3 - Remembering the Past at the End of Time

Summary

This chapter considers the relationship between change and continuity in the English Reformations through a close study of historical writing. It situates Protestant historical writing during the Tudor Reformations in its polemical context: the need to defend Protestantism from charges of novelty and heresy, and explain away the apparent glory of the Catholic Church over the previous 1,500 years, which were captured in the phrase, ‘Where was your Church before Luther?’ It shows that in answering that question, Protestant writers used traditional practices and modes of historical writing – apocalypticism, providence and prophesy – and employed traditional media (ballads and prophetic images) alongside the new technology of print. It argues that this apparent continuity with the medieval past was vital to Protestant experience and expression of the Reformations as a jolt to historical consciousness. Because they were teleological, these types of historical writing defined the Reformation as a seismic and defining change in history: the last days which would see the culmination of human history and the purification of the Church. Articulating the importance of the presence necessitated the past being remembered and redefined. In this way, memory was crucial to the process of Reformation.