Chapter 2 probes the temporal dimensions of the memory of the dissolution, which it traces across the period c. 1540–c. 1640 and in the context of the transition from personal to inherited memory. It explores the place of the suppression in both Protestant and Catholic historiography, and its role in what recent scholarship has identified as the reformation of English history. It uses evidence gleaned principally from chronologically organised sources such as histories and chronicles, including those by John Foxe, John Stow, Peter Heylyn, Nicholas Sander, and Gilbert Burnet, as well as lesser known authors. It examines how – far from the insignificant episode described in many modern studies – the dissolution was seen by many commentators as a critical, if not the critical, episode in the Protestant Reformation. It also interrogates the emerging tendency exhibited by Catholic and Protestant authors alike to judge Henry VIII’s reputation by the dissolution. In the context of English Protestantism, it is particularly striking that this tendency developed as perspectives on Henry’s reign became increasingly anxious and critical. At the heart of this chapter are questions of how and when the suppression came to be considered a rupture with the medieval past and a critical Reformation event.

Chapter 1 examines the process of suppression in the 1530s, using memory as a tool for rethinking our approach to this episode. With sensitivity to the language employed by the Henrician government, it characterises the dissolution as a long and uncertain process that can be separated into two main phases: the ‘reformation of the monasteries’ and the ‘surrender of the monasteries’. It pays particular attention to the emergence of narratives of monastic corruption and the expediency of suppression because, it argues, these are the themes that modern scholarship has inherited from its largely Henrician source base. It is the success and longevity of this triumphalist narrative that the remainder of the book sets out to test, complicate, and unravel. This chapter also notes the emergence of early critiques of the dissolution – Catholic, conservative, and evangelical – which are traced alongside the narratives propagated and perpetuated by Tudor governments with a view to highlighting the complexity and diversity of the early modern memory of the dissolution. Crucially, the chapter highlights the prevalence and persistence of the idea that the monasteries were irredeemably corrupt across different confessional perspectives, as well as across time and space.

This chapter examines how the suppression of religious houses undertaken by Henry VIII’s government between 1536 and 1540 was transformed into the event that has come to be known as the ‘Dissolution of the Monasteries’. It begins by considering this transformation through the lens of an eye-witness chronicle, compiled by Charles Wriothesley in the 1530s and 1540s. The second part of the chapter then turns to explore how the protracted and uneven process witnessed by Wriothesley acquired the qualities of temporal specificity and cultural significance that are the hallmarks of historical events. It traces evolving perspectives across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with a view to highlighting that the ‘Dissolution of the Monasteries’ was an invention of posterity: it emerged only in hindsight and largely in critical perspective. The final part of the chapter asks how early modern processes of naming, commemorating and selectively forgetting the dissolution have shaped modern historical scholarship. In seeking to expose the ‘Dissolution of the Monasteries’ as a seventeenth-century construct, this chapter also exposes modern historians’ reliance on a vocabulary and temporal framework that were themselves products of the dissolution and the wider English Reformation.

With a focus on Edmund Spenser, this chapter explores representations of ruined monasteries within (New) English protestant writing of c.1590-1642. Monastic ruins are visible mnemonics of British-Irish reformation, and Protestants express surprisingly broad motivations for their remembrance, from sorrow for, to celebration of, monastic dissolution – a breadth of opinion reflecting the breadth of beliefs and practices within the Elizabethan/early Stuart church. Recognition of this confessional latitude is leading to reappraisal of Spenser’s own ‘puritan’ credentials, and to realisation that Spenser was as anti-Presbyterian as he was anti-Catholic. The chapter is the first to translate Spenser’s Presbyterian anxieties to a Scottish context, arguing that Spenser’s famously fractious relationship with James VI was prompted as much by Spenser’s anxieties over James’s seeming support for Scottish Presbyterians as by Spenser’s attack on James’s Catholic mother. The chapter shows how, in Faerie Queene VI, Spenser evokes memories of monastic ruins to warn his generation against the prospect of further, Presbyterian-led ruination in England and Ireland under a future Scottish king. This perspective on monastic ruins – as memories of past, and monitories against future, reformation – serves as a salutary reminder that ‘reformation’ was a protracted and by no means universally popular process for Spenser’s generation.