Description: 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.
Brief description: 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.
Review Quotes: 'Scholarly interest in the social and cultural construction of memory has never been higher, ... Memory and the Reformation is a remarkable collection of essays that does exactly what it sets out to do--show the reader how memory has been repudiated, rehabilitated, valorized, and memorialized, intellectually and materially.' Autumn Reinhardt-Simpson, Reading Religion