s eventual successor] at the time of the last Congregation.’Footnote ¹² Later hagiographies of the particularly long-lived Neri recounted how this apostle of Rome recognized Ignatius’s sanctity, and conveniently, vice versa (Figure 2).

Figure 1.

Undated engraving by Hieronymus Wierix of Ignatius of Loyola. Copyright The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved [Asset number 602619001].

Figure 2.

‘Philip Neri sees the faces of Saint Charles [Borromeo] and Ignatius [of Loyola] shining brightly’, in Jacques Stella, Vita di S. Filippo Neri, fiorentino fondatore della Congreg.ne dell’oratorio di Roma, dove mori nell’ anno 1595 dell’età sua ottanta (s.l., s.d.), 47. Image courtesy of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute Library. [https://digital.clarkart.edu/digital/collection/p16245coll5/id/8687. Accessed 20 February 2021] (The scene depicting Neri’s meeting with Ignatius is in the background.)

Reasons other than a concern for accuracy may well have played a role in Acquaviva seeking out the Belgian seniors as well. Acquaviva was an extremely skilled manager of people and resources. The Superior General had called the Congregation to which Manare alluded—which was only the Society’s Fifth—in 1593–94 to face down opposition to his long rule in Spain.Footnote ¹³ Yet his normal practice was to co-opt rather than dictate, especially where members of the Society’s old guard was concerned. As Acquaviva’s erstwhile rival, Manare required especially careful handling. In his criticism of the use of Ignatius’s death mask, the Belgian Jesuit also alluded to the (evidently better) judgement of Acquaviva’s immediate predecessors.Footnote ¹⁴ Consultation, then, was a form of personnel management, keeping those who harked back to the good old days in line. In this context it comes as no surprise, then, that the Superior General had also asked the wilful Manare to write his memoirs.Footnote ¹⁵ If he were ever to be canonized, Acquaviva would be the ideal patron saint of HR departments.

Underpinning concerns from all sides, however, was the fact that the founder of the Society of Jesus had still not been beatified or canonized. Only in 1588, under Sixtus V, did Catholic saint-making resume after a hiatus of more than six decades. With Sixtus (who was notoriously anti-Jesuit) out of the way, the 1593–94 Congregation beseeched Acquaviva to seek the canonisation of both Ignatius and his closest companion Francis Xavier.Footnote ¹⁶ During the 1590s it became increasingly apparent that Ignatius risked being left behind. Philip Neri, with whom Manare still conversed, passed away in 1595, and the Oratorians lost no time portraying their founder as a saint. Without waiting for papal approval, they distributed images of their founder that showed him halo and all.Footnote ¹⁷ The dissemination of accurate images therefore mattered for the campaign of Ignatius’s sainthood. Accurate memories, of course, did as well. In the spring of 1606, four of the five elderly Belgian Jesuits (one had passed away) testified in Brussels as part of the canonization proceedings. The four Jesuits had waited for half a century to recount their memories of Ignatius and to declare what they already knew when they were young men: that he had always been seen by everyone, even when still alive, as ‘a saintly man.’Footnote ¹⁸ The four men lived to witness Ignatius’s beatification in 1609, but none would live to see his canonisation in 1622.Footnote ¹⁹

It may well be overly indulgent to open a review of an edited collection, filled to the brim with engaging studies of collective memories and acts of remembrance, with a micro-study of my own. Yet memory is a notoriously slippery concept. It is not, as Geoffrey Cubitt noted, ‘a thing to be pinned down, like a moth in a cabinet.’Footnote ²⁰ Its study is reminiscent of quantum mechanics. We can only observe memories when they are fixed on the page, and like Schrödinger’s notorious cat, their expression will have changed them in the process. These memories will have lost some of their fluidity, being brought to bear on a present that is also only another moment in time. We can only glimpse the memories themselves, as we have just done, from an angle, knowing that the context in which they are expressed alters them.

Where quantum physics holds up the physical universe, memories – large or small – are the oh-so slippery building blocks of the past. It is impossible to study memory without traversing adjacent territory, without paying attention to cognate concepts such as remembering and commemoration, or their opposites, forgetting, oblivion, erasure. Memory easily annexes or displaces other concepts: myth, tradition, and stereotype. Memories intersect with identity and agency – they are recalled or forgotten by a person or a group for a reason. As a result, the relationship between memory and history is a vexed one. Memory occupies its own fluid time-space continuum, which reaches into the present. From there, it either wages war on history or acts as its principal object of study or even as its servant. Where one of the contributors to Remembering the Reformation describes memory as ‘the very stuff of historiographical tradition’ (p. 23), Pierre Nora, one of the key scholars in the field of memory studies, represents history as its public enemy: ‘History is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it.’Footnote ²¹ Memory, in sum, is a moving target, whose relationship with other concepts and historical praxis is forever shifting, while the hold of specific memories over the present complicates their study. Given this minefield, elderly Jesuits debating Ignatius’s likeness may help us structure our thoughts on this volume’s wide-ranging contributions.

Our opening anecdote points us to an aspect of memory that Remembering the Reformation rather neglects, despite the editors’ promise to study memory ‘within the Reformation period’ (p. 7): how memories are generated and take on the wider communal significance that they do. The Belgian Jesuits debating Ignatius’s likeness show how personal recollections are contested and recorded (in this case, even engraved) and transformed into collective memories, that belong to a wider community. The generation of such memories matters and deserves further study. After all, the Reformation narrative is replete with events that did not happen but which are nevertheless remembered – most obviously, its opening event, the nailing of the Ninety-Five Theses on the door of Wittenberg’s Schlosskirche.Footnote ²² Katrina Olds’s fascinating discussion of the Cross of Carabuco provides the volume’s most relevant contribution on this front. Olds reconstructs the origins of a cross that one of Christ’s apostles had allegedly brought to the Andes but that had literally been buried and forgotten. Stories of supposed early evangelisation of the Americas mattered greatly to Spanish chroniclers and the legitimacy of the Spanish conquest, but Olds shows how this story emerged out of a conflict between rival indigenous factions, in which the cacique or leader of one side accused the other of being ‘descended from those who had buried the cross’ (p. 179). Olds wonderfully demonstrates how the Cross was not an invention imposed from above by eager Spanish chroniclers. Rather it was a product of older narratives and myths (‘memories’), both European and native American. At a time when Spanish imperial actions scrambled existing native American hierarchies, different groups reconstructed their memories in dialogue and competition with each other to align with the new order.

Olds’s study points us to those aspects of traditional memory that Nora valued so much – memory as alive and in permanent evolution, and therefore able to bridge the gap between the past and the present (History, on the other hand, ‘is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer’Footnote ²³). We encounter that type of memory in these reflections of our elderly Jesuits about Ignatius’s likeness and in their testimony in favour of Ignatius’s canonisation, when their personal reminiscences of him in fixed and written form become part of collective memory. The closest we get to this type of unwritten, re-activated memory in the volume’s other contributions is in Carolina Lenarduzzi and Judith Pollmann’s chapter on the relief of Leiden in 1574 by Dutch rebel forces. Memories of the siege centred on widespread starvation – ‘gnawing scraps of raw meat from the bones that had been left by dogs’ (p. 63) – which, however, are contradicted by contemporary sources. The authors argue that by foregrounding hunger the population echoed memories of an earlier fourteenth-century famine that had been commemorated in the city for centuries. This focus on starvation transformed the siege and its happy end into a powerful communal narrative, which privileged political over religious bonds, and which continues to be celebrated to this day. The event, however, has been thoroughly secularized – my main memory of visiting the fair years ago was winning a plush Droopy dog which on closer examination turned out to have a small leather whip in its hand and the words ‘hit me’ engraved on its belly.

The extent to which memories, collectively or individually, were able to build on existing narratives, then, was of seminal importance for their endurance. Individuals, as Geert Janssen points out in his contribution, were able to draw on narratives of conversion, exile, and martyrdom (and the recollections of the Belgian Jesuits suggest that there are also wider narratives of witnessing, beyond martyrdom, that are worth exploring). As a collective memory, the Reformation is an absolutely outstanding candidate for study, for the event itself was and is widely perceived as a rupture, with a clear before and after. This has implications for an event’s or memory’s emotional valence. For most Catholics north of the Alps, this narrative was overwhelmingly one of Paradise lost. In their introduction, the editors draw on the ground-breaking work of Eamon Duffy on the emotional distress caused by England’s stripping of the altars.Footnote ²⁴ They offer the Reformation as ‘a site of trauma’ as one of the volume’s main themes, but the preponderance of the contributions centre on Protestant memory cultures. As already indicated, I would have liked to have seen more on how, when, and where the Reformation came to be remembered as a break with the past, how the Reformation came into being as an event with meaning and narrative coherence that was worth remembering, or even as a deeply unpleasant thing that would not go away.

At the same time, the volume’s wide geographic reach draws our attention to variations within this Reformation-as-rupture narrative that I, for one, did not anticipate. Tarald Rasmussen’s contribution on the Nordic Reformations shows how ruptures could be mended or softened. Different Scandinavian countries each with Lutheran Reformations remembered their pasts very differently. Sweden preserved much of its medieval legacy, as represented by the ecclesiastical centre of Uppsala which remained the burial site of the country’s monarchs. Norway experienced the Reformation as part of its painful integration into the kingdom of Denmark, and the cult of its medieval martyr-king Saint Olaf continued to thrive in opposition to Danish royal policy. In Norway, Rasmussen observes, the ‘dark ages’ began rather than ended with the Reformation.

Natalia Nowakowska’s chapter on Polish chronicles offers an even more striking example, not of softening the Reformation rupture, but of erasing it. Early sixteenth-century chroniclers rigidly stuck to ‘chessboard-like’ histories in which kings, emperors, and armies made their moves a version of history from which heretics were excluded. Once the Reformation was defeated, Counter-Reformation chroniclers were again able to portray Polish religious history through omission as entirely pacific. These chronicles are as whitewashed as the walls of Calvinist churches. Heresy happened outside of Poland’s borders, and Poles evidently still live in the shadow of that convenient fiction. I am not convinced by Nowakowska’s argument that Poland’s Reformation was forgotten because there were no shared histories, only split memories. It seems just as important that by the mid-seventeenth century, there was no one left in Poland to proclaim the Reformation message or even to remember it. In that sense, the country illustrates that the interplay between memory and agency also holds true in a negative sense: there is nothing more disempowering than oblivion.

As Nowakowska’s chapter illustrates once more, any discussion of memory inevitably slides onto adjacent terrain. There is no remembering without forgetting. Before we get there, however, we ought to unpick further how memory cultures and the need for narratives intersect with the differing demands of Protestant theologies, because these often serve to complicate the desire for remembrance. James Simpson’s observation in the volume’s opening essay that ‘the Reformation longs to forget’ (p. 28) obviously does not hold true across the board, as many of the later contributions show. Yet Simpson’s study of Pieter Saenredam’s melancholic empty Calvinist churches makes a compelling case that Reformation theologians also had a vested interest in letting the past be the past, ‘stilling’ it, in keeping with a theology that denied scriptural events any agency in the present. In a similar vein, Thomas Browne, one of the English antiquarians studied by Isabel Karremann, denounced the ‘folly of posthumous memory’ (p. 55) and made a positive case for oblivion, for the dead being entirely forgotten, on theological grounds. Philip Benedict and Sarah Scholl show how John Calvin’s attitudes towards images and idolatry complicated efforts to memorialize Geneva’s Reformation. Nineteenth-century dreams of a statue of Calvin ‘atop a pillar on the shore of Lake Geneva’ (p. 275) came to naught as a result. (For me, the authors’ description conjured up a Calvin statue akin to Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer towering over Geneva.)

Alongside all these Calvinist theological difficulties, the volume’s wider European focus also points to a historical imperative for Protestants of all stripes to soften the rupture’s revolutionary edges. Some continuity needed to remain. For starters, the restoration of the true faith meant that it could never have been completely extinguished. In this regard, Stefano Villani’s fascinating chapter on the Waldensians of Savoy shows how difficult it is to disentangle memory from myth and historiography. Almost from the beginning of the Reformation, Protestant historians from John Foxe to Flacius Illyricus pointed to the Waldensians, named after their mysterious medieval founder Waldo of Lyon, to answer ‘the question of where the church of Christ had been during the long night of apostasy’ (p. 192). Villani shows how by the seventeenth century it was no longer enough to just find Waldo, and the Waldensians were given a range of new apostolic and late Roman origins. Yet even claims to continuity with medieval forebears may well have been a case of invented memory by late sixteenth-century Waldensians who to all intents and purposes were Calvinists.

Villani demonstrates how Waldensian preachers were able to use these memories and origin myths and the special status they bestowed on their community to solicit aid from foreign Protestants. Phillip Haberkern’s contribution on the Hussites shows how these Bohemian communities negotiated a similar status abroad of having ‘reformed’ a century before the Reformation, while at the same time preserving at least part of their own distinct identity and theology. Luther’s embrace of the Hussites—‘without knowing it, we are all Hussites’ (p.142)—benefitted these communities in their dealings with both foreign princes and their own. Yet it was a mixed blessing nevertheless. It put pressure on the Bohemians to give up the more traditional parts of their theology, such as clerical celibacy and the principle of apostolic succession, which in turn led to conflict among the various Hussite groups. As with many of the other case studies in this volume, religious considerations intersected with patriotic and political ones – in 1535, one group, the Unity of Brethren, called on its followers to remember ‘our forebears, the old Czechs, and to understand ecclesial and religious matters much more with them, than with more recent [hint: foreign] people’ (p. 147).

As many of these examples make clear, memories, whether personal or collective, legitimated actions which valorised and validated those who held them in turn. Again, we could turn to our elderly Belgian Jesuits for an example of this: they used their memories to contribute to the canonisation of the founder of their order. Like the late eighteenth-century Moravian missionary, discussed by Dagmar Freist, who wrote home from Surinam ‘to keep the memory of herself alive among her brethren at home’ (p. 296), they shared their personal reminiscences in order to participate in a collective project of remembrance in which they were both an active agent and a seemingly passive conduit for the past. They were both present and subsumed by the collective. We already discussed one example of the erasure of memory in Nowakowska’s chapter. In a different vein, David van der Linden’s chapter on the Holy League in the French Wars of Religion shows how memories could be, at least publicly, neutered. Following Henri IV’s victory over the ultra-Catholic League the French were ordered to forget, ‘as if [events] have never taken place’ (p. 78). Van der Linden shows how difficult and paradoxical forgetting really was – after all, Henri had to triumph over someone in order to become king. Here, too, religious and civil conflict is recast as political and foreign in nature, the League becoming a Spanish pawn. Yet however partial, oblivion had its advantages. As a form of public and legal amnesia, it made it impossible for people to act on their memories of the past. Van der Linden suggests another reason why oblivion might be preferable: sidestepping the thorny issue of assigning blame was better and more realistic than forgetting the past atrocities committed by both sides altogether.

Publicly or privately, memories were contested. Here too, memory straddles multiple domains. To assert a memory is more than just asserting one’s knowledge, identity and communal standing, it is also a claim of ownership. Our Belgian Jesuit Olivier Manare could not help but direct a swipe towards portraits produced in Madrid under the supervision of Pedro de Ribadeneyra, the youngest of Ignatius’s early disciples and the widely acclaimed author of his Life.Footnote ²⁵ Manare contested Ribadeneyra’s privileged position as Ignatius’s hagiographer. Examples of counter-memories or counter-histories run through Remembering the Reformation. Lenarduzzi and Pollmann discuss ‘underground’ Catholic memory cultures in Calvinist Leiden, preserving memories of pre-Reformation religious practice. Van der Linden points to the persistence of Leaguer images in inventories of devout Catholic homes. Geert Janssen’s chapter on the legacy of exile shows how even the descendants of religious exiles could use their pedigree – effectively, a claim to ancestral memory, action, and standing – to further political and religious careers or obtain patronage.

In his foundational 1925 study, Maurice Halbwachs already pointed to the great paradox at the heart of memory. Our own individual memories, ‘our most exclusive possession’, are more difficult to access than collective ones: those ‘we can recall … whenever we want just because we can base oursel[ves] on the memory of others.’Footnote ²⁶ Halbwachs points to the greater complexity of personal memory, which may be one more reason why collective memories (or communities acting on them) can be dangerous. Key, of course, to the preservation and recollection of memories, whether individual or collective, and their commemoration are the lieux de mémoire, the sites of memory that act as reminders after original milieux de mémoire vanished. Our Belgian Jesuits provide a good, if unusual instance of this. In dialogue with each other, they tested their own recollections against lieux de mémoire, which they found lacking.

Almost all the contributions touch on lieux de mémoire, often in rich and surprising ways. Roísín Watson’s stimulating chapter on remembering the dead in Lutheran Württemberg offers fascinating examples of how Lutherans used remnants of the Catholic past. The territory’s rulers integrated the funeral monuments of their Catholic ancestors into Lutheran burial grounds – by altering and reframing these monuments the dukes sought at once to make these monuments safely Lutheran, yet also bridge the Reformation rupture in a narrow dynastic sense. At the same time as these dukes integrated their Catholic ancestors into a Lutheran scheme of memory, some of their preachers used surviving Catholic images in their churches for the inverse purpose, as reminders of the bad old days. Just as fascinating and relevant is Kat Hill’s contribution on the memory practices of the Anabaptist diaspora. Hill’s chapter offers an invaluable meditation on the interplay between time and space in early modern and modern memory practices. She uses lieux de mémoire and in particular membership books to trace Anabaptist communities in present-day North America via Russia, Ukraine and Poland, back to Germany, in a way that makes travel through space feel like journeying through time. Hill shows how important objects – Bibles, acorns (for replanting), even gravestones – were recreating the past in the present.

Lieux de mémoire, then, are also ways to lay claim to space. This aspect becomes particularly apparent in Andrew Atherstone’s contribution on Victorian and Edwardian memorials to Reformation martyrs. Atherstone’s chapter is a reminder of how long the Reformation really was. The primary motivation for blanketing late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain with such statues was anti-Catholicism, to celebrate, as Lord Shaftesbury put it, the country’s rescue from ‘the domination of a soul-destroying religion’ (p. 253). The statue campaign petered out during the First World War when there were suddenly other dead that required more urgent commemoration.

Remembering the Reformation is an extremely valuable volume that appears at a highly opportune moment. Indeed, it is more timely than its editors could ever have anticipated, appearing as it does in this great age of ‘depedestalisation’, to use Simon Schama’s term. This is not because ‘the Reformation is still with us’ (p. 7), as the editors claim in the introduction. Rather I suspect that the opposite is true. The world has changed since the age of ‘statuemania’. Atherstone points out that more recent memorials are much smaller and lower key, describing a 2007 Cambridge martyr’s monument as ‘a pathetic contrast’ (p. 260) with Oxford’s 1843 extravaganza. Conversely, no one seeks to topple any statue of Luther, great anti-Semite though he was. Ironically, a movement that itself impelled waves of iconoclasm will emerge from our current moment unscathed—not because the Reformation emerged triumphant, but because it no longer elicits any public emotions, positive or negative. The Reformation is past, truly ‘stilled’. In their chapter on Geneva, Benedict and Scholl compare the modesty of the 2009 commemorations of the 400^th anniversary of Calvin’s birth to past events. Dagmar Freist draws similar conclusions about the 2017 celebrations in the volume’s afterword and wonders what the lack of strong symbols will mean for global Protestantism (by which I assume he means, outside of Europe).

Paradoxically, the Reformation losing its hold on the present makes study of its memory culture so worthwhile. Unlike other processes set in motion during the early modern period – colonisation, empire, slavery – the memory culture of the Reformation has a clear beginning, middle, and end. We can approach it more easily from the outside. Study of the Reformation’s memory cultures can teach us a great deal about how cultures of remembrance come into being, how they are sustained and contested, and how they fall away. In this context, I would like to have seen more reflection in the volume on more recent perceptions of the Reformation, the ‘end’ part. I rather suspect that the way that the Reformation is widely taught—as a common-sensical event involving unobjectionable demands (about vernacular Bibles and priestly corruption)—has stripped it of all emotional valence and thus consequence. Conversely, historians need to reconstruct the profound emotional charges behind memories and events if they are to understand the Reformation – they need to comprehend why Belgian Jesuits bickered about a portrait of Ignatius.

It is a facile criticism of any edited volume to wish for more. Nevertheless, this volume would have benefitted from chapters that reflected on beginnings—how the Reformation came into being as a coherent event—and ends. Implicit in my survey of the contributions above is also some scepticism about the large number of parts (seven) into which the sixteen chapters are divided. The chapters are considerably richer than the bland section headings on ‘repressed memory’, ‘divided memory’, and so on allow. Their fragmentation across so many parts obscures many of the crosscutting currents that I have attempted to sketch out. These comments do not take away from the editors’ achievements in bringing together these cogent and stimulating chapters from a stellar cast of contributors that are often, both knowingly and unknowingly, in dialogue with one another. Certainly, the 2017 conference from which this volume emerged was one of the most stimulating that I remember (!) attending.