Chapter 3 focuses on space and the visual dimensions of the memory of the dissolution. Concentrating on the period between the late sixteenth century and the late seventeenth century, it examines the work of a number of antiquaries who produced topographies and images of former monastic sites. Taking previous scholarship on the ‘nostalgic’ element in antiquarian topographies of the dissolution as its main point of departure, this chapter addresses the role of monastic ruins together with those sites that were converted to new uses, both spiritual and secular, in shaping changing perspectives on the suppression. It argues that we should pay more attention to converted spaces – whether parish churches or private homes – which could function to reinforce the project to forget the dissolution across the generations. To support this argument, this chapter also features a substantial discussion of the visual afterlives of the dissolution. It illuminates what recent scholarship has described as a seventeenth-century visual culture of ‘pastness’, but also hypothesises the emergence of a parallel and equally powerful visual culture of the present. Ultimately, it suggests that topographical writing and images were genres in which senses of loss could converge with gain, past with present, and remembering with forgetting.

This chapter turns to the memory of the dissolution in the communities that had been built around monasteries and in the families who occupied them. In order to access the local and oral dimensions of this memory culture, it uses antiquarian writing to throw a sidelight onto the traditions and stories that antiquaries encountered as they traversed the country. This chapter suggests that the key concept to unlocking this memory culture is sacrilege. Stories of ghostly hauntings and strange happenings preoccupied local people living in or near former monastic places. It has sometimes been suggested that English Protestantism was hostile to oral and local cultures, but this chapter argues that, far from being the harbinger of their decline, the Reformation in fact generated and invigorated local traditions. By exploring sacrilege narratives connected to the dissolution, this chapter also makes a case for the vibrancy and longevity of local memory cultures across the seventeenth century and into the early eighteenth century and beyond. In doing so, it seeks to erode and collapse the distinctions between ‘popular’ and ‘learned’, ‘local’ and ‘national’ cultures of history and memory that continue to influence scholarship on early modern historical consciousness