Rarely does a collection of essays redefine a field, but Memory and the English Reformation, which represents the fruits of a long-term, interinstitutional project, Remembering the Reformation, is clearly an exception. As they have done in other settings throughout the nearly four years of their collaboration, the editors. Alexandra Walsham, Bronwyn Wallace, Ceri Law, and Brian Cummings bring together in these pages a cohort of scholars to help us understand how and to what ends the English Reformation entered into anglophone historical, cultural, political, and religious consciousness. The result of their labors is a multifaceted collection that will be thought-provoking not only for students of English religion but also for specialists in other time periods and cultures who seek to understand the processes of history- and memory-making.
The introduction is itself worth the volume's (admittedly hefty) price. While the introduction effectively previews the twenty-three essays that follow, it is also a remarkable piece of scholarship in its own right. Walsham, Cummings, and Law offer a succinct yet nuanced account of the field that has come to be known as memory studies, tracing earlier work on memory in, and the memory of, both the English and mainland European reformations. The editors persuasively explain that this book has a “double agenda”: first, to show that the English Reformation “involved a concerted attempt to reshape social memory,” and second, to articulate how the Reformation subsequently took on historical and cultural significance (3). Crucial to achieving both goals, they explain, is to cultivate a “critical investigation of historical writing,” because texts that at first blush appear to be academic histories have often been part of the apparatus for constructing and contesting memories of the Reformation (16).
The volume's essays are organized across four themes: “Events and Temporalities,” “Objects and Places,” “Lives and Afterlives,” and “Rituals and Bodies.” While it is impossible to give each contribution the attention it deserves in this short review, I note the several that in each section stand out for their clarity, originality, and capacity to illuminate the volume's overall themes.
Peter Marshall opens the first section with an investigation of English memories of Martin Luther's reformation, about which Marshall argues that “ambivalence . . . has persisted to the present day” (60). Marshall sounds a note that recurs in the volume's final essay, from Alec Ryrie: because successive English governments gained such propaganda value from the idea that the Reformation represented continuity rather than change, drawing attention to what had happened either in England or on the European mainland would have been counterproductive. Likewise, as Harriet Lyon shows in her contribution, Henrician chroniclers did not employ shorthand labels familiar to later generations, such as the “dissolution of the monasteries.” Yet, a century after the Reformation, amidst the chaos of the Civil War and Commonwealth, pamphleteers put their preferred words in the mouths of characters from the time of England's break with Rome, especially Henry VIII, as Christopher Highley's essay demonstrates.
The second section, along with Walsham's contribution on the afterlives of crosses standing in churchyards, markets, and roads, engages principally with material culture. These essays elucidate how people who lived through the Reformation, and other people who looked back on it, employed physical objects as sites of memory—what Pierre Nora has famously dubbed lieux de mémoire. Here, Joe Moshenska describes how adults gave formerly holy objects to children as playthings. Tessa Murdoch explains how rock crystal reliquaries appropriated from dissolved monasteries became salt-cellars on elite tables, acquiring in the process a new set of ritual uses. Peter Sherlock's essay on monuments demonstrates how the concerns of later generations, including those of the ecumenical movement, have sometimes produced anachronistic commemorations of the Reformation.
Part three, “Lives and Afterlives,” deals with biography. The essays here engage not only with traditional forms of life writing but also with the ways Reformation-era figures sought to have themselves remembered. Law's contribution explores an idiosyncratic manuscript in which Matthew Parker, Elizabeth I's archbishop of Canterbury, enumerated key episodes in his life. Susan Royal looks further back in time, tracing how Protestant historians revised or selectively omitted Henry V's persecution of lollard heretics from their otherwise glowing accounts of the king who won the battle of Agincourt. Victoria Van Hyning discusses competing claims about the life and relics of Thomas More, noting that many commemorations of More date only to the period of his cause for sainthood.
The final part of the volume contains some of its most evocative essays, including Ryrie's discussion of the Reformation's liturgical commemoration, or rather non-commemoration, by the Church of England to which it gave birth. Cummings's contribution, “The Wounded Missal,” reconstructs how reformers slashed a manuscript, strategically dealing wounds to images of the Cross and God the Father enthroned, as well as to the canon of the Mass. Emilie Murphy, writing about recusant and exiled Catholics’ musical miscellanies, highlights how sound, like texts and objects, can shape memory.
This necessarily truncated survey of the essays Walsham, Wallace, Law, and Cummings have assembled reflects their volume's disciplinary and chronological breadth. Shortcomings are few, including a general lack of attention to the place of the Reformation in late modern and contemporary popular culture. But far more important are this volume's achievements. Memory and the English Reformation does more than bring together an outstanding cast of senior and junior scholars. It marks the arrival of memory as a subfield of the study of late medieval and early modern English religion. Collectively, these contributions establish that memory, individual and collective, was an essential element of the terrain on which the contests of the Reformation were waged. Religious reformers and their allies in regimes from Henry VIII through the Stuarts and beyond sought to shape their contemporaries’ and successors’ sense of what happened and why it was important, with varying degrees of success. But as for the success of the Remembering the Reformation project, and its memorialization in these pages, it is unalloyed.
