Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 November 2012
This article is a revised and expanded version of my inaugural lecture as Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, delivered on 20 Oct. 2011. It explores how the religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reshaped perceptions of the past, stimulated shifts in historical method, and transformed the culture of memory, before turning to the interrelated question of when and why contemporaries began to remember the English Reformation as a decisive juncture and critical turning point in history. Investigating the interaction between personal recollection and social memory, it traces the manner in which remembrance of the events of the 1530s, 1540s, and 1550s evolved and splintered between 1530 and 1700. A further theme is the role of religious and intellectual developments in the early modern period in forging prevailing models of historical periodization and teleological paradigms of interpretation.
I am grateful to those who attended the lecture, and to Julian Hoppit and Judith Pollmann, for helpful comments. This is dedicated to the memory of Patrick Collinson, who died on 28 Sept. 2011.
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26 Edward Cardwell, ed., Documentary annals of the Reformed Church of England (2 vols., Oxford, 1844), i, pp. 6–7, 17, 212, 221.
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98 See Walsham, Alexandra, Providence in early modern England (Oxford, 1999), ch. 6, esp. pp. 299–304Google Scholar.
99 Carleton, George, A thankfull remembrance of Gods mercy. In an historicall collection of the great and mercifull deliverances of the church and state of England, since the Gospell began here to flourish, from the beginning of Queene Elizabeth (London, 1624), p. 147Google Scholar.
100 Lever, Christopher, The historie of the defenders of the Catholique faith. Wheareunto are added observations divine, politique, morrall (London, 1627)Google Scholar, quotations at pp. 35, 61, 254–5.
101 See, among others, Sharpe, Kevin, Criticism and compliment: the politics of literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar.
102 Cressy, David, Bonfires and bells: national memory and the Protestant calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (London, 1989)Google Scholar. See also Alexandra Walsham, ‘“A very Deborah”? The myth of Elizabeth I as a providential monarch’, in Doran and Freeman, eds., Myth of Elizabeth I, pp. 143–68. On the ambiguous legacies of Henry VIII, see Rankin, Mark, Highley, Christopher, and King, John N., eds., Henry VIII and his afterlives: literature, politics and art (Cambridge, 2009)Google Scholar.
103 Michael Sparke, Thankfull remembrances of Gods wonderfull deliverances of this land, bound with Crumms of comfort (London, 1627 edn).
104 British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings (BMDP&D), Satires 11.
105 Damian Nussbaum, ‘Appropriating martyrdom: fears of renewed persecution and the 1632 edition of Acts and Monuments’, in David Loades, ed., John Foxe and the English Reformation (Aldershot, 1997), pp. 178–91.
106 See, e.g., A collection of sundry petitions presented to the kings most excellent majestie (London, 1642), p. 4; Judith Maltby, ed., ‘Petitions for episcopacy and the Book of Common Prayer on the eve of the Civil War, 1641–1642’, in Stephen Taylor, ed., From Cranmer to Davidson: a Church of England miscellany, Church of England Record Society 7 (1999), pp. 119, 158, 162.
107 2 Esdras xxiv: 25. Hugh Latimer reputedly comforted Nicholas Ridley with the same words as he was about to be burnt at the stake in 1555: ‘We shall this day light such a candle by God's grace in England, as I trust shall never be put out’ (Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583 edn), p. 1770). See BMDP&D, British xviic Mounted Roy. For a brief discussion, see O'Connell, Sheila, The popular print in England, 1550–1850 (London, 1999), pp. 129–31Google Scholar. For German and Dutch variations, see Hoffmann, Werner, Luther und die folgen für die kunst (Munich, 1984), pp. 157, 320Google Scholar; Wolfgang Harms and Michael Schilling, Deutsche illustrierte flugblätter des 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (4 vols., Tubingen and Munich), ii, p. 123 (c. 1620–56, ‘after the version from London’).
108 See, e.g., the frontispiece to The plots of Jesuites (London, 1653), BMDP&D, Satires 785.
109 Now in the Society of Antiquaries of London.
110 J. S., Ecclesiastical history epitomized (London, 1682), frontispiece to Part ii. Copies of this in print collections include National Portrait Gallery D23051. BMDP&D Satires, British Supplementary 1720 Unmounted Roy does not include the title.
111 This print is now known only from a photograph in the Warburg Library.
112 A true account of the rise and growth of the Reformation, or the progress of the Protestant religion (London, 1680).
113 The fireback is now in the Sussex Archaeological Society collections held in Anne of Cleves House, Lewes. There is a possibility that it is a copy commissioned for Brighton Museum by the Piltdown forger Charles Dawson. A fireback corresponding to this object is recorded at Brick House, Burwash in 1871. I owe my knowledge of this to Professor Mark Greengrass.
114 BMDP&D, registration number 1891, 0224.3.
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117 See Milton, Catholic and reformed, ch. 6.
118 Heylyn, Peter, Ecclesia restaurata, or, the history of the Reformation of the Church of England (London, 1661)Google Scholar, sig. a2v, pp. 172, 139, 167. Heylyn's distinctive historical outlook also emerges in his response to Thomas Fuller's Church history of Britain (London, 1655) entitled Examen historicum (London, 1659). Aerius redivivus: or, the history of the presbyterians (London, 1670).
119 See Milton, Anthony, ‘Licensing, censorship and religious orthodoxy in early Stuart England’, Historical Journal, 41 (1998), pp. 625–51, at p. 647CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See idem, Laudian and royalist polemic in seventeenth-century England: the career and writings of Peter Heylyn (Manchester and New York, NY, 2007), see esp. pp. 83–7, 197–213.
120 Quantin, Jean-Louis, The Church of England and Christian antiquity: the construction of a confessional identity in the seventeenth century (Oxford, 2009)Google Scholar.
121 See MacCulloch, Diarmaid, ‘The myth of the English Reformation’, Journal of British Studies, 30 (1991), pp. 1–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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123 See Woolf, Social circulation of the past, ch. 10; Walsham, Reformation of the landscape, ch. 7.
124 Geoffrey Cubitt, History and memory (Manchester, 2007), p. 39.
125 Herbert Butterfield, The whig interpretation of history (Harmondsworth, 1973 edn), p. 29.
126 ‘Focal point: post-confessional Reformation history’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte/Archive for Reformation History, 97 (2006), pp. 277–306.
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128 Sharpe, Kevin, ‘The foundation of the chairs of history at Oxford and Cambridge: an episode in Jacobean Politics’, History of Universities, 2 (1982), pp. 127–52Google Scholar, repr. in his Politics and ideas in early Stuart England: essays and studies (London and New York, NY, 1989), p. 220. See also Wheare, Degory, The method and order of reading both civil and ecclesiastical histories (London, 1694)Google Scholar.
129 Butterfield, Herbert, The study of modern history: an inaugural lecture delivered at Cambridge on 14 November 1944 (London, 1944), p. 34Google Scholar.