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Edited by Alexandra Walsham, Bronwyn Wallace, Ceri Law and Brian Cummings
Cambridge:
University Press, 2020 Hardcover.
xvi + 448 p. ISBN 978-1108829991. £90
Reviewed
by Jacqueline Rose University
of St Andrews
The Reformation, the
editors of this volume write at the end of their introduction, was ‘less … a
unitary moment of rupture than … an ongoing struggle to reconfigure the
nation’s ecclesiastical and cultural heritage’ [45]. The length and legacy of
that struggle are core themes of this volume, which offers insights into the
way in which the process of reform merged with memories of it, and bled into
historical treatments, with influences on historiography lasting to the present
day. The conscious and sub-conscious, deliberate and unintended, shaping of
memory – early modern understanding of which gave it a liminal place between
fact and fiction – affected textual, visual, and material culture. ‘Conversion’,
meanwhile, was a description of how material artefacts were reborn, mirroring
the process of renewal of the souls of their users [140]. Several chapters
outline the decades-long process in which epithets were established as labels
for events, or idioms became inscribed. Johanna Harris charts the way in which
the epistolary idiom of Protestant martyr letters, sufficiently established by
the mid-1500s for Catholics to satirise it, was widespread enough to be
recognised and recycled a century later. Harriet Lyon’s chapter demonstrates
how it took almost the same length of time for ‘the dissolution of the
monasteries’ to emerge as a shorthand summary of Henrician expropriations of
religious houses, and reminds us of the often critical accounts of it by
seventeenth-century writers. Yet while the dissolution is one headline of
Henrician England, even its critical and retrospective shaping provides some
form of fixed reference point. No such fixed point can be offered for the start
of the English Reformation. As the two chapters that (excepting the
introduction) bookend the volume show, England has no 1517 and – even more
strikingly – has never felt the need to invent one. Peter Marshall suggestively
remarks that this reflects the nature of the identity of the Church of England,
while Alec Ryrie points out that even claims that reform involved a return to
an older, purer, church were vague on what true church had been restored (and
when). Liturgical silence on
Reformation history was significant, given ‘medieval and early modern liturgies
were display cabinets for public memory’ [422]. The performance of worship
associated with the new Book of Common Prayer also involved selective memory of
which once-familiar rituals and gestures were still to be performed. Not
practising ceremonies could imply they had been forgotten, continuing to use
those castigated as remnants of ‘popery’ might have been habit or deliberate
defiance, or ignorance as to their meaning, banning them implied they were more
theologically significant than they were meant to be. Others might see them as
a repository of social memory, or a reservoir of rituals that marked a pleasing
continuity with an older church. As Arnold Hunt notes when discussing this
topic, contemporaries might also puzzle over what these rituals meant to
parishioners, having to undertake a quasi-anthropological investigation into
their contemporaries [378]. This was not the only manifestation of memory that
unsettled early modern people, who might feel (as Joe Moshenska explores) some
anxiety as to whether the ex-devotional object that had become a plaything for
their child was a doll or an idol. Other episodes
designed to make or unmake memory also pose challenges for twenty-first-century
scholars trying to interpret them. One of the most striking of these is the
defaced missal analysed by Brian Cummings. The ‘relentlessness joined with
destructive zeal’ [359] evidenced by the cuts of the pictures that would have
featured particularly prominently in the York Use seemingly involved an
unusually intense savagery. Did this, Cummings asks, reflect horror or anger? Were
the shape and positioning of the cuts deliberate? And why was the same object
then used to record James VI’s escape from the Gowrie conspiracy and its
ownership still marked in it into the 1660s? Some motivations to alter memories
of pre-Reformation objects may be irrecoverable. Other incompatible traditions
of memory cannot now be untangled: the different versions of the story of
Thomas More’s hair shirt and its provenance are a good example, narrated by
Victoria Van Hyning, of how competing narratives authorised groups by
implicitly transferring religiosity to them, and were glossed over by later
accounts of More and his family. Whether it was
Margaret Roper or Margaret Clement who was the trusted recipient of More’s hair
shirt, it reflects the role of women and family in transmitting memory and/or
relics. Tessa Murdoch’s account of the afterlives of sacred silver includes
examples of the passing of such objects through families, and the gradual
transition of reliquaries to relics. Matthew Parker’s family were the first
keepers of his ‘Roll’, an account of his life whose format nevertheless
suggests an intent to create a formal record or artefact. Forgetting was, as
Ceri Law’s analysis of this document shows, as important as remembering,
particularly for those like Parker who had not become martyrs or exiles during
Mary Tudor’s reign. Indeed, as both this and other chapters show, it was less a
case of remembering vs forgetting
than of selective remembering, with a battle over who did the selecting. An
argument over defacement or effacement of ‘idols’ was one about the
part-preservation as well as part-destruction of the material remains of
medieval religious culture. What was left could be, as some had it, ‘Monuments
of our indignation’ [241] rather than testaments to a land but halfly reformed. In other cases the
Protestant reworking of history failed: the positive memory of Henry V proved
difficult to eradicate (as shown by Susan Royal), while Catholics remembered in
ways that demonstrated their dynamic modes of resisting reform. Emilie Murphy’s
account of post-Reformation Catholic musical miscellanies shows how they were
repositories of individual, social, and collective memory, forms of protest as
well as records of lamentation. Contrasting what ‘has been’ with what ‘is now’,
they still suggest reform was an ongoing process rather than a decisive break. Just as the
experience of reform engaged all the senses, then, so too were memories of it
aural and visual as well as textual. The reworking of medieval Doom paintings
of the weighing up of souls, routinely removed during the Reformation, into the
image of the weighing of the Bible against ‘popish’ relics, is an apt example
explored by Tara Hamling. Used in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, it was
repeated on ballads, employed domestically as part of a chimneypiece, and
reappeared on a banner in the Civil Wars. As Hamling shows, different
iterations could be less elaborate, but they were not crude. Furthermore, they
probably penetrated to the level of tenant farmers who had a visual cue to
remember religious change every time they settled by the fire. And this too is suggestive. Memories
differed, competed, and were contested; sometimes they may have been shared,
but either way they were inescapable: from chimneypieces to campfires, from
quotidian activities to battles in what has been called a war of religion. An
output linked to a UK research-council funded project run in the years
surrounding the 500th anniversary of a date that was for centuries not really
deemed relevant to the English Reformation, this volume also occasionally
alludes to the ongoing tensions in remembering Reformation now. As it shows, these
difficulties are as deep rooted as the phenomenon they seek to recall. The
English Reformation will remain, as it has always been, as difficult to
remember as it is impossible to forget.
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