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Mémoire et oubli dans le monde anglophone des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles

Amnesia and Oblivion in England’s Long Reformation

Alexandra Walsham

Résumés

Cet essai explore des aspects de l’histoire de l’oubli dans le contexte de la longue Réforme de l’Angleterre, qui s’étend du xvie au xviiie siècle. Il examine les stratégies officielles d’effacement du passé religieux médiéval, par l’iconoclasme, l’amnésie approuvée et la censure, ainsi que les tentatives de prévenir et de combattre son oubli complet. Il aborde également la question plus difficile de savoir ce que les générations qui ont été témoins et acteurs des bouleversements religieux de l’époque ont cherché à oublier de ces développements décisifs et pourquoi. Il sonde le domaine insaisissable de la mémoire sélective à la fois au niveau collectif et individuel, retrace ses transmutations au fil du temps et réfléchit aux défis méthodologiques de l’interprétation des lacunes et des silences du document historique dans lequel réside l’oubli.

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1Bearing ghostly traces of seventeenth-century handwriting, the erasable writing tables reproduced as Figures 1 and 2 are compelling emblems of the subject of this essay: forgetting. Only a small number of items of this kind still survive in scholarly libraries, their wax coated pages are interleaved with those of a printed calendar and almanac. Whether inscribed with an ink pen, metal stylus, or graphite, these could be wiped clean with a moist sponge and reused (Writing Tables, 1584; Writing Tables, 1604).

Figure 1: Erasable leaf: Writing Tables with a Kalender for xxiiii. Yeeres: with Sundry Necessarye Rules. London, 1584.

Figure 1: Erasable leaf: Writing Tables with a Kalender for xxiiii. Yeeres: with Sundry Necessarye Rules. London, 1584.

Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, STC 101.2. https://digitalcollections.folger.edu/​bindings_bib169883-165388

Figure 2: Erasable leaf: Writing Tables with a Kalender for xxiiii. Yeeres: with Sundry Necessarie Rules. London, 1604.

Figure 2: Erasable leaf: Writing Tables with a Kalender for xxiiii. Yeeres: with Sundry Necessarie Rules. London, 1604.

Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, STC 26050.6. https://digitalcollections.folger.edu/​bindings_bib161790-154447

One of the erasable pages of a similar book, now in the Congregational Library, commemorates Ann Mitchell, who died on 5 October 1667, aged 45. This ephemeral memorial to an obscure Englishwoman is a further striking symbol of the fragility and transience of memory (Congregational Library, MS I.h.52). Standing in a tradition that stretches back to the wax tablets employed in classical times, these texts materialise a metaphor that finds its origin in the Greek philosopher Plato. It is the natural successor of the palimpsest, a vellum manuscript scraped of earlier writing to make way for a new text, but on which the scriptio inferior still remains faintly visible.

2Books of this kind were tiny portable archives, designed to be carried around in a pocket. They supplied surfaces upon which thoughts could be temporarily preserved, until they were obsolete or had been transcribed onto a more permanent medium. Symptomatic of the accelerating shift from memory to written record (Clanchy), they were one manifestation of the contemporary appetite for note-taking. This was itself a response to the growing anxiety about the danger of decay and oblivion that accompanied the phenomenon of early modern “information overload”. People worried that there was simply too much to know (Blair). They were concerned that their memories were receptacles that, like purses, might become too full and that valuable knowledge would consequently spill out and be lost. It might be necessary to sift and discard the contents to make space for new ideas. In short, it might be necessary to selectively forget. The revival of the ancient ars memoriae was another response to the same problem. A genre of books teaching the technique of creating a memory palace or theatre appeared: imagining a building with many rooms, into which particular thoughts could be filed for mental retrieval at some future time (Yates; Engel, Loughnane, and Williams). Simultaneously, people increasingly resorted to writing to supplement their frail human faculties. In his influential guide entitled Mnemonica, John Willis said that this was “the faithfullest guardian of Memorandums” and described it as a way to “discharge” or “disburden memory” in order to prevent important things from being forgotten. “This is not unlike expunging writing out of Table-books”, he opined. “If there be any Art of Oblivion, it may be properly referred hither” (30-31).

3Erasable notebooks were one of the modes of knowledge management that Alberto Cevolini has aptly called “forgetting machines”. Like the personal computers, tablets and phones on which we now rely so heavily, such technologies served as a form of artificial memory. They highlight the ways in which erasure and inscription, memory and oblivion are closely intertwined. These intriguing artefacts also underline two interconnected insights that have emerged from recent scholarship on forgetting. Still a neglected younger sister in the field of memory studies, forgetting is increasingly understood not only as an involuntary and unpredictable process but also as a generative and productive impulse. Social as well as individual, amnesia and oblivion can no longer be conceptualised solely in terms of lapse, deficit and failure. Instead, they must be understood as constitutive forces, as important elements in conflict resolution, peace-making and reconciliation and as instruments of identity formation (Augé; Connerton; Forty and Küchler; Ivic and Williams; Karremann, Zwierlein, and Groote; Plate; Rieff; Weinrich). Interestingly, the French word oubli better captures this active sense than the passive English formulation “forget”, the Germanic etymological origins of which imply negation and loss (Oxford English Dictionary, “forget” and “oblivion”; Plate 146).

4In one of the most stimulating contributions to this literature, Guy Beiner speaks of “forgetful remembrance”, a fruitful oxymoron that captures the complexity and delicacy of the enterprises of discarding, concealing, occluding and suppressing he explores in the context of late eighteenth-century Ireland. The consequence of thinking about forgetting in these terms is to draw our attention not merely to the gaps and shadows in the historical record in which it characteristically resides. It also encourages us “to tune in to the sounds of silence” and to listen for the “muted recollections” and “muffled voices” in which it no less frequently finds expression (27, 29, 604-605, 614). The narratives it generates are slippery entities filled with wrinkles, dissonances, ambiguities and tensions. But when approached sensitively the methodological challenges of locating this elusive phenomenon can, at least in part, be overcome. Moreover, as Michel de Montaigne observed wittily in one of his essays, “there is nothing that imprints a thing so vividly on the memory as the desire to forget it” (365).

  • 1 Sherlock is an excellent overview, with some points of intersection with the discussion that follow (...)

5This essay endeavours to sketch some prominent aspects of the history of forgetting in the context of England’s long Reformation.1 It considers official strategies for expunging offensive elements of medieval Catholicism, through iconoclasm and conversion, prescriptive amnesia, and censorship, alongside attempts to combat and counteract this campaign of oblivion. Secondly, it analyses some of the paradoxes of sinful remembering and divine forgetting and the circumstances in which it became necessary to prescribe collective amnesia. The third and final part considers the more difficult question of what the generations that witnessed and experienced the religious upheavals of the period sought to forget about these decisive developments and why. It probes the realm of selective remembrance at both the collective and personal level and traces its subtle transmutations over time.

Reformation forgetting and the combatting of oblivion

6The Reformation must be recognised as a major juncture in the history of memory. At its centre was an attempt to cast a significant portion of the past into utter darkness. In a culture that linked veracity with antiquity, Protestantism effaced the revolutionary rupture that its advent entailed by presenting itself as the reincarnation of primitive Christianity in its pristine purity. This entailed describing the medieval centuries as an era of corruption and benighted ignorance fostered by the corrupt Antichristian papacy and clergy. Like the Renaissance, the Reformation was predicated on a programme of public forgetting that created a new model of periodisation. A vigorous burst of polemical writing and historical activity discredited these dark ages of superstition and idolatry and celebrated the reigniting of the candle of the Gospel in their own time. This was accompanied by efforts to eliminate falsehood by attacking the ecclesiastical institutions, theological doctrines and liturgical practices in which it was visibly enshrined: these invented “traditions” bore no resemblance to the blueprint laid down in Scripture (Walsham, Wallace, Law and Cummings, 1-46).

7The most prominent device for achieving this was iconoclasm, which Eamon Duffy evocatively defines as “a sacrament of forgetfulness” (480). Destroying or defacing physical reminders of the Roman Catholic Church was regarded as a powerful mechanism for preventing the populace from clinging to soul-destroying error. The Henrician regime targeted the edifices and structures associated with relic veneration, pilgrimage and purgatory, insisting that prayers to the saints and intercessions for the dead were not legitimate ways of remembering them and should be eradicated. Following the pattern provided by the Swiss Reformation, the Edwardian and Elizabethan injunctions went further, ordering officials to “utterly extinct” all such shrines, paintings, and monuments “so that there remain no memory of the same in walls, glasses, windows or elsewhere within their churches or houses” (Documents, ed. Bray 255, 340-341). Conscious of the mnemonic properties of material objects, they saw the removal of these stumbling blocks as essential to the task of re-education. Some diocesan bishops went so far as to specify that the empty tabernacles in which statues had once stood should be filled up and the “vacant places” made “plain”, as if they had never been there (Visitation Articles 3: 323). For these churchmen, total annihilation was the best way of preventing backsliding to popery. Radical puritans like John Penry wanted to extend this mandate to other remnants of the “romish religion”, including parish churches, so that all traces of it would be “buryed” (89-92). Others thought that broken idols and mutilated monuments should remain as a prophylactic against idolatry. The decapitated heads and severed hands of images and statues also had didactic value as trophies and spectacles of what the Reformation had conquered. The underlying assumption here was that it was necessary to remember in order to forget. As time progressed, some divines defended the presence of these battered fragments as “monuments of our indignation and detestation against them” (Prynne 462). Philip Schwyzer writes of “the curation of iconoclasm” (24) as a mode of religious instruction. But Margaret Aston has suggested that such justifications may also be “part of a rationalisation to cover the failure of total erasure” (16-17). Other reflections of the intrinsic limits of the English Reformation as an iconoclastic endeavour are scratched roodscreens and whitewashed walls overpainted with Scripture verses in which the medieval murals they replace shine through (Figure 3). As in palimpsests, their transformations cannot entirely expunge the original messages. Residues of them continue to reside in cultural memory (see Berenbeim; Fleming).

Figure 3: Detail of rood screen with scripture texts painted over whitewashed medieval mural. Parish church of St Mary and Holy Cross, Binham Priory, Norfolk

Figure 3: Detail of rood screen with scripture texts painted over whitewashed medieval mural. Parish church of St Mary and Holy Cross, Binham Priory, Norfolk

Church of St Mary & Holy Cross, Binham Priory - rood screen (detail). Photograph credit: Evelyn Simak. Wikimedia Commons.

8There were other reasons why the effacement of the Catholic past could only be partial. One was the difficulty of disentangling the remembrance of idolatry from the remembrance of worthy ancestors. This was the problem tackled by a proclamation of 1560, which banned the “barbarous disorder” of those who broke “monuments of antiquitie”. This threatened to extinguish the honour due to the virtuous persons and noble families to whom such monuments had been erected for the sake of “memory” rather than “superstition” (Tudor Royal Proclamations 3: 146-147).

9 An alternative technique of forgetting was conversion or recycling. Putting sacred objects such as bells, vestments, altar stones, and holy water stoups to “profane” or secular use was another tactic for bringing about meaningful religious change. Melted down to create other vessels and turned into tablecloths, paving stones, and sinks, such items reflected the perception that purposeful appropriation and adaptation might facilitate the reformation of memory, as, if not more effectively than obliteration (Walsham 2017). Building upon the ancient mnemotechnical principle of effacing one pattern of association by superimposing another upon it, this too served as “a memory cue for the chastisement of future generations” (Carruthers 53). The same applied to the dissolved monasteries. Alongside those left to crumble, abbeys and priories converted into domestic residences provide further insight into the art of forgetting. As recent work by Harriet Lyon has shown, the architectural alterations that many underwent “engendered a culture of amnesia that became increasingly potent over time” (144). They too helped to erode, block out, and modify the memory of medieval Catholicism by overlaying it with new and different connotations.

10 The Reformation programme to repress the Catholic past also had political dimensions. Notoriously, Henry VIII launched a wholesale assault on the flourishing cult of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury whose resistance to the royal power of Henry II was a dangerous precedent for dissent against the Tudor king’s claim to ecclesiastical supremacy. His shrine was destroyed and a 1538 edict ordered that all visual depictions of the saint be “put down and avoided”. All references to him in liturgical texts were to be systematically removed and celebrations of his appointed feast day were to cease instantly. Ironically, this document provided a record of the very event that it sought to suppress – Becket’s death at the hands of assassins, which it said was “untruly called martyrdom” (Tudor Royal Proclamations 1: 275-276). This species of damnatio memoriae had the unsurprising side-effect of transforming Becket into a mascot and talisman of the English Counter Reformation.

11The ingenious ways in which books containing Becket’s office were censored alert us to other dimensions of the early modern culture of selective forgetting. Extant manuscript and printed primers and missals bear evidence of this process, including the deletion of the word “papa” and promises of indulgences and excisions from the calendar. It is often impossible to tell whether this was carried out in a mood of obedient but perfunctory compliance or in a spirit of genuine zeal, though the savage manner in which one page of an early sixteenth-century missal from Stainton in Yorkshire has been slashed seems to tell its own tale (Missale ad usum, sig. N2v-3r). In a fifteenth-century Salisbury processional the list of cathedral relics has been crudely blotted out with ink, but the entries are still legible. The later addition of the Oath of Supremacy shows how this text adapted to the religious revolution unfolding around it and defied liturgical developments that threatened it with obsolescence (Salisbury Cathedral Library, MS 148). Notable here was the 1549 order to destroy old service books which declared that they should be “so defaced and abolished that they may never hereafter serve to any such use as they were first provided for” (Tudor Royal Proclamations 1: 485-486). But books of hours with cursorily scratched out indulgences owned by recusant families could and did continue to sustain forbidden traditions of worship. The very survival of carefully defaced images of pity is suggestive of the complex mixture of remembering and forgetting that marked the Reformation in both theory and practice (To them that before this image of pity). And if some of the Church’s ancient liturgical ceremonies were consigned to oblivion as “intolerable” reminders of idolatry and superstition, others were retained in the Book of Common Prayer as instruments of “decent order” and “godly discipline” (214-216). The abuse and misuse of traditional rites by the papists did not necessitate their complete abrogation. Tensions over what and how much to forget continued to test and fracture the English Reformation from within for the next century.

12Some books, of course, did end up being burnt on bonfires of vanities. Their incineration was not simply indicative of the imperative to purge society of the error and infection of falsehood; it was a practical strategy for preventing the populace from coming into contact with ideas that might pervert them, though once again it provided “heretical” and “seditious” works with the oxygen of publicity. The precedent for such rites of destruction, which extended to the bodies of those formally convicted of theological unorthodoxy, lay in the Old Testament, which called for the “plucking down” and burning of graven images (Deuteronomy 7: 5 and 12: 3), blotting out the names of God’s enemies “from under heaven” (Deuteronomy 9: 14) and cutting off “the memory of them from the earth” (Psalm 109: 15). This stretched not merely to the living but also to the dissident dead, whose crimes were not allowed to go with them quietly to their graves. The exhumations of the bodies of John Wyclif in 1428 and of the Protestants Martin Bucer and Peter Phagius in 1557 are cases in point: the disinterring, cremation and scattering of their bones and ashes highlight the continuing vitality of these strategies for removing the remembrance of those who had wilfully placed themselves beyond the pale (Foxe, 104-106, 1549-1558). The commemoration of these processes of forgetting in both text and image in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments may be seen as an attempt to reverse their ritual erasure (Figure 4):

Figure 4: Reversing oblivion: the exhumation and burning of the bones of John Wyclif, 1428: John Foxe, Actes and Monuments. London, 1563.

Figure 4: Reversing oblivion: the exhumation and burning of the bones of John Wyclif, 1428: John Foxe, Actes and Monuments. London, 1563.

Public Domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:Wycliffe_bones_Foxe.jpg

13The sanction of excommunication itself was a kind of ars oblivionalis, involving the spiritual expulsion of offenders from the community of the faithful, who were to be treated as if they no longer existed. In short, such individuals were technically dead to the world and the victims of an active and voluntary forgetting that anticipated their future damnation and erasure from the book of life, as promised in the Bible (Jaser). The dismemberment of Catholic priests and laypeople executed as traitors was a judicial punishment underpinned by the same objective of obliterating their memory. The Protestant programme of forgetting thus built on strong Christian foundations.

14The Reformation assault upon the material sites of traditional religion prompted a concerted attempt to conserve the Catholic world that was in danger of being lost. We see this in the long entry in an otherwise laconic Tudor chronicle of Worcester compiled by a conservative writer, noting the local impact of the Edwardian reforms in 1547. It is a passage punctuated by absences and negations: by sacred objects that are now missing and by practices that have conspicuously ceased. “[T]hat yeare was taken away the great brazen candelstike and the beame of timber before the high altar”, “that year on Candlemasse day was noe candles hallowed nor bone. On Ashwednesday was noe Asshes hallowed … On Good Friday was noe creping to the crosse. On Easter Even noe fire halowed but the pascal taper and the font” (MacCulloch and Hughes, 245-246). The Yorkshire priest Roger Parkyn’s narrative of the same decade is another register of what was “utterly omittide” and “left undone” in these tumultuous years of change (66-68). These are quite literally records of forgetting.

15The same determination to stave off oblivion is evident in the mournful late sixteenth-century memoir of Long Melford church written by the Suffolk Catholic Roger Martyn, which lovingly describes the dismantled apparatus and discontinued rituals of worship he remembered from his youth, alongside the festive practices that accompanied the regular cycle of the ecclesiastical calendar (70-73). The Elizabethan manuscript known as “the Rites of Durham” is a document in a similar vein, laboriously but evocatively surveying the monuments, ceremonies and customs of the monastic foundation before its suppression in 1536. Probably authored by the antiquary William Claxton, who was a small child at the time, it testifies to a desire to preserve the pre-Reformation past that intensified as the events in question receded into the distance and paradoxically became more pronounced in the generations that succeeded those who had actually witnessed them. The very format of this copy, as a roll, is deliberately reminiscent of an earlier era (Claxton). The tone of the recusant Thomas Habington’s topographical description of Worcestershire, which contains an account of a hermitage chapel with a defaced image of the Mass of St Gregory, is likewise tinged with lament: his aim was “to presearve […] within thease paper walles what that stronge rocke cannot keepe” (2: 18).

16Other antiquarian texts echoed the sentiment that books were more permanent memorials than marble or stone, “for in all things there is a vicissitude” (Weever 3). It was not only committed Catholics who gave voice to the fear of forgetting this heritage. By the early seventeenth century, a sense that the Reformation had licensed too much oblivion was emerging among upstanding members of the Church of England, who were torn between celebrating the downfall of popish iniquity and regretting the loss of important remnants of the nation’s history. These shifting perspectives were symptomatic of a mellowing attitude to the medieval Church, which some now began to remember as the mother of their own institution, quietly effacing its faults and omitting the claim that it was a Satanic invention and a limb of Antichrist (Milton 1995, 310-321).

17John Weever’s Ancient Funerall Monuments, which appeared in 1631, was animated by the conviction that the ravages of the time, ‘the malignitie of wicked people”, and greed were responsible for extinguishing the memory of “venerable antiquity” (Epistle to the Reader). While he firmly reproved the vices of Catholic “votaries”, he could not approve of burying the devout piety of the founders of medieval religious houses in total silence. He felt compelled to apologise for including the inscriptions on the memorial slabs he recorded and illustrated, “which some may say might have beene as well left out of my booke, as they are in many places scraped out of the brasse” (A2r). He hoped that his failure to forget these would not offend his readers. Some of the woodcuts he incorporated were themselves pictures of voids. As he noted, the figures and arms in a memorial to John and Alice Howard in the parish church of Stoke dated 1452 had been “most impiously stolne away” (773) (Figure 5). In a surviving slab commemorating a couple from Boston, Lincolnshire, Thomas Flete is a merely spectral presence, a silhouette registering the havoc wrought by covetous hands, if not an impassioned attempt to banish false beliefs about the fate of the dead. In the eyes of Weever and a growing number of contemporaries, this was tantamount to sacrilege (https://www.mbs-brasses.co.uk/​index-of-brasses/​thomas-and-alice-flete).

Figure 5: Damaged monument to John and Alice Howard in the parish church of Stoke by Nayland: John Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments. London, 1631. p.773.

Figure 5: Damaged monument to John and Alice Howard in the parish church of Stoke by Nayland: John Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments. London, 1631. p.773.

By Permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. Shelfmark: Grylls 32.187.

18Assembled against the backdrop of the Civil Wars and Interregnum, William Dugdale’s celebrated Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656) and multi-volume Monasticon Anglicanum (1655-73) are prominent examples of the impulse to preserve disappearing vestiges of the past for posterity. The translator of the latter suspected that some thought this enterprise “more useless and insignificant than an old almanac” (Dugdale 1693, A2r), but the overriding purpose of these works was to hold back the effects of time and “contingent mischief” (Dugdale 1656, “To my honoured friends the gentrie of Warwickshire”). The riposte of Sir John Marsham against those who damned Dugdale’s enterprise and demanded it “be banished from libraries, if not delivered up to the flames” was swift and uncompromising (Dugdale 1718 edn, vi). Some puritan zealots evidently thought that the effort to rescue relics of the religious houses was misguided. Dugdale’s books engaged in their own forms of pious forgetting. The structures they represented pictorially were partly imagined ones, restored to their former glory and free of decay and dilapidation. As I have argued elsewhere, those who looked back to the age of monasticism as a golden era of spiritual ardour did not want to remember it as a cluster of mouldering ruins. The cathedrals that suffered damage during sieges, such as Lichfield, were portrayed in Dugdale’s text in the same way, minus their scars and wounds. All traces of the unspeakable uses to which St Paul’s in London was put when it quartered Parliamentary troops were eliminated in engravings of the building, including the dunghills and piles of horse manure with which it had been filled. The self-induced amnesia these images involve was in large part a response to the traumas that those loyal to the monarchy and the established church endured in these years (Walsham 2010). The wish to turn back the clock and forget the future persisted into the Restoration: the antiquary Simon Gunton’s History of the Church of Peterburgh (1686) depicted the altarpiece before it had “been beaten down by the Souldiers in the great Rebellion” and ransacked by the “strange furious and frantick zeal” of the “reforming Rabble” (333 and plate, facing 25) (Figure 6):

Figure 6: ‘The Old Altar-piece, beaten down by the Souldiers in the great Rebellion’: Simon Gunton, History of the Church of Peterburgh. Ed. Simon Patrick. London, 1686, plate facing p. 25.

Figure 6: ‘The Old Altar-piece, beaten down by the Souldiers in the great Rebellion’: Simon Gunton, History of the Church of Peterburgh. Ed. Simon Patrick. London, 1686, plate facing p. 25.

By permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. Shelfmark: L.14.24.

19Such publications were responses to the renewed wave of iconoclasm that accompanied what Anthony Milton has recently called England’s second Reformation (Milton 2021). This was a more comprehensive drive to eliminate idols, which swept up the lingering residues of Catholic “superstition” in the form of external crucifixes, “popish pictures” and inscriptions, cherubims and angels, together with the physical manifestations of the Laudian innovations, particularly altar rails. New ordinances in the early 1640s required the “utter demolishing, removing and taking away” of such monuments, though they were qualified with the caveat that memorials to kings, princes, noblemen and other laypeople could “stand and continue in like manner and forme, as if this Ordinance had never been made” (Ordinance 6-7). The rites of material oblivion that these edicts legitimated included the demolition of the “Dagon” that was Cheapside Cross in May 1643, on the vacated site of which the notorious book of sports was ceremonially burnt one week later (Downe-fall of Dagon). The journal in which William Dowsing documented his destructive tour of East Anglia is also a chronicle of deliberate forgetting, mathematically precise as an account of all the items to which he and his accomplices had taken an axe. The activities of another determined iconoclast, Richard Culmer, were advertised in his Cathedrall Newes from Canterbury (1644), which called for the “speedy dissolution” of this eyesore, which he had personally purged of its more egregious idols (title-page). In turn, this was answered by another pamphlet, entitled The Razing of the Record, which condemned the “impudent” work of this “notable Plunderer” and hoped it would be expunged from history. Again, this satirical text only served to perpetuate remembrance of Culmer’s concerted attempt to effect “the downfall of this tower of Babel” (A2r-v). It treated him like a latter day Herostratus, the fourth-century arsonist accused of seeking fame by destroying the Temple of Artemis. Protagonists on both sides of the mid-seventeenth century memory wars wielded the weapon of blotting out against their bitter rivals. They confidently predicted that God would pour down his judgements upon the perpetrators of the crimes of idolatry and sacrilege and consign them to the ignominy of oblivion.

Sinful remembering, godly forgetting, and necessary amnesia

20One consequence of the process of generational change that shaped England’s long Reformation was the growing concern of the clergy that their project of evangelisation had, at least partly, failed. Too many of their parishioners still seemed, in the words of one Essex vicar, to be holding “a pope in their belly” (Dent 141). Reluctant to relinquish the last dregs of superstition, they lingered in ignorance and darkness and wilfully resisted the requirement to forget the popish past. Physical idols may have been disappearing from the landscape, but it was harder to remove what the puritan divine William Perkins called the “idols of the mind” (811). Pastoral anxieties of this kind found expression in anecdotes about popular nostalgia for the pre-Reformation era. It was commonplace to complain that the common people harked back stubbornly to the time before the mass was put down, the bible was preached, and all things were cheap. Wistful yearning for a lost age of charity, harmony and plenty itself involved selective forgetting. The rose-tinted vision of “merry England” encapsulated in such speeches may have been partly a figment of the clerical imagination, but it is nevertheless indicative of the widespread worry that religious recidivism was one of the cardinal sins of English society in this period (Phillips; Walsham 2023, 456-460). Sermons on the story of Lot’s wife, who looked back to the wicked city of Sodom and was turned into a pillar of salt, were meditations on the terrible punishments that would befall those who refused to repent and who failed to forget (Carpenter; Wilkinson).

21Unease about residual popery was linked with dismay about the rise of “atheism”. In the eyes of many godly Protestants, this manifested itself less in overt repudiation of established religion than in an absence of zeal. The spiritual apathy in which the majority languished was a function of their propensity to forget God. Protestant ministers found ample evidence of this offence, and its punishment, in the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures. The prophets Jeremiah and Hosea strongly indicted ancient Israel for forgetting their Maker “days without number” and foretold the fire that would devour those who placed their trust in false gods (Jeremiah 2: 32; Hosea 8: 14). This form of forgetfulness was often described as sinful sleep or sluggishness. Ministers identified “sleeping sicknes” and “drousie disease” as a chronic distemper of the times, comparing it with the medical condition of lethargy (Jenkyn; Drousie Disease; Clapham; Rawlinson 48-9). According to the prevailing Galenic theory, this resulted from an imbalance of the bodily humours. Memory loss or deficit was a physiological product of excessive heat, dryness or fever, which prevented lasting impressions from being left on the brain (Lemnius 119-27; Barrough, 20-23). By the later seventeenth century, the term deployed for this malady was amnesia, which means forgetfulness in Greek. However, in the earlier part of the period, the word lethargy dominated (Oxford English Dictionary, “amnesia”, “lethargy”). It alludes to the mythical river of forgetfulness in Hades, Lethe, the waters of which caused drinkers to forget their past lives. The metaphorical potential of this personification of oblivion was frequently exploited in poetry and literature, as well as in practical divinity (Ivic and Williams).

22These classical references coexisted with Christian ones, which were ambivalent in sense and meaning. Some passages of Scripture spoke of forgetting, contradictorily, as a remedy for spiritual lethargy. To repent was to put one’s former sinful ways behind one, in short, to forget them (Philippians 3: 13). It was to abandon the indiscretions of one’s youth and turn over a new leaf. Texts like Thomas Playfere’s Pathway to Perfection (1593) described it as a recuperative activity. “The first lesson that Christ teacheth his Scholler is Forget” (18). This was an ancient theme, upon which Augustine had dilated in his Confessions, which are themselves a treatise on remembering and forgetting as redemptive religious activities guided by human and divine will (Grove 141-157). On the other hand, as Grant Williams and Christopher Ivic have commented, biblical discourse “stigmatises forgetting as a socially subversive transgression” (4). It reproves it as a trespass of both individual believers and communities that entailed disobeying God’s commandments and breaking the covenant into which they entered with him. The punishment the Almighty inflicted upon those who committed it fitted the crime: he would blot them out of his book of life. The ultimate sentence he passed upon sinners was their oblivion. As Thomas Adams warned in 1615, if the English people showed insufficient thankfulness, he would remove the candlestick of the Gospel, thereby sending them to ‘the land of forgetfull Darknesse’ (13).

23These observations were frequently made in the context of the providential mercies and deliverances from which England had benefited since the Reformation. Preachers at Paul’s Cross and elsewhere constantly castigated their hearers for their deplorable ingratitude, especially on the anniversaries of famous events such as the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, which were interpreted as interventions to save the nation from Catholic malice and cruelty, all the more remarkable because they did not deserve them (Walsham 1999, esp. 283-291). Later episodes, from the cessation of the plague in 1625 and Civil War battle victories to the Popish Plot and the Glorious Revolution, were assimilated into the same framework. The recurrent celebration of these happy occurrences and narrow escapes as “never to be forgotten” dates in the calendar betrays the pervasive concern that English Protestants repeatedly fell short in the realm of thankful remembrance (Clarke; General Bill; Englands Memorial; Horrid Popish Plot). Their indifference to so much divine benevolence would surely provoke devastating judgements. As the preacher John Reynolds observed in a thanksgiving sermon delivered in Exeter on 5 November 1678: “because age and length of time generally brings with it the oblivion and forgetfullness of the most notable occurrences […] God is pleased from time to time to awaken and rub us up by suffering this bloody brood of the Papacy to engage upon such like attempts afresh […]” (2).

24These were perils upon which ministers had dwelt for more than a century, including the Berkshire divine Thomas Taylor. In a sermon on Exodus 17: 14 published in 1624, he recalled how God himself had “utterly abolished” and “put out” the memory of the Amalekites “from under heaven” (7). This provided a pattern for the gratitude contemporaries should display for their deliverances from the vengeful papists. Rising to a pitch of urgency, Taylor declared:

Whereas the Lord hath commanded us to remember what Amalek hath done to us in our way, and repeateth it againe, forget it not, we forget the strait injunction: we remember not what they did to us in Queene Maries daies, but have forgotten those furious flames and times. We have forgotten what Amalek did to us in 1588 and remember not that they digged a sulphurous pit in 1605 wide enough to swallow three whole kingdomes. Now while wee so easily forget that which wee are commanded to remember, what marvell if God rub our memories, by suffering them to be pricks in our sides and eies still? (24)

25An earlier sermon by William Goodwin reflected on the same obligations, saying that divine deliverances should be recorded in “Characters that shall never be blotted out”. He noted that before the Flood the patriarchs had prodigious memories; afterwards, because the mnemonic powers of humanity declined, it was necessary to resort to texts and to erect pillars and monuments to offset forgetfulness. Evoking Psalm 107, he said that if people forgot the blessings God bestowed upon them, the stones in the street and the timber in the walls would remember these and rise up to condemn them (Dr Williams’ Library, MS 12.10. fos. 9v-102, 12r). This helps to explain the construction of the Monument to the Great Fire of London of 1666, between 1671 and 1677. In 1681, at the height of the panic about the Popish Plot, a Latin inscription was added by order of the civic fathers, part of which blamed the fire on “the treachery and malice of the popish faction” and said that the “Popish frenzy, which wrought such horrors, is not yet quenched”. But the latter words accusing the Catholics of arson were chiselled out following Catholic Emancipation in 1830 in another strategic act of forgetting (https://www.themonument.info/​history/​inscriptions.html). Virulent anti-popery of this kind was now politically incorrect.

26 The canon of historical writing engendered by the commemorative culture linked with the evolving Protestant calendar also revolved around the art of selective forgetting. It involved effacing human mistakes and covering up elements of past events out of keeping with the triumphalist narratives that became a key ingredient of English patriotism. It also entailed adjusting the record about previous monarchs, such as Elizabeth I, whose reluctance to advance the cause of godly reform was silently elided in accounts that celebrated her “blessed memory”. Frustrations with Charles I’s style of rule disappeared amidst the outrage that followed his violent death by order of the regicides, which transformed him into a martyr. After the Restoration, the future Charles II’s escape from capture by hiding in an oak tree following the Battle of Worcester in 1651 was closely correlated with England’s own deliverance from Cromwellian tyranny during the Interregnum. Providential histories of the seventeenth century carried different inflections and demonstrated different forms of forgetting, depending upon the allegiances of those retelling them. But all agreed that God would punish the ungrateful by forgetting them.

27 As the Royalist divine Thomas Fuller commented, “God cannot properly be said either to remember or forget, because all things alwayes present themselves as present unto him” (3). Because He stood outside time, to speak of His memory was to compromise his omniscience. Nevertheless, the temptation to anthropomorphise and humanise the deity was hard to resist (Riley). If scripture referred to the vengeful forgetting of the Jehovah, it also invoked his benevolent forgetting of human sin. The Lord blotted out and “remembered not” the iniquities of his children, removing them from his sight. This was forgiveness, a “washing away” and “remission” of guilt purchased not by good works but by Christ’s death on the cross. Nathanael Culverwell, sometime fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, called this “the Act of Oblivion”, the “royal Prerogative” by which God pardoned sins and “carried [them] into a land of forgetfulness” (29, 36). He was not the first to coin this phrase: Fuller anticipated him in his sermon The Best Act of Oblivion in 1655.

28Both ministers alluded to the series of official edicts passed in these years of turmoil in an effort to resolve conflict, encourage reconciliation, and promote peace. In February 1652, the godly republic issued one in the hope that “all rancour and evil will occasioned by the late differences may be buried in perpetual oblivion” (Act 1652, 1546). This predated the better known Act of “free pardon and indemnity” passed in 1660, which sought to “bury all Seeds of future Discords and remembrance of the former” “Troubles”, “Warrs”, and “Discords” that had torn Charles II’s three kingdoms apart for more than two decades. The legislation protected those who had fought and participated in the war from prosecution, though with a set of telling exemptions, which included those who had plotted and designed the Irish Rebellion, those who had committed egregious acts of sacrilege, and above all those who had contrived to murder his late father. This extended to those who were already deceased, notably Oliver Cromwell, whose body, together with those of several of his co-confederates, was exhumed and subjected to rites of humiliation. These were crimes too heinous to forget. The law also contained clauses prohibiting the utterance of words tending “to revive the memory of the late differences or the occasions thereof” on pain of a sliding scale of fines (Act 1660 1, 8). Leading figures, including Edward Hyde, the earl of Clarendon, saw “this excellent Art of Forgetfulness” as a vital device for reuniting the nation (Kewes 114).

29 Like other European directives of the same kind, these statutes required the societies in which they were enacted to forget the past that had fatally divided them because remembering it would only open old wounds (Pollmann 140-159). This is perhaps most clearly spelt out in the Edict of Nantes of 1598, which brought the French Wars of Religion to an end: it declared that the memory of all that had passed since 1585 “shall remain extinguished and suppressed, as things that have never been” (Duke, Lewis, and Pettegree, 120). Such settlements prescribed forgetting in conjunction with compassion and clemency. Borrowing the language of divine mercy and underlining the close link between amnesia and amnesty, they must be seen in the same light as grants of indulgence, liberty of conscience, and toleration. They were given as gifts by authorities that exercised hierarchical power over their recipients (van Dijhuizen, esp. 407-409). Overlooking offences in the interests of order and stability was not equivalent to wiping the slate clean (Poole; see also Berensmeyer). It was rather a case of temporarily sweeping them under the carpet and prudently suspending the penalties due to them. As in a palimpsest or erasable notebook, troubling traces of the emotions that underpinned them remained.

30Indeed, the very prescription to forget may have worked to perpetuate and nurture bitterness. It proved difficult to bury these memories. As Imogen Peck has astutely observed about the 1650s, there was a persistent tension between reconciliation and remembrance (36, 53). Oblivion carried its own inbuilt contradictions: it drew renewed attention to the things it wanted to expel from the written record and from contemporary consciousness. This is nicely encapsulated in a 1660 broadside ballad entitled An Exit to the Exit Tyrannus, which celebrated the erasing of the “ignominious and scandalous motto” that had been set up by the republican regime in place of a statue of Charles I in the Royal Exchange. This and another printed sheet, Gold turn’d into Mourning, preserved this act of symbolic forgetting on paper for posterity. The same irony surrounds the many scurrilous songs sung to the tune of “Let Oliver now be forgotten” (Excellent new ballad; Conspiracy). The music was a mnemonic to doing precisely the opposite. As a number of recent studies have shown, as determined as Restoration England and Ireland to consign the villainous exploits of Oliver Cromwell and his comrades to the dustheap, they also needed them as a reminder of the religious passions and prejudices that had brought the three kingdoms to their knees during the puritan Revolution. Both strategies, in their own way, performed the function of cartharsis and exorcism. They reanimated even as they expelled the memory of the violent “fanaticism” that became synonymous with these decades (Neufeld; Peters 46-55; Covington). The contentious afterlife of the Civil War in the later seventeenth century was one of the legacies of England’s long Reformation.

Forgetful remembrance and England’s long Reformation

31Thirdly we must turn to the more difficult question of how to write a history of personal as opposed to public forgetting. What did those who lived through the tumultuous developments that unfolded over two centuries wish to remember and what did they want to forget? And how did this change as those who witnessed and participated in it died and were succeeded by generations that knew them only via inherited testimonies and texts? Here we may turn to the multifarious forms of life-writing that flourished in English society, from genealogies and chronicles to diaries and memoirs. Reinforcing Adam Smyth’s call for us to recognise the capaciousness and flexibility of autobiography as a category, these were texts that were invariably produced in retrospect. Whether people were detached from the events they described by hours, days, weeks, months, or years, they looked back upon them with the benefit of hindsight. They recalled their childhood through the lens of adulthood and from the perspective of middle or old age. As they moved through the lifecycle, they edited their own lives and those of their families and friends in accordance with their present identities, which were themselves prone to change over time. These intertwined processes both required a generous dose of forgetting.

32In the pedigrees that contemporaries were increasingly obsessed with compiling, relatives who had been born and died before the break with Rome were either silently excised or carefully reconfigured to fit with new priorities. To the structural amnesia of primogeniture was added the problem of adherence to a prohibited faith. Godly Protestants played down the involvement of their forebears in crusades and pilgrimages and played up their precocious sponsorship of preaching and bible translation. Medieval bishops and monks became slightly embarrassing black sheep, while those who had sacrificed their lives or suffered for their beliefs were memorialised as martyrs (Walsham 2023, 183-212). The genealogy of the Tracy family of Gloucestershire, for instance, displayed particular pride in its early sixteenth-century ancestor William, whose decaying corpse was disinterred and burnt for heresy, like Wyclif’s before it (201). Sometimes, though, another form of amnesia set in: a charitable instinct to forgive one’s predecessors on the grounds of ignorance and to hope that, despite their adherence to popish error and their misdirected devotion, they had been saved.

33Similar processes of self-fashioning can be observed at work in the stories Elizabethan Protestants told about how they had behaved during Mary’s reign. These ironed out evidence of the forms of Nicodemite dissimulation that had allowed them to evade detection and live quietly but which were now looked upon as forms of cowardice and hypocrisy. Here Matthew Parker’s vellum scroll of memoranda is especially revealing: it effaces the fact that the future Archbishop of Canterbury did not choose the path of exile after 1553. It smooths over his compromises and subtly transforms them into evidence of constancy, stoicism, and providential intercession. Filtering his activities through the sieve of selective memory, he aligned them with the martyrological tropes popularised by Foxe’s Actes and Monuments and in doing so crafted his own posthumous reputation (Corpus Christi College, MS 583; Law). In its own way, the heroic gesture that Thomas Cranmer made as he was burnt at the stake, thrusting the hand that had signed his recantation into the flames, was an attempt to do the same (Foxe 1503). He wanted to forget the moment of weakness that had led him to falter in his commitment to the Protestant faith. The manuscript memoirs Rose Hickman wrote around 1610, in her 85th year, are revealing for similar reasons. Although she and her husband did leave England, they chose Catholic Antwerp rather than Calvinist Geneva. She presented the ethical dilemmas they faced there in the best possible light, disguising the pragmatic decisions they made and congratulating herself on the sacrifices she had made for her faith (Dowling and Shakespeare). Her narrative was a delicate confection of wishful thinking and strategic forgetting. The tensions and inconsistencies in these narratives reflect the gaps between the standard accounts that were crystallising in the Protestant imagination and the rather messier realities. On other occasions they muffle and mask humiliating and harrowing experiences that their writers had no desire to relive in detail, including interrogation, torture, and corporal punishment. John Louth told how his father Edmund had been murdered by the monks of Sawtrey Abbey in 1522 while he was carrying his small son in his arms. His knowledge of this event was second-hand, transmitted to him by his mother, whose recollection of it was surely inflected by anger and grief (Narratives, ed. Nichols 35-39).

34The wartime experiences of soldiers and civilians during the Civil Wars of the 1640s and 50s were filtered through the same distorting lenses. Irish Protestants interviewed by the commissioners investigating the 1641 rebellion recalled their tribulations in graphic detail, but the resulting narratives are silent about some of the most distressing aspects of the violence they faced, including those connected with sexual assault and rape (McAreavey). Their reticence in this respect was a way of retrospectively protecting their dignity. When she was interviewed two years later, Elizabeth Price detailed some but not all of the “bloudie barbarous & divellish Cruelties” committed against “the persons of a multitude of Protestants” in Armagh, which included stripping them of their clothes. But she was diffident about identifying all of those involved, demurring that their “names shee cannot now expresse” (1641 Depositions, MS 836, fo. 101r). Perhaps she could no longer remember them, but perhaps she had repressed this or thought it best to smother them in silence.

35The stories that combatants on both sides later told about the part they had played in the bitter conflicts between King and Parliament were likewise sanitised. Often rehearsed in petitions seeking compensation for the injuries and disabilities they had incurred, these concealed shameful behaviour such as desertion, de-personalised their enemies, and eschewed the use of antagonising labels such as rebel (Stoyle 2003). Like Thomas Jace of Duddon in Cheshire, who petitioned Justices of the Peace for relief in 1666, they played up their loyalty to Charles I of “blessed memory” and emphasised how much they had suffered for their “Constant affection to his Majesty’s Cause” (Civil War Petitions, Petition of Thomas Jace, 1666). The decade that had passed and their current pressing needs facilitated forms of forgetful remembrance. The euphemistic language by which they referred to the turbulent events of these decades is another aspect of the attempt to heal differences through partial forgetting: phrases like “the late troubles” and the “late unhappy war” acknowledged the fact of conflict without laying blame on any particular party (Stoyle 2004, 22).

36The case of Lucy Hutchinson, wife of the colonel and regicide John Hutchinson, provides another perspective. As Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille has shown, in her account of the English Revolution Lucy Hutchinson tends to hide her agency and confine herself to the role of witness and nurse. Patriarchal assumptions prompted her to partially censor herself from the historical record, though when she reached the early 1660s, she made herself a more visible actor, tinkering with memory and engaging in practices of equivocation and forgetting that resembled the sins of partisanship, forgery, lying and omission that true historians were supposed to eschew (166-202).

37The diaries written by later Stuart Protestants and puritans are shaped by other forms of forgetting that deserve our attention. Tom Webster has described them as forms of “writing to redundancy”, texts that involve the repression and renunciation a sense of self in order to foreground divine magnanimity and achieve a new state of spiritual awakening (42-43). The nonconformist John Rastrick prefaced his with the observation that “what I have done be worthy of nothing but forgetfulness”, while what the Lord had done for him deserved “a written and grateful Memoriall” (29). Many godly Christians lamented their failure to acknowledge the mercies they had received and obsessively catalogued their lapses in this regard. Nehemiah Wallington woke early one morning in October 1654 and reflected regretfully upon his aptness “to forget this heavenly word the food of my soule” (332). The late seventeenth-century Rye dissenter Samuel Jeake gave up the practice of recording his sins “considering that God hath blotted out as a thick Cloud my Transgressions […] why should I give occasion to Man to revive the memory of that which [he] will remember no more” (Jeake 98). He justified his own forgetfulness by invoking the benign amnesia of the Almighty.

38Meanwhile, England’s Roman Catholics developed a distinctive culture of oblivion of their own. The Jesuits and seminary priests who served as missionaries consoled their beleaguered congregations with the thought that, in due course, God would ensure that the memory of heresy was banished. Robert Southwell confidently predicted that just as the memory of medieval heretics was “quite abolished” so would “Luthers noveltyes […] being but parcels of their corruptions, revived and raked out of oblivion” soon vanish and be extinguished (80). The chronicles composed in the English convents in the Low Countries were written anonymously by women who regarded themselves as dead to the world, but within which they gave discreet expression to their own subjectivities and life histories, including decisions to defy parental authority (Van Hyning). The stances and positions Catholic laypeople adopted in response to pressure and persecution also required some careful glossing and editing. Many were eager to both occlude and excuse their church papistry, which contrasted with the heroism of recusancy. Some of those who sought refuge abroad retrospectively remembered their voluntary flight as a forced expulsion from their homeland (Smith). When the future Yorkshire martyr Robert Watkinson entered the English College in Rome as a scholar in 1599, the account he gave of his past history downplayed what seems to have been a youthful crisis of faith and a flirtation with heresy. Seduced by the “smooth words” of a learned man, he suggested to some of his friends that “they might be saved outside the Catholic Church”. But “touched by the sting of conscience”, he soon realised the error of his ways and “praise be to Christ” had, ever since, never been tempted to waver again. Watkinson evidently wanted to forget how close he had come to converting to Protestantism (Unpublished Documents 378).

39Others cast a veil over their complicity in rebellions and conspiracies such as the Northern Rising and the Babington Plot. They did so in order to resist the imputation of political disobedience and to refute the state’s claim that Catholics were ipso facto traitors. These rhetorical patterns successfully injected themselves into subsequent martyrologies and histories in ways that have blinded us to its politically subversive undercurrents. It is telling that Bishop Richard Challoner’s Memoirs of Missionary Priests (1741-42) explicitly omitted the gentleman James Leyburn, who was executed at Lancaster in 1583, because at both his arraignment and his death he had denied Queen Elizabeth to be his lawful sovereign. Challoner drew attention to this to cement a historiographical tradition that was predicted upon forgetting those who tainted Catholicism’s status as a passively suffering faith, and which was designed to secure the canonisation of its martyrs as saints (A7v). The counter archives that other eighteenth-century clerics collected and curated, which are currently being scrutinised by Liesbeth Corens, similarly served as “secure sites of forgetting”, advancing “hidden agendas of oblivion and concealment” that have coloured and distorted our understanding of the post-Reformation Catholic community (Brendecke 132).

40These were designed to undermine the alternative version of the past promoted by the Protestant state. The dissolution of the monasteries was accompanied by a partial salvaging of the contents of their libraries by Matthew Parker and other antiquaries. The wheat they sifted from the chaff were manuscripts that buttressed both the jurisdictional claims of Henry VIII and his heirs and the theological hallmarks of the infant Church of England (Summit). The central role of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments in this process is also well known. Not only did Foxe remodel the Lollards as pious precursors of Luther (Collinson); he also “airbrushed” dissident groups such as the Freewillers out of the picture, in the interests of depicting English Protestantism as harmonious and coherent (Freeman 154).

41Influential later histories of the Reformation written by Thomas Fuller and Peter Heylyn engaged in other forms of amnesia. While Fuller remembered it as an orderly event, achieved largely without the eruption of violence, Heylyn was not merely intent upon finding within it the seeds of Laudianism, but also upon constructing it as a via media that owed everything to English genius and exceptionalism and nothing to foreign influences emanating from Europe (Fuller; Heylyn; Milton 2013, 83-87). Heylyn was a key figure in creating the enduring legend about the origins of Anglicanism that Diarmaid MacCulloch calls the myth of the English Reformation. Gilbert Burnet’s History of the Reformation of the Church of England modified this story to present the Glorious Revolution as both its natural endpoint and its triumphant culmination (Figure 7):

Figure 7: Gilbert Burnet. The History of the Reformation of the Church of England (London, 1681), title page.

Figure 7: Gilbert Burnet. The History of the Reformation of the Church of England (London, 1681), title page.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:The_history_of_the_reformation_of_the_Church_of_England_(1681)_(14596673009).jpg

42The narrative of the ejection of James II as an unscrupulous Catholic despot and the accession of the Protestant monarchs William and Mary constructed by Whig historians was itself a product of historical amnesia which proceeded in several phases. It entailed the “erasure” of those who supported his radical aims to abolish the laws against nonconformity and introduce an even more far-reaching form of toleration than that enshrined in the Act of 1689. James II’s erstwhile Dissenter allies “whitewashed” their past loyalties and later generations steadily marginalised the “repealers” from accounts of this seminal moment of English religious and constitutional liberty. As Scott Sowerby remarks, “the energy poured into suppressing” their presence reveals “a kind of negative image” of this forgotten movement (90-91, 121). The archives that underpin the historiographical tradition that still dominates our understanding of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England are thus composed out of the bricks of memory and oblivion. Only by probing their dissonances and lacunae can we reconstruct this prolonged religious revolution in all its complexity.

*

43I conclude with a few words about a form of memory loss to which this essay has made little reference: the memory loss that afflicts the aged. A revealing entry in a commonplace book once owned by Sir Marmaduke Rawdon concerns the case of John Calvin’s successor in Geneva, the theologian Theodore Beza, which “was peculiar & memorable; beinge about fourescore yeares of age hee perfectly could say by heart any Greeke chapter in St Pauls Epistles, or any thinge which hee had learnt longe before, butt forgott whatsoever was newly told him” (York Minster Library, MS Add 122, fo. 127v). Describing a phenomenon that is all too familiar to those who have witnessed the debilitating effects of dementia in the elderly, it also enshrines the early modern conviction that memory is fragile and vulnerable to the ravages of disease and time. We may juxtapose the story of Beza with the tantalising glimpses we gain of the memory problems of some of the patients who consulted the astrological doctor Richard Napier in the early seventeenth century. His case books provide an oblique window into the experiences of people like 70-year-old Margery Vans of Weston Underwood in Buckinghamshire whose memory was described in 1610 as “decayed with worldly care”. Napier”s note on Alice Ashpole, aged 47, of Newport Pagnell, who he saw on 4 January 1615, runs “out of memorie & remembrance and knoweth none” (Casebooks, ed. Kassell et al, cases 24681 and 24210). These poignant examples point towards a further chapter in the history of forgetting that must be left for another occasion. This essay has focused less on its accidental and inadvertent dimensions than its strategic and social ones. But it has also investigated some of the more private and intimate traces that amnesia, oblivion, and forgetful remembrance have left in the records of England’s long Reformation, as on the pages of the erasable notebooks with which I began.

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Bibliographie

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Notes

1 Sherlock is an excellent overview, with some points of intersection with the discussion that follows.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Figure 1: Erasable leaf: Writing Tables with a Kalender for xxiiii. Yeeres: with Sundry Necessarye Rules. London, 1584.
Légende Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, STC 101.2. https://digitalcollections.folger.edu/​bindings_bib169883-165388
URL http://journals.openedition.org/1718/docannexe/image/13061/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 330k
Titre Figure 2: Erasable leaf: Writing Tables with a Kalender for xxiiii. Yeeres: with Sundry Necessarie Rules. London, 1604.
Légende Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, STC 26050.6. https://digitalcollections.folger.edu/​bindings_bib161790-154447
URL http://journals.openedition.org/1718/docannexe/image/13061/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 332k
Titre Figure 3: Detail of rood screen with scripture texts painted over whitewashed medieval mural. Parish church of St Mary and Holy Cross, Binham Priory, Norfolk
Légende Church of St Mary & Holy Cross, Binham Priory - rood screen (detail). Photograph credit: Evelyn Simak. Wikimedia Commons.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/1718/docannexe/image/13061/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 209k
Titre Figure 4: Reversing oblivion: the exhumation and burning of the bones of John Wyclif, 1428: John Foxe, Actes and Monuments. London, 1563.
Légende Public Domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:Wycliffe_bones_Foxe.jpg
URL http://journals.openedition.org/1718/docannexe/image/13061/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 432k
Titre Figure 5: Damaged monument to John and Alice Howard in the parish church of Stoke by Nayland: John Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments. London, 1631. p.773.
Légende By Permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. Shelfmark: Grylls 32.187.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/1718/docannexe/image/13061/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,3M
Titre Figure 6: ‘The Old Altar-piece, beaten down by the Souldiers in the great Rebellion’: Simon Gunton, History of the Church of Peterburgh. Ed. Simon Patrick. London, 1686, plate facing p. 25.
Légende By permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. Shelfmark: L.14.24.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/1718/docannexe/image/13061/img-6.jpg
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Titre Figure 7: Gilbert Burnet. The History of the Reformation of the Church of England (London, 1681), title page.
Légende https://commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:The_history_of_the_reformation_of_the_Church_of_England_(1681)_(14596673009).jpg
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Alexandra Walsham, « Amnesia and Oblivion in England’s Long Reformation »XVII-XVIII [En ligne], 81 | 2024, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2024, consulté le 06 novembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/1718/13061 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/130q2

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Auteur

Alexandra Walsham

Alexandra Walsham is Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Emmanuel College and the British Academy. She has published extensively on early modern religious and cultural history and her books include The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2011) and Generations: Age, Ancestry and Memory in the English Reformations (2023). She was Principal Investigator of the Arts and Humanities Research Council project “Remembering the Reformation” between 2016 and 2019. Email: amw23@cam.ac.uk

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