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Recycling the Sacred: Material Culture and Cultural Memory after the English Reformation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2017

Alexandra Walsham
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Abstract

This article examines medieval liturgical artifacts that survived the English Reformation by being converted to alternative religious and secular purposes. Exploiting both textual and material evidence, it explores how sacred objects were adapted and altered for a range of domestic and ecclesiastical uses, together with the underlying theological assumptions about adiaphora or “things indifferent” that legitimized such acts of “recycling.” These are situated on a continuum with iconoclasm and approached as dynamic and cyclic processes that offer insight into how Protestantism reconfigured traditions of commemoration and patterns of remembrance. Simultaneously, it recognizes their role in resisting religious change and in preserving tangible traces of the Catholic past, showing how converted objects served to perpetuate and complicate social and cultural memory. The final section investigates the ambiguous longer-term legacies of this reform strategy by probing the significance of growing concerns about the sin of ‘sacrilege’ committed by those who had profaned holy things.

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Articles
Information
Church History , Volume 86 , Special Issue 4: Church History in Commemoration of the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation , December 2017 , pp. 1121 - 1154
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Copyright © American Society of Church History 2017 

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30 See Barrow, Briefe Discoverie, 132; and Smyth, Parallels, censures, observations, 121–122, who repudiated the precedent that heathen temples had been converted into the houses of God.

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59 Ibid.,159, and see also 71.

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63 Shagan, Popular Politics, 298.

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67 See “Orphrey (cushion),” no. 837–1902, Victoria and Albert Museum, accessed 12 March 2017, http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O129343/orphrey-cushion-unknown/.

68 Iain Soden, “The Conversion of Former Monastic Buildings to Secular Use: The Case of Coventry,” in Archaelogy of the Reformation, ed. Gaimster and Gilchrist, 285.

69 See Stocker, David with Everson, Paul, “Rubbish Recycled: A Study of the Re-Use of Stone in Lincolnshire,” in Stone: Quarrying and Building in England AD 43–1525, ed. Parsons, David (Chichester: Phillimore, 1990), 97 Google Scholar. On the Kyme chantry, see Stocker, David, “Archaeology and the Reformation: A Case Study of the Redistribution of Building Materials in Lincoln, 1520–1560,” Lincolnshire History and Archaeology 25 (1990): 18–32 Google Scholar.

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74 Ibid., 86.

75 Ibid., 54, 70, 73, 77, 107, 132, 146.

76 Kennedy, Elizabethan Episcopal Administration, 3:150. See also the visitation articles for the prebend of Wistow, Yorkshire, in Purvis, J. S., Tudor Parish Documents of the Diocese of York (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), 48 Google Scholar.

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80 Walters, London Churches, 86.

81 Cox and Harvey, English Church Furniture, 238.

82 See Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm, 79–80. Cox and Harvey, English Church Furniture, chap. 6, p. 182 cites a font at Newark in Nottinghamshire, which has an accompanying brass plate inscribed “This Font was demolished by the Rebels, May 9, 1646, and rebuilt by the charity of Nicholas Ridley in 1660.”

83 Cf. the medieval examples of reverent font burial discussed in Stocker, David, “ Fons et Origo: The Symbolic Death, Burial and Resurrection of English Font Stones,” Church Archaeology 1 (1997): 17–25 Google Scholar. For buried fonts at Grappenhall and Alderley Cheshire, see Cox and Harvey, English Church Furniture, 188. See also Aston, Broken Idols, 595–604; and Trevor Johnson, “Brass, Glass and Crosses: Identifying Iconoclasm outside the Journal,” in Journal of William Dowsing, ed. Cooper, 89–106, 96–97.

84 Cited in Heal, “Visual and Material Culture,” 607.

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87 Cox and Harvey, English Church Furniture, 38.

88 Ibid., 37.

89 Walters, London Churches, 27.

90 Many examples are cited in Nightingale, Church Plate of the County of Wiltshire and Church Plate of the County of Dorset. For the meanings and functions of Protestant church plate, see Peterson, Mark, “Puritanism and Refinement in Early New England: Reflections on Communion Silver,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 58, no. 2 (April 2001): 307–346 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

91 See Walters, London Churches, 59, 60, 96, 123, 127, 137, 349, 457, among many references to items acquired by goldsmiths.

92 Peacock, English Church Furniture, 33, 112.

93 “The Stonyhurst Salt, c. 1577,” 1958,1004.1, British Museum, London. For a stimulating discussion of this object and the wider phenomenon, see Victoria Yeoman, “Reformation as Continuity: Objects of Dining and Devotion in Early Modern England,” (forthcoming). I am grateful to Dr. Yeoman for permitting me to read and cite this in advance of publication.

94 LOAN:MET ANON.11-2007, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O142161/reliquary-partridge-affabel/. I am grateful to Tessa Murdoch for sharing her expertise regarding this item. On the transformation of reliquaries into works of art, see Nagel, Alexander, “The Afterlife of the Reliquary,” in Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe, ed. Bagnoli, Martina, Klein, Holger A., Mann, C. Griffith, and Robinson, James (London: British Museum Press, 2010), 211–222 Google Scholar.

95 Nightingale, Church Plate of the County of Wiltshire, 25, 53. It is not clear when these secular vessels became communion ware.

96 See Peacock, English Church Furniture, 55.

97 Edgeworth, Roger, Sermons very Fruitfull, Godly and Learned, ed. Wilson, Janet (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), 143 Google Scholar.

98 See Scribner, R. W., “Ritual and Reformation,” in Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London: Hambledon, 1987), 114 Google Scholar. A figure of the crucified Christ with his arms broken off dating from 1475–1525 discovered in an old mansion at Fiddleford, Dorset is now in the British Museum: 1998,0408.1. Joe Moshenska is currently working on this intriguing topic. For evidence of deliberate damage to surviving devotional figurines, see also Gaimster, David, “Of ‘Idols and Devils’: Devotional Pipeclay Figurines from Southern Britain in their European Context,” in Archäologie der Reformation: Studien zu den Auswirkungen des Konfessionswechsels auf die materielle Kultur, ed. Jäggi, Carola and Staecker, Jörn (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007): 269 Google Scholar.

99 Additional MS 5813, fos 20v–21r, British Library, printed in Sherbrook, Michael, “The Fall of Religious Houses,” in Tudor Treatises, ed. Dickens, A. G., Yorkshire Archaeological Society 125 (Leeds: Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 1959), 125 Google Scholar.

100 Eeles, F. C. and Brown, J. E., eds., The Edwardian Inventories for Bedfordshire, Alcuin Club Collections 6 (London: Longmans, Green, 1905), 24, 28Google Scholar.

101 Kennedy, Elizabethan Episcopal Administration, 3:218. See also Dymond and Paine, Spoil of Melford Church, 32.

102 Fuller, Church-history of Britain, 417, 419.

103 Fowler, J. T., ed., Rites of Durham. Being a Description or Brief Declaration of all the Ancient Monuments, Rites, and Customs Belonging or being within the Monastical Church of Durham before the Suppression, Surtees Society 107 (Durham: Andrews and Co., 1903), 60–61, 26–27 Google Scholar.

104 Dymond and Paine, Spoil of Long Melford Church, 39; and Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 490.

105 Tarlow, “Reformation and Transformation,” 118.

106 Peacock, English Church Furniture, 30.

107 This probably explains the survival of some of the items described in Browne, Davies, and Michael, English Medieval Embroidery, see 181, 249–251, 263.

108 Peacock, English Church Furniture, 121. For another example of an altar stone “laid for a grave stonne,” see 112.

109 The phrase is more widely employed in relation to the poor. It was first coined by Hufton, Olwen in The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France 1750–1789 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974)Google Scholar and has become a powerful paradigm for scholars in this field. See, for example, King, Stephen and Tomkins, Alannah, eds., The Poor in England 1700–1850: An Economy of Makeshifts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

110 As noted by Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 483. Forthcoming work by Lucy Kaufman also tackles this theme.

111 Walters, H. B., “Inventories of Norfolk Church Goods (1552),” Norfolk Archaeology 27 (1941): 410–411, 405Google Scholar respectively.

112 A revealing example is the diaper tablecloth Anne Heckford bequeathed to be cut into two to make covers for the communion tables at Saint Botolph and Holy Trinity, Colchester: Emmison, F. G., ed., Essex Wills: The Bishop of London's Commissary Court 1587–1599, (Chelmsford: Essex Record Office, 1998), 130 Google Scholar.

113 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, chap. 14; and Duffy, “The End of it All,” esp. 116–118.

114 Shagan, Popular Politics, 287, 309.

115 See Duffy, Eamon, Reformation Divided: Catholics, Protestants and the Conversion of England (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 186–187 Google Scholar. For other helpful discussions, see Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, chap. 7; Sherlock, Peter, Monuments and Memory in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), chap. 8Google Scholar; and Sherlock, , “The Reformation of Memory in Early Modern Europe,” in Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, ed. Radstone, Susannah and Schwarz, Bill (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 30–40 Google Scholar.

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117 Fowler, Rites of Durham, 61–62.

118 “The Recusancy Papers of the Meynell Family of North Kilvington, North Riding of Yorkshire, 1596–1676,” ed. Aveling, J. C. H., in Miscellanea, ed. Reynolds, E. E., Catholic Record Society 56 (London: Catholic Record Society, 1956), 40–41 Google Scholar.

119 Additional MS 3041, fol. 323v, Cambridge University Library, Cambridge, printed in Nicholas Roscarrock's Lives of the Saints: Cornwall and Devon, ed. Orme, Nicholas, Devon, and Cornwall Record Society, n.s., 35 (Exeter: Devon and Cornwall Record Society, 1992), 78–79 Google Scholar.

120 Cited in Doggett, Patterns of Re-use, 56. See also Hope, W. H. St. John, “The Making of Place House at Titchfield, near Southampton in 1538,” Archaeological Journal 63 (1906): 235 Google Scholar. I am grateful to Euan Cameron for pointing out the irony that the source of this quotation was a satirical pasquil attributed to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.

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130 See Wood, Andy, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), chap. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lyon, “The Afterlives of the Dissolution.”

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133 Duffy, “End of it All,” 121.

134 Roger Martyn's account is reproduced in Sir Parker, William, The History of Long Melford (London, 1873), 70–74 Google Scholar; and Fowler, Rites of Durham. See Jones, Memory and Material Culture, 39.

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