Memory in Early Modern England - Faculty of History
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Part II Special Subject C
Memory in Early Modern England
Prof. Alex Walsham
(amw23@cam.ac.uk)
Overview
Without memory, we could not write History. But memory itself has a history. This Special
Subject investigates one segment of that history in the context of sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century England. By contrast with medievalists and modernists, early modernists have been
slow to investigate how the arts of remembering and forgetting were implicated in and
affected by the profound religious, political, intellectual, cultural, and social upheavals of the
period. However, there is now a growing surge of exciting and stimulating research on this
topic. Its relevance and centrality to key historiographical debates and its capacity to shed
fresh light on classic questions regarding one of the most tumultuous eras in English history
are increasingly being recognised. Set against the backdrop of the profound ruptures of the
Reformation, Civil Wars, and the constitutional revolution of 1688, this Paper seeks to
explore how individuals and communities understood and practised memory alongside the
ways in which it was exploited and harnessed, divided and fractured, by the unsettling
developments through which contemporaries lived and in which they actively participated. It
assesses the role played by amnesia and oblivion, nostalgia and commemoration, in
facilitating change and in negotiating the legacies it left. Students will be exposed to a wide
range of primary sources – from chronicles, diaries, histories, memoirs and compilations of
folklore to legal depositions, pictures, maps, buildings, funeral monuments and material
objects – that afford insight into the culture and transmutations of early modern memory.Sessions in the Michaelmas Term will explore contemporary perceptions and practices of memory. They will illuminate the ways in which traditional modes of remembering were reshaped by the Renaissance revival of mnemonic techniques, the rise of literacy and the advent of print and explore the continuing role of ritual, performance, gesture and speech in transmitting inherited knowledge down the generations. They will consider the sites and locations in remembering and forgetting took place – landscapes, churches, homes, studies, libraries, archives – together with the role that material culture, including fixed memorials and portable heirlooms, played in conveying the memory of people and events. Attention will also be given to the new textual forms that emerged to document the self, local societies, and the nation at large. The aim will be to sketch the features and contours of what has been called ‘the social circulation of the past’. In the Lent Term the emphasis shifts to the dramatic and transformative events that framed the period. Sessions will investigate the ways in which the Reformation challenged fundamental assumptions about what it meant to remember, particularly in relation to the dead. The concerted campaign to recast and erase the Catholic past which the Protestant project entailed will also be assessed, with a particular spotlight falling upon iconoclasm, which one scholar has described as ‘a sacrament of forgetfulness’. Alongside this, we shall trace the new memory cultures that the Reformation engendered: legends of heroic martyrs and patriotic myths of providential intervention to save England from popish malice and tyranny. Finally, attention will turn to the impact of the mid seventeenth-century Civil Wars and Revolution and to their contested and varied afterlives in subsequent decades. Sessions will be devoted to the interplay of official and seditious memories, to attempts to extinguish the memory of the unprecedented act of the regicide, and to the mental and emotional scars that the wars left on those who were the victims and perpetrators of violence. At a higher level, the Paper also invites students to engage with theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives on memory. It aims to provoke critical reflection on how the master narratives and dominant paradigms that shape our understanding of the period came into being and the lingering imprint they have left in scholarly and popular thinking. It is hoped that it will also provide students with deeper insight into the methodological challenges of writing History itself and its complex relationship with human memory. Teaching Arrangements The paper will be taught in 16 two hour seminar style classes in the Michaelmas and Lent Terms (32 hours), with 4 two hour revision classes (8 hours) in Easter Term. There will be two one hour practice gobbets sessions, one in Michaelmas and one in Lent and a one hour class discussing strategies for researching and writing the Long Essay in Lent. The total contact time will be 43 hours of teaching. Individual classes will be held in the Fitzwilliam Museum and University Library, if possible. In addition one or more field trips to churches, museums and historic buildings and places may be organised. The total number of pages of documents for study is approximately 1200. All the set primary sources are available via the Moodle site for this paper.
Assessment
The Special Subject is assessed by two papers:
(1) By a Long Essay of 6000-7000 words selected from a list of ten questions which will be
issued to candidates in week 4 of Lent Term. This essay is unsupervised. Two copies of the
essay are due by noon on the third Thursday of the Easter Term.
(2) By an unseen examination in the Easter Term. This will consist of four questions. The
first two questions (Questions 1 and 2) will require the candidate to comment on three
gobbets (extracts from the set primary sources) from a selection of five. Candidates will then
choose to write one essay from Questions 3 and 4. This essay will ask them to engage with
one or more genres of source material and/or to compare the utility of different types of
sources.
Schedule of classes:
Michaelmas Term: Cultures of Memory
Introduction: Early Modern Memory
The Renaissance Arts of Memory
History and Antiquarianism
Sites of Memory: Space, Place and Landscape
Mnemonics and Relics: The Material Culture of Memory
Tradition: Custom, Ritual, Legend and Folklore
Record-keeping: Communities of Memory
Life-writing: Biography and Autobiography
There also will be a one hour practice Gobbets class.
Lent Term: Ruptures of Memory
Remembering the Dead: from Intercession to Commemoration?
Erasing the Past: Iconoclasm
The Memory of the Martyrs
Protestant Memory and Myth-making
Nostalgia and Anger: Conservative and Catholic Memory
Forgetting: Acts of Amnesia and Oblivion
The Afterlife of the Civil Wars: Official and Seditious MemoriesTraumatic Memory: Victims and Violence
In addition, there will be a one hour gobbets class and a one hour class dedicated to
discussion of the Long Essay.
Easter Term: Revision
Revision (gobbets and exam essay question)
Revision (gobbets and exam essay question)
Revision (gobbets and exam essay question)
Revision (gobbets and exam essay question)Michaelmas Term: Cultures of Memory
(1) Introduction: Early Modern Memory
Key Questions:
• What is the history of memory in early modern England and Europe?
• How have historians and other scholars approached the study of memory in the past?
• What developments shaped, affected and ruptured contemporary cultures of memory?
Recommended Reading:
• Geoffrey Cubitt, History and Memory (2007) [online access]
or
• Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture, trans. Sara B. Young (2011) [online access]
These are overviews of the field of Memory Studies in general and will provide
an introduction to some of the theoretical literature on this topic.
• Judith Pollmann, Memory in Early Modern Europe (2017), esp. introduction
[accessible as an ebook]
• Bruce Gordon, ‘History and Memory’, in Ulinka Rublack (ed.), The Oxford
Handbook of Protestant Reformations (2016) [available via Oxford Scholarship
Online]
• Erika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann et al (eds), Memory before Modernity: Practices of
Memory in Early Modern Europe (2013), introduction [Open Access publication]
• Peter Sherlock, ‘The Reformation of Memory in Early Modern Europe’, in Susannah
Radstone and Bill Schwarz (eds), Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates (2010)
[online access]
• Alexandra Walsham, ‘History, Memory and the English Reformation,’ The Historical
Journal 55 (2012), pp. 899–938 [online].
Further reading:
• Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media,
Archives (Cambridge, 2011) [online]
• Jan Assmann, ‘Communicative and Cultural Memory’, in Astrid Erll and Ansgar
Nünning (eds), Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary
Handbook (Berlin and New York, 2008), 109-118. [online]
• Jan Assmann, ‘Memory and Culture’, in Dmitri Nikulin (ed.), Memory: A History
(2015), pp. 325-49. [online]
• Jan Assmann, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, New German Critique, 65
(1995), 125-33. [online]
• Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance and
Political Imagination (Cambridge, 2011) [online]
• Stefan Berger and Jeffrey Olick (eds), A Cultural History of Memory, vol. 3 (Early
Modern Age) (due to be published November, 2020)
• Jens Brockmeier, Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative and the Autobiographical
Process (2015)
• Peter Burke, ‘History as Social Memory’, in Thomas Butler (ed.), Memory: History,
Culture and the Mind (1989), pp. 97-113.• Kate Chedgzoy et al (eds), Special issue on Memory in Early Modern Studies,
Memory Studies, 11 (2018) [online]
• Alan Confino, ‘History and Memory’, in Axel Schneider and Daniel Woolf (eds), The
Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol. 5 Historical Writing Since 1945 (2011), pp.
36-51. [online]
• Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (1989) [online]
• Susan Crane, ‘(Not) Writing History: Rethinking the Intersections of Personal History
and Collective Memory’, History and Memory, 8 (1996), pp. 5-29. [online]
• Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nunning (eds), A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies
(2010). [online]
• James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (1992) [online]
• Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis Coser (1992)
• Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of
Collective Memory Studies’, History and Theory, 41 (2002), pp. 179-97. [online]
• K. L. Klein, ‘On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse’, Representations,
69 (2000), 127-50. [online]
• Erika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann et al (eds), Memory before Modernity: Practices of
Memory in Early Modern Europe (2013) [online]
• Barbara A. Misztal, Theories of Social Remembering (Maidenhead, 2003) [online]
• Merback Mitchell, ‘Forum: Memory before Modernity: Cultural Practices in Early
Modern Germany’, German History, 33 (2015), 100-122. [online]
• Matthew Neufeld (ed.), Special Issue on memory in early modern England,
Huntington Library Quarterly, 76: 4 (2013), esp. his introduction, and Daniel Woolf,
‘Shadows of the Past in Early Modern England’. [online]
• Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations,
26 (1989), pp. 7-24. [online]
• Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (ed.), Memory, Histories, Theories, Debates
(2010) [online]
• Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. K. Blamey and D. Pellauer (2004)
[online]
• Paul Ricoeur, ‘Memory-Forgetting-History’, Jorn Rüsen (ed.), Meaning and
Representation in History (2006), pp. 9-19.
• E. Tulving and F. I. M. Craik (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Memory (2005)
• Jasper Van der Steen, Memory Wars in the Low Countries, 1566-1700 (2015) [online]
• Brady Wagoner (ed.), Handbook of Memory and Culture (2018)
• Alexandra Walsham, ‘History, Memory and the English Reformation,’ The Historical
Journal 55 (2012), pp.899–938. [online]
• Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500-
1730 (2003)
• Eviatar Zerubavel, The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life
(2006) [online](2) The Renaissance Arts of Memory
Key Questions:
• How did contemporaries conceptualise memory in early modern England?
• What was the Renaissance art of memory?
• What techniques were used to recollect information and knowledge?
Primary Sources: [55 pages]
• John Willis, Mnemonica; or, the art of memory, drained out of the pure fountains of
art & nature (London, 1661; first publ. in Latin 1618; first trans. 1621), 134-45, and
the extracts in Engel et al (eds), Memory Arts, pp. 73-84 [23 pages]
• Richard Saunders, ‘The Art of Memory’, in Saunders physiognomie, and chiromancie
… whereunto is added the art of memory (1671), pp. 371-77. [6 pages] [see also
Engel et al (eds), Memory Arts, pp. 88-94]
• William Engel, Rory Loughnane and Grant Williams (eds), The Memory Arts in
Renaissance England: A Critical Anthology (2016), pp. 51-64, 69-73, 179-81
(Extracts from William Fulwood, The Castle of Memory (1562); William Basse, A
help to memory and discourse (1620); Robert Hooke, ‘An Hypothetical Explication of
Memory’ (1682)). [20 pages]
• Entries on memory in two 17th century commonplace books in the CUL:
• https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/reformation/artifacts/the-treasurehouse-of-the-mind-
memory-in-commonplace-books/ [2 pages]
• Entry on memory in commonplace book, c. 1690, in Earle Havens, Commonplace
Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth
Century (2001), p. 70. [1 page]
Recommended secondary reading:
• Richard Yeo, ‘Notebooks as Memory Aids: Precepts and Practices in Early Modern
England’, Memory Studies, 1 (2008), pp. 115-36. [online]
Secondary reading:
• Peter Beal, ‘Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book’, in
W. Speed Hill (ed.), New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance
English Text Society, 1985-1991 (Binghamton, 1993).
• F. S. Belleza, ‘Mnemonic Devices and Memory Schemas’, in M. A. McDaniel and M.
Pressley (eds), Imagery and Related Mnemonic Processes (1987), pp. 34-55.
• Ann Blair, Too Much Too Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern
Age (Cambridge, MA, 2010) [online]
• Ann Blair and Richard Yeo (eds), ‘Note-Taking in Early Modern Europe’, Special
Issue of Intellectual History Review, 20, no. 3 (2010) [online]
• Lina Bolzoni, The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographical Models in the
Age of the Printing Press (2001)
• Victoria Burke, ‘Memorial Books: Commonplaces, Gender and Manuscript
Compilation in Seventeenth-Century England’, in D. Beecher and Grant Williams
(eds), Ars Reminiscendi: Mind and Memory in Renaissance Culture (2009), pp. 121-
38.
• Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture
(1992) [online]• Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of
Images, 400-1200 (1998), ch. 1-2 [ch. 1 scanned]
• Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski (eds), The Medieval Craft of Memory: An
Anthology of Texts and Pictures (2004)
• Mary Carruthers, ‘Ars oblivionis, ars invenienda: The Cherub Figure and the Arts of
Memory’, Gesta, 48 (2009), 1-19.
• Mary Carruthers, ‘How to Make a Composition: Memory-Craft in Antiquity and the
Middle Ages’, in Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (ed.), Memory, Histories,
Theories, Debates (2010), pp. 15-29. [online]
• Mary Carruthers, ‘Mechanisms for the Transmission of Culture: The Role of Place in
the Arts of Memory’, in Laura Hollengreen (ed.), Translatio, the Transmission of
Culture in the Middle Ages (2008), pp. 1-26.
• Stephen Clucas, ‘Memory in the Renaissance and Early Modern Period’, in Dmitri
Nikulin (ed.), Memory: A History (2015), pp. 131-75. [online]
• Janet Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the
Past (1992) [online]
• Andrew Gordon and Thomas Rist (eds), The Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern
England: Memorial Cultures of the Post Reformation (2013) [e-book on order]
• Earle Havens, Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books
from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (New Haven, 2001).
• Earle Havens, ‘Of Common Places, or Memorial Books: An Anonymous Manuscript
on Commonplace Books and the Art of Memory in Seventeenth-Century England’,
Yale University Library Gazette, 76 (2002), 136-53. [online]
• Andrew Hiscock, Reading Memory in Early Modern Literature (2011) [online]
• Rhodri Lewis, ‘The Best Mnemonical Expedient: John Beale’s Art of Memory and its
Uses’, Seventeenth Century, 20 (2005), pp. 113-44. [online]
• Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought
(Oxford, 1996). [online]
• Walter J. Ong, Rhetoric, Romance and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of
Expression and Culture (1971), chs 4, 6. [online]
• Richard J. Ross, ‘The Memorial Culture of Early Modern English Lawyers: Memory
as Keyword, Shelter and Identity, 1560-1640’, Yale Journal of Law and the
Humanities, 10 (1998), pp. 229-326. [online]
• Paolo Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language,
trans. S. Clucas (2000)
• Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (1984)
• William West, ‘No Endless Moniment: Artificial Memory and Memorial Artifact in
Early Modern England’, in S. Radstone and K. Hodgkin (eds), Memory cultures:
memory, subjectivity, and recognition (2006), 61-75. [legal deposit]
• Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past (2005), ch. 8
• Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (1966) [online]
• Richard Yeo, ‘John Locke’s “New Method” of Commonplacing: Managing Memory
and Information’, Eighteenth-Century Thought, 2 (2004). [online](3) History and Antiquarianism
Key Questions:
• What distinguished the writing of history and the practice of antiquarianism in early
modern England?
• Was there an historiographical revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?
• Why did an interest in recovering textual, physical and material traces of the past
develop in this period?
Primary Sources: [64 pages]
• Francis Bacon, Of the Advancement and Proficiencie of Learning (1640 edn; STC
1167), pp. 79-105 (EEBO images 96-109). [26 pages]
• John Hall, ‘A Method of History’ (1645), printed in Joad Raymond, ‘John Hall’s A
Method of History: A Book Lost and Found’, English Literary Renaissance, 28
(1998), pp. 267-98, with Hall’s text pp. 286-98). [12 pages]
• John Earle, Micro-cosmographie. Or, A peece of the world discouered in essayes and
characters (1628; STC 7440.2), sigs C1v-3v (EEBO images 22-24) [3 pages]
• William Dugdale, The antiquities of Warwickshire illustrated (1656; Wing D2479),
sig. a3r-v (dedication to the gentry of Warwickshire); sigs b1r-b4r (preface); pp. 687-
93 (Solihull); pp. 797-804 (Polesworth). [23 pages]
Recommended Secondary Reading:
• D. R. Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500-
1730 (2003), ch. 5. [scanned]
Secondary reading:
• Jan Broadway, No Historie so Meete: Gentry Culture and the Development of Local
History in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (2006) [online]
• Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (1969).
• Patrick Collinson, 'Elizabeth I and the verdicts of history', Historical Research, 76 (2003)
[online]
• Patrick Collinson, 'Truth, lies, & fiction in sixteenth-century Protestant historiography', in
P. Kelly & D. Harris Sacks (ed.), Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain (1997)
• Patrick Collinson, 'History', in M. Hattaway (ed.), A New Companion to English
Renaissance Literature and Culture (2010) [online]
• Patrick Collinson, 'One of us?: William Camden and the making of history', Transactions
of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 8 (1998) [online]
• S. Dixon, ‘The Sense of the Past in Reformation Germany’, German History (2012)
[online]
• Christopher Dyer and Catherine Richardson (eds), William Dugdale, Historian, 1605-1686:
His Life, His Writings, and his County (2009)
• A. B. Ferguson, Clio Unbound: Perceptions of the Social and Cultural Past in Renaissance
England (1979)
• Tony Grafton, What was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (2007)
[online]
• Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (1992)
• Kelsey Jackson Williams, The Antiquary: John Aubrey's Historical Scholarship
(2016) [online]• Kelsey Jackson Williams, ‘Antiquarianism: A Reinterpretation’, Erudition and the
Republic of Letters, 2 (2017), 56-96. [online]
• D. R. Kelley, ‘The Theory of History’, in Quentin Skinner and Eckhard Kessler (eds), The
Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (1988), pp. 746-61. [online]
• Donald R. Kelley, Faces of history: historical inquiry from Herodotus to Herder (1998)
• Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks (eds), The Historical Imagination in Early
Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric and Fiction, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1997)
• D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (1950), ch. 8
• Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modern England (2005); also in
Huntington Library Quarterly, 68 (2005), including [online]
• Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic
World 1600-1800 (Cambridge, 1999), ch. 5 [online]
• Joseph M. Levine, Humanism and History: Origins of Modern English Historiography
(1987) [online]
• F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (1967)
• May McKisack, Medieval History in the Tudor Age (1971), ch. 6.
• S. A. E. Mendyk, Speculum Britanniae: Regional Study, Antiquarianism and Science in
Britain to 1700 (1989) [online]
• Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century
(1995) [online]
• Stuart Piggott, ‘Antiquarian Thought in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Levi
Fox (ed.), English Historical Scholarship in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
(1956), pp. 93-114.
• F. Smith Fussner, The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and Thought
1580-1640 (1962) [online]
• Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain
(2004)
• Katherine van Liere, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan (eds), Sacred History: Uses
of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World (2012). [online]
• Angus Vine, In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England
(2010) [online]
• Alexandra Walsham, ‘Like Fragments of a Shipwreck: Printed Images and Religious
Antiquarianism in Early Modern England’, in Michael Hunter (ed.), Printed Images in
Early Modern Britain (2010). [legal deposit]
• David Womersley, ‘Against the teleology of technique’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 68
(2005), pp. 95-108; and in Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modern
England (2005) [online]
• D. R. Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500-1730
(2003), ch. 5-7 [ch. 5 scanned]
• D. R. Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (2000)
• D. R. Woolf, ‘The Dawn of the Artifact: The Antiquarian Impulse in England, 1500-1730’,
in Leslie J. Workman (ed.), Medievalism in England (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 5-35.
• D. R. Woolf, ‘From Hystories to the Historical: Five Transitions in Thinking about the Past,
1500-1700’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 68 (2005), pp. 33-70. [online]
• D. R. Woolf, ‘Memory and Historical Culture in Early Modern England’, Journal of the
Canadian Historical Association, 2 (1991), pp. 283-308. [online]
• D. R. Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England: Erudition, Ideology and ‘The
Light of Truth’ from the Accession of James I to the Civil War (1990)(4) Sites of Memory: Space, Place and Landscape
Key Questions:
• To what extent was memory of the past tied to particular spaces and places?
• What developments tested and threatened the status of the landscape as a theatre of
memory?
• How were chronology and topography linked?
Primary Sources: [68 pages]
• William Lambarde, A Perambulation of Kent (1596 edition), dedications, pp. 290-314
(Canterbury) [25 pages] [you may find the 1610 edition on EEBO easier to read,
pp. 313-40]
• William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum: or, The history of the ancient abbies, and
other monasteries, hospitals, cathedral and collegiate churches, in England and
Wales (1693; Wing D2487), dedication to William Bromley and preface ‘To the
Reader’. [6 pages]. Plus selected images from the Latin edition: Monasticon
Anglicanum, sive, Pandectae coenobiorum Benedictinorum, Cluniacensium,
Cisterciensium, Carthusianorum a primordiis ad eorum usque dissolutionem (1661;
Wing D2485), prospect of Glastonbury, Malmesbury Abbey, Gisburn Abbey, Osney
Abbey [4 pages]
• Stonhing ([London], 1575): Society of Antiquaries, Lemon broadside no. 67 [1 page]
• William Camden, Britain (1610), pp. 251-4. [4 pages]
• Inigo Jones, The most notable antiquity of Great Britain, vulgarly called Stone-heng
an Salisbury Plain, ed. John Webb (1655), pp. 65-81, 106-9 [18 pages]
• William Stukeley, Itinerarium curiosum. Or an account of the antiquitys and
remarkable curiositys in nature or art (1724), preface, pp. 115-17 (Canterbury), and
plates for Canterbury and Glastonbury Abbey [10 pages]
Recommended Secondary Reading:
• Margaret Aston, ‘English Ruins and English History: The Dissolution and the Sense of the
Past’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 36 (1973) [online], repr. in her
Lollards and Reformers: images and literacy in late medieval religion (1984)
• Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Memory and
Identity in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (2011), pp. 273-311. [online]
Further Reading:
• Barbara Bender, ‘Stonehenge – Contested Landscapes (Medieval to Present Day)’, in
eadem (ed.), Landscape: Politics and Perspectives (1993), pp. 245-79.
• Aubrey Burl, Prehistoric Avebury (1979)
• Christopher Chippindale, Stonehenge Complete: Revised Edition (1994)
• David Boyd Haycock, William Stukeley: Science, religion and archaeology in
eighteenth-century England (2002)
• Rodney Legg (ed.), Stonehenge Antiquaries (1986)
• David Lowenthal, ‘Past Time, Present Place: Landscape and Memory’, Geographical
Review, 65 (1975), pp. 1-36. [online]
• Nicholas Orme, ‘The Commemoration of Places in Medieval England’, in C. Barron
and C. Burgess (eds), Memory and Commemoration in Medieval England (2010)
• Stuart Piggott, William Stukeley: An Eighteenth Century Antiquary (1985)• Stuart Piggott, ‘William Camden and the Britannia’, Proceedings of the British
Academy, 37 (1951), p. 199-217 [online]
• D. A. Postles, Social Geographies in England, 1200-1640 (2007)
• R. L. Sanford, Maps and Memory in Early Modern England: A Sense of Place (2002)
• Zur Shalev, Sacred words and worlds: geography, religion, and scholarship, 1550-
1700 (2012) [online]
• Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (1995)
• Philip Schwyzer, ‘The Scouring of the White Horse: Archaeology, Identity and
“Heritage”’, Representations, 65 (1999) [online]
• Philip Schwyzer, ‘John Leland and his Heirs: The Topography of England’, in M.
Pincombe and C. Shrank (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature (2009) [online]
• Jacqueline Simpson, ‘The Local Legend: A Product of Popular Culture’, Rural
History, 2 (1991), pp. 25-35. [online]
• Jacqueline Simpson, ‘God’s Visible Judgements: The Christian Dimension of
Landscape Legends’, Landscape History, 8 (1986), 53-8.
• William Smyth, Map-making, landscapes and memory: a geography of colonial and
early modern Ireland, c.1530-1750 (2006)
• P. J. Stewart and A. Strathern (eds), Landscape, Memory and History:
Anthropological Perspectives (2003) [online]
• Jennifer Summit, ‘Leland’s Itinerary and the Remains of the Medieval Past’, in G.
McMullan and D. Matthews (eds), Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England
(2007)
• Peter J. Ucko, Michael Hunter, Alan J. Clark, and Andrew Davids (eds), Avebury
Reconsidered: From the 1660s to the 1990s (1991)
• Alexandra Walsham, ‘Richard Carew and English Topography’, in Richard Carew,
The Survey of Cornwall, Facsimile edition, ed. John Chynoweth, Nicholas Orme and
Alexandra Walsham, Devon and Cornwall Record Society, New Series, volume 47,
pp. 17-41.
• Alexandra Walsham, ‘The Holy Thorn of Glastonbury: The Evolution of a Legend in Post-
Reformation England’, Parergon, 21 (2004) [online]
• Alexandra Walsham, ‘Wyclif’s Well: Lollardy, Landscape and Memory in Post-
Reformation England’, in Angela McShane and Garthine Walker (eds), The Extraordinary
and Everyday Life in Early Modern England (2010)
• Alexandra Walsham, ‘Footprints and Faith: Religion and the Landscape in Early Modern
Britain and Ireland’, in Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon (eds), God’s Bounty: The Church
and the Natural World, Studies in Church History (2010), pp. 169-83. [online]
• Alexandra Walsham, ‘Holywell: Contesting Sacred Space in Post-Reformation Wales’, in
Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (eds.), Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge
University Press, 2005), pp. 209-36.
• Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Memory and
Identity in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (2011). [online]
• Alexandra Walsham, ‘Antiquities Cornu-Britannick: Language, Memory and
Landscape in Early Modern Cornwall’, in Robert Armstrong and Tadhg O
hAnnrachain (eds), Christianities in the Celtic World (Palgrave: Basingstoke, 2014),
pp. 71-91.
• Retha M. Warnicke, William Lambarde: Elizabethan antiquary, 1536-1601 (1973)
• Nicola Whyte, ‘The After-life of Barrows: Prehistoric Monuments in the Norfolk
Landscape’, Landscape History, 25 (2003) [online]• Nicola Whyte, Inhabiting the Landscape: Place, Custom and Memory, 1500-1800
(2009) [online]
• Nicola Whyte, ‘The Deviant Dead in the Norfolk Landscape’, Landscapes, 4 (2003)
24-39. [online]
• Nicola Whyte, ‘Norfolk Wayside Crosses: Biographies of Landscape and Place’, in T.
A. Heslop, Elizabeth A. Mellings, and Margit Thøfner (eds), Art, faith and place in
East Anglia : from prehistory to the present (2012), pp. 163-78.
• Nicola Whyte, ‘An Archaeology of Natural Places: Trees in the Early Modern
Landscape’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 76 (Winter 2013), 499-517. [online]
• Andy Wood, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in
Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2013), ch. 4. [online]
• Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500-
1700 (Oxford, 2003), chs. 8-9.(5) Mnemonics and Relics: The Material Culture of Memory
This class will be held in the Fitzwilliam Museum.
Key Questions:
• What kinds of objects served as mnemonics in early modern England?
• How did attitudes towards the material culture of memory change in this period?
• What happened to the category of relics after the Reformation?
Primary Sources: [49 pages]
• The Langdale Rosary, c. 1500; adjusted c. 1600 (Victoria and Albert Museum): [1
page] http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O17851/the-langdale-rosary-rosary-unknown/
• Anthony Babington’s Rosary, 16th century: [1 page]
https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/reformation/artifacts/remembering-with-beads-
anthony-babingtons-rosary/
• Prayer bead, c. 1500-25 (Flemish): British Museum: [1 page]
https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_WB-236
• Reliquary case, English c. 1500: British Museum H_1977-1001-1
https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1977-1001-1
[1 page]
• Silver reliquary, English, 15th century: Victoria and Albert Museum, 731-1891: [1
page]
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O110933/reliquary-unknown/
• Memento mori mourning ring, English, 1600: [1 page]
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O118913/ring-unknown/
• Memento mori mourning ring, English, 1719: [1 page]
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O125791/mourning-ring-unknown/
• Earthenware jug, English, 1666: Victoria and Albert Museum 575-1898 [1 page]
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O332567/jug-unknown/
• Earthenware jug, English, 17th century, British Museum, 1887,0307,D.26:
https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1887-0307-D-26 [1 page]
• [Some f]yne gloues deuised for Newyeres gyftes to teche yonge peop[le to] knowe
good from euyll wherby they maye learne the. x. commaundementes at theyr fyngers
endes ([1559-67], STC 23628.5) [1 page]
• William Hinde, A faithfull remonstrance of the holy life and happy death of John
Bruen (1641), pp. 55-59 (account of Old Robert’s girdle) [5 pages]
• John Tradescant, Musaeum Tradescantianum: or, A Collection of Rarities Preserved
at South-Lambet neer London (London, 1656), pp. 42-55. [14 pages]
• Musæum Thoresbyanum. A catalogue of the genuine and valuable collection of that
well known Antiquarian the late Ralph Thoresby, Gent. F. R. S. (London, [1764]) [20
pages].
Recommended secondary reading:
• Andrew Jones, Memory and Material Culture (2007), ch. 1. [online]
• Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500-
1730 (2003), pp. 191-7.Further reading:
• Caroline Bynum, ‘Are Things “Indifferent”? How Objects Change our Understanding
of Religious History, German History 34, no. 1 (2016), 88–112. [online]
• Paul Connerton, ‘Cultural Memory’, in Christopher Tilley et al (eds), Handbook of
Material Culture (2009) [online]
• Anne Dillon, ‘Praying by Number: The Confraternity of the Rosary and the English
Catholic Community, c.1580–1700’, History 88 (2003), pp. 451–71. [online]
• Eamon Duffy, ‘The End of it All: The Material Culture of the Late Medieval Parish
and the 1552 Inventories of Church Goods’, in his Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition:
Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations (London, 2012), 109–129.
• Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey (eds), Death, Memory and Material Culture
(2020) [legal deposit]
• Tara Hamling, ‘Old Robert’s Girdle: Visual and Material Props for Protestant Piety in
Post-Reformation England’, in Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie (eds), Private and
Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain (2012), pp. 135-63. [legal deposit; ebook
on order]
• Tara Hamling, ‘An Arelome to this Hous for Ever: Monumental Fixtures and
Furnishings in the English Domestic Interior, c. 1560-c.1660’, in Andrew Gordon
and Thomas Rist (eds), The Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England:
Memorial Cultures of the Post-Reformation (2013) [legal deposit; ebook on order]
• Michael Hunter, ‘The Cabinet Institutionalised: The Royal Society’s Repository and
its Background’, in Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (eds.), The Origins of
Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Europe
(Oxford, 1985), pp. 159-68.
• Andrew Jones, Memory and Material Culture (2007) [online]
• James E. Kelly, ‘Creating an English Catholic Identity: Relics, Martyrs and English
Women Religious in Counter-Reformation Europe’, in James E. Kelly and Susan
Royal (eds), Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Counter-
Reformation (2016), 41-59. [online]
• Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward and Jeremy Aynsley (eds), Material Memories
(1999).
• L. McClain, ‘Using what's at hand : English Catholic reinterpretations of the Rosary,
1559-1642’, Journal of Religious History, 27 (2003), 161-76. [online]
• Robin Malo, ‘Intimate Devotion: Recusant Martyrs and the Making of Relics in Post-
Reformation England’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 44 (2014)
[online]
• Robyn Malo, Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England (2013) [online]
• Arthur F. Marotti, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-
Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (2005), 9-31.
• Andrew Morrall, ‘Protestant Pots: Morality and Social Ritual in the Early Modern
Home’, Journal of Design History 15, no. 4 (2002), 263–73. [online]
• Alexander Nagel, ‘The Afterlife of the Reliquary’, in Martina Bagnoli et al (eds),
Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe (2010), pp.
211-22.
• Alan Radley, ‘Artefacts, Memory and a Sense of the Past’, in David Middleton and
Derek Edwards (eds), Collective Remembering (1990), pp. 46-59.
• Lucy Razzall, ‘'A good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master-spirit':
Recollecting Relics in Post-Reformation English Writing’, Journal of the Northern
Renaissance, 2 (2010)• Catherine Richardson, Tara Hamling and David Gaimster (eds), The Routledge
Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe (2017) [online]
• Ulinka Rublack, ‘Grapho-Relics: Lutheranism and the Materialization of the Word’,
in Alexandra Walsham, ed., Relics and Remains, Past and Present Supplement 5
(2010), 144-66. [online]
• Claire Richter Sherman, Writing on Hands: Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern
Europe (2000)
• Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of
Memory (2000)
• A. Walsham, ‘Domesticating the Reformation: Material Culture, Memory and
Confessional Identity in Early Modern England’, Renaissance Quarterly, 69 (2016), pp.
566-616. [online]
• Alexandra Walsham (ed.) Relics and Remains, Past and Present Supplement 5 (2010),
esp. introduction [online]
• Alexandra Walsham, ‘Skeletons in the Cupboard: Relics after the English
Reformation’, in Walsham (ed.) Relics and Remains (2010): 121-43. [online]
• Alexandra Walsham, ‘The Pope’s Merchandise and the Jesuits’ Trumpery: Catholic
Relics and Protestant Polemic in Post-Reformation England’, in Dagmar Eichberger
and Jennifer Spinks (eds), Religion, the Supernatural, and Visual Culture in Early
Modern Europe: An Album Amicorum for Charles Zika (2015), pp. 370-409. [online]
• Alexandra Walsham, ‘Recycling the Sacred: Material Culture and Cultural Memory
after the English Reformation,’ Church History 86 (2017), pp. 1121-1154. [online]
• Katie Whitaker, ‘The Culture of Curiosity’, in N. Jardine, J.A. Secord and E. C. Spary
(eds.), Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 75-90.(6) Tradition: Custom, Ritual, Legend and Folklore
Key Questions:
• Through what kinds of sources can we gain insight into early modern oral tradition?
• What developments challenged the status of customary knowledge?
• What were the origins of folklore?
Primary Sources: [72 pages]
• Tancred Robinson, ‘A Letter giving an Account of one Henry Jenkins a Yorkshire
Man who attained the age of 169 years’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society. 19 (1695-97), pp. 266-8.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstl.1695.0038.[3 pages]
• ‘The Credibility of Humane Testimony’, in The philosophical transactions and
collections, to the end of the year 1700. Abridg'd and dispos'd under general heads.
In three volumes (London, [1716]), vol. iii. 662-5 [4 pages].
• Memories of the boundaries of New Buckenham, 1594, from parish documents [2
pages]
• Examinations regarding the precincts of All Saints parish, Southampton, 1577, G. H.
Hamilton (ed.), Books of Examinations and Depositions 1570-1594, Southampton
Record Society 16 (Southampton, 1914), pp. 45-6 [1 page].
• T. Story Maskelyne, ‘Perambulation of Purton, 1733’, Wiltshire Archaeological and
Natural History Magazine, 40 (1918), pp. 119-28. [9 pages]
• John Aubrey, Remains of Gentilisme and Judaisme, in John Aubrey, Three Prose
Works, ed. John Buchanan-Brown (1972), pp. 132 (preface), 172-182 (funerals), 189-
97 (fountains, garlands, groves), 289-90 (old wives tales). [20 pages]
• Henry Bourne, Antiquitates vulgares; or, the antiquities of the common people (1725),
preface (pp. ix-xii), chs 8, 13-16, 25-27 (pp. 65-9, 126-50, 200-15). [33 pages]
Recommended secondary reading:
• Daniel Woolf, ‘The “Common Voice”: History, Folklore and Oral Tradition in Early
Modern England’, Past and Present, 120 (1988), pp. 26-52. [online]
• Nicola Whyte, ‘Landscape, Memory and Custom: Parish Identities c. 1550-1700’,
Social History, 32 (2007), 166-86. [online]
• Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (1989), ch. 3 (Bodily practices) [online]
Further reading:
• Michael Berlin, ‘Reordering Rituals: Ceremony and the Parish, 1520-1640’, in P.
Griffiths and M. Jenner (eds), Londinopolis (2000), pp. 47-66. [online]
• Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500-1700 (2000), chs 3-5. [online]
• Adam Fox, ‘Custom, Memory and the Authority of Writing’, in P. Griffiths, A. Fox
and S. Hindle (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (1996),
pp. 89-116.
• Adam Fox, ‘Remembering the Past in Early Modern England: Oral and Written
Tradition’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series (1999), pp. 233-56.
[online]
• Leslie V. Grinsell, Folklore of Prehistoric sites in Britain (1976)
• D. Hey, ‘The Dragon of Wantley: Rural Popular Culture and Local Legend’, Rural History,
4 (1993). [online]• Steve Hindle, ‘Beating the Bounds of the Parish: Order, Memory and Identity in the
English Local Community, c. 1500-1800’, in M. Halvorson and K. Spierling (eds),
Defining Community in Early Modern Europe (2008), pp. 205-27. [legal deposit]
• Michael Hunter, John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning (1975)
• Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700
(1994) [online]
• Ronald Hutton, Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (1996)
[online]
• Ronald Hutton, ‘The English Reformation and the Evidence of Folklore’, Past and
Present 148 (1995), pp. 89–116. [online]
• Kelsey Jackson Williams, The Antiquary: John Aubrey's Historical Scholarship
(2016) [online]
• Bronach Kane, Popular Memory and Gender in Medieval England (2019) [online]
• Bronach Kane, ‘Custom, Memory and Knowledge in the medieval English Church
courts’, in R. Hayes and W. Sheils (eds), Clergy, Church and Society in England and
Wales, c. 1200-1800 (2013).
• Bronach Kane, ‘Women, Memory and Agency in the Medieval English Church
Courts’, in B. Kane and F. Williamson (eds), Women, Agency and the Law, 1300-
1700 (2013) [legal deposit]
• Peter Marshall, ‘The Debate over Unwritten Verities in Early Reformation England’,
in Bruce Gordon (ed.), Protestant History and Identity in Sixteenth Century Europe
(1996), vol. 2, pp. 60-77.
• Muriel C. McLendon, ‘A Moveable Feast: Saint George’s Day Celebrations and
Religious Change in Early Modern England’, Journal of British Studies, 38 (1999), 1-
27. [online]
• M. McGlynn, ‘Memory, Orality and Life Records: Proofs of Age in Tudor England’,
Sixteenth Century Journal, 40 (2009), 679-97. [online]
• Charles Phythian Adams, ‘Ceremony and the Citizen: The Communal Year at
Coventry 1450-1550’, in Peter Clark and Paul Slack (eds), Crisis and Order in
English Towns 1500-1700 (1972) [legal deposit]
• Judith Pollmann, Memory in Early Modern Europe (2017), ch. 3 [online]
• Simon Sandall, ‘Custom, Memory and the Operations of Power in Seventeenth-
Century Forest of Dean’, in F. Williamson (ed.), Locating Agency: Space, Power and
Popular Politics (2010). [online]
• Alison Shell, Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England (2007) [online]
• Keith Thomas, ‘Age and Authority in Early Modern England’, Proceedings of the
British Academy, 62 (1972), pp. 205-48. [online]
• Keith Thomas, The Perception of the Past in Early Modern England (Creighton Trust
Lecture, 1983) [scan available from AW]
• E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (1993) [online]
• David Vincent, ‘The Decline of the Oral Tradition in Popular Culture’, in Robert D.
Storch (ed.), Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-Century England (1982).
[legal deposit]
• Andy Wood, ‘History, Time and Social Memory’, in Keith Wrightson (ed.), A Social
History of England (2017), pp. 373-91. [online]
• Alexandra Walsham, ‘Reformed Folklore? Cautionary Tales and Oral Tradition in
Early Modern England’, in Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf (eds), The Spoken Word:
Oral Culture in Britain, 1500-1700 (2000), pp. 173-95. [online]• Alexandra Walsham, ‘Recording Superstition in Early Modern Britain: The Origins of
Folklore’, in S. A. Smith and Alan Knight (eds.), The Religion of Fools? Superstition
Past and Present, Past and Present Supplement 5 (2008). [online]
• Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and
Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (2011), ch. 7. [online]
• Nicola Whyte, ‘Custodians of Memory: Women and Custom in Rural England c.
1550-1700’, Cultural and Social History, 8 (2011) 153-173. [online]
• Andy Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country 1520-1770 (1999), pp.
127-43. [online]
• Andy Wood, ‘Custom and the Social Organisation of Writing in Early Modern
England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser. 9 (1999), pp. 257-69.
[online]
• Andy Wood, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in
Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2013), ch. 2 [online]
• Andy Wood, ‘The Place of Custom in Plebeian Popular Culture: England 1550-1850’,
Social History, 22 (1997) [online]
• Andy Wood, ‘Deference, Paternalism and Popular Memory in Early Modern
England’, in S. Hindle, A. Shepard, and J. Walter (eds), Remaking English Society:
Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England (2013). [online]
• Daniel Woolf, ‘Speech, Text and Time: The Sense of Hearing and the Sense of the
Past in Renaissance England’, Albion, 18 (1986), pp. 159-93. [online]
• Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500-
1700 (Oxford, 2003), chs. 8-10.(7) Record-keeping: Communities of Memory
Key Questions:
• How was the memory of institutions and communities preserved and passed down the
generations?
• Why did the early modern period witness a surge in practices of record-keeping and
the growth of archives?
• To what extent can bureaucratic records such as churchwardens’ accounts and parish
registers yield insight individual and collective memory?
Primary Sources: [116 pages]
• Diarmaid MacCulloch and Pat Hughes, ‘A Bailiff’s List and Chronicle from
Worcester’, Antiquaries Journal, 75 (1995), pp. 235-53. [18 pages]
• Chronicle of King’s Lynn: Ralph Flenley (ed.), Six Town Chronicles of England
(1911), pp. 184-201. [18 pages]
• ‘The Register of Sir Thomas Botelar, vicar of Much Wenlock’, Transactions of the
Shropshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, 6 (1883), pp. 93-132 [39
pages].
• Todd Gray (ed.), The Lost Chronicle of Barnstaple 1586-1611 (Exeter, 1998), pp. 59-
101 [41 pages]
Recommended secondary reading:
• Alexandra Walsham, ‘The Social History of the Archive’, in Liesbeth Corens, Kate
Peters and Alexandra Walsham (eds), Archives and Information in the Early Modern
World (2018) [online]
Further Reading:
• Ian Archer, ‘Discourses of History in Elizabethan and Early Stuart London’, in
Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modern England (2005); also in
Huntington Library Quarterly, 68 (2005) [online]
• Jennifer Bishop, ‘The Clerk’s Tale: Civic Writing in Sixteenth-Century London’, in
Liesbeth Corens, Kate Peters, and Alexandra Walsham (eds), The Social History of
the Archive: Record-Keeping in Early Modern Europe (2016). [online]
• P. Cain, ‘Robert Smith and the Reform of the Archives of the City of London, 1580-
1623’, The London Journal, 13 (1987-8), pp. 3-16. [online]
• Alison Chapman, ‘Whose Saint Crispin's day is it? Shoemaking, holiday making, and
the politics of memory in early modern England’, Renaissance Quarterly, 54 (2001),
1467-94. [online]
• Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307 (1993)
[online]
• Liesbeth Corens, Kate Peters and Alexandra Walsham (eds), Archives and
Information in the Early Modern World (2018).
• Will Coster, ‘Popular Religion and the Parish Register 1538-1603’, in Katherine L.
French, Gary C. Gibbs and Beat A Kümin (eds), The Parish in English Life 1400-
1600 (1997), pp. 94-111.
• Eamon Duffy, The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English
Village (2001). [online]
• A. Dyer, ‘English town chronicles’, Local Historian 12 (1976-7), pp. 285-95.• Sarah Foot, ‘Finding the meaning of form: narrative in annals and chronicles’, in
Nancy Partner (ed.) Writing Medieval History (2010), pp. 88-108.
• Sarah Foot, ‘Annals and Chronicles in Western Europe’, in Sarah Foot and CF
Robinson (eds), The Oxford History of Historical Writing, Volume 2: 400-1400
(2012), pp. 346-67. [online]
• Gary Gibbs, ‘Marking the Days: Henry Machyn’s Manuscript and the Mid-Tudor
Era’, in Eamon Duffy and David Loades (eds), The Church of Mary Tudor (2006).
[online]
• Alexandra Gillespie and Oliver Harris, ‘Holinshed and the native chronicle tradition’,
in P. Kewes, I Archer and F. Heal (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s
Chronicles (2013), pp. 135-51. [online]
• C. Given-Wilson, Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England (2004).
• Andrew Gordon, Writing Early Modern London: Memory, Text and Community
(2013), esp. chs 1, 3.
• Andrew Gordon, ‘The Paper Parish: The parish register and the reformation of parish
memory in early modern London’, Memory Studies, 11 (2018), pp. 51-68. [online]
• Simone Hanebaum, ‘Sovereigns and superstitions: identity and memory in Thomas
Bentley’s ‘Monumentes of Antiquities’, Cultural and Social History 13 (2016), pp.
287-305. [online]
• Vanessa Harding, ‘Memory, History and the Individual in the Civic Context: Early
Modern London’, in V. Harding and K. Watanabe (eds), Memory, History and
Autobiography in Early Modern Towns in East and West (2015) [online]
• P. Kewes, I. Archer and F. Heal (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s
Chronicles (2013) [online]
• M. Lundin, Paper Memory: A Sixteenth-Century Townsman Writes his World (2012)
[online]
• Harriet Lyon, ‘A pitiful thing’? The afterlife of the dissolution of the English
monasteries in early modern chronicles, c. 1540-c.1640’, Sixteenth Century Journal
(2019). [online]
• Ian Mortimer, ‘Tudor chronicler or sixteenth-century diarist? Henry Machyn and the
nature of his manuscript’, Sixteenth Century Journal 33 (2002), pp. 981-98. [online]
• Judith Pollmann, ‘Archiving the present and chronicling for the future in early
modern Europe’, in Liesbeth Corens, Kate Peters and Alexandra Walsham (eds), The
Social History of the Archive: Record-Keeping in Early Modern Europe. Past and
Present Supplement 11 (2016), pp. 231-52. [online]
• Judith Pollmann, Memory in Early Modern Europe (2017), ch. 4 [online]
• Robert Tittler, ‘Henry Manship: Constructing the civic memory in Great Yarmouth’,
in R. Tittler (ed.), Townspeople and the Nation: English Urban Experiences, 1540-
1640 (2001), pp. 121-139.
• Robert Tittler, ‘Reformation, civic culture and collective memory in English
provincial towns’, Urban History 24 (1997), pp. 283-300. [online]
• Robert Tittler, The Reformation and the Towns in England: Politics and Political
Culture, c.1540-1640 (1998) [online]
• Alexandra Walsham, ‘Chronicles, Memory and Autobiography in Early Modern
England’, Memory Studies, 11 (2018), pp. 36-50. [online]
• David Womersley, ‘Against the teleology of technique’, Huntington Library
Quarterly, 68 (2005), pp. 95-108. [online]
• Andy Wood, ‘Tales from the Yarmouth Hutch: Civic Identities and Hidden Histories
in an Urban Archive’, in Liesbeth Corens, Kate Peters, and Alexandra Walsham (eds),The Social History of the Archive: Record-Keeping in Early Modern Europe (2016).
[online]
• Daniel Woolf, ‘Genre into Artefact: The Decline of the English Chronicle in the
Sixteenth Century’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 19 (1988), pp. 321-54. [online]
• Daniel Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (2000), ch. 1.(8) Life-writing: Biography and Autobiography
Key Questions:
• What inhibited and what stimulated life-writing in the early modern period?
• Is the category ‘autobiography’ an anachronistic term in the context of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries?
• For whom did people write memoirs and diaries?
Primary Sources: [74 pages]
• The Responsa Scholarum of the English College, Rome, 1598-1685, ed. Anthony
Kenny, 2 vols., Catholic Record Society 54-55 (1962-3), pp. 25-28 (Nicholas Hart) [4
pages]
• Caroline Bowden (ed.), English Convents in Exile, 1600-1800, 6 vols (2012-13); vol.
2, pp. 347-67 (obituaries of Augustinian and Benedictine nuns) [15 pages]
• Samuel Clarke, The Lives of Thirty Two English Divines, part of A general
martyrologie (London, 1677), pp. 377-91 (Jane Ratcliffe), pp. 391-407 (Ignatius
Jurdain) [29 pages]
• David Booy (ed.), The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, 1618-1654: A selection
(2007), pp. 263-83 (‘An extract of the passages of my life or the booke of all my
writing books’, Folger MS V.a.436). [20 pages]
• Alice Thornton, Alice Thornton, My first booke of my life. ed. Raymond A.
Anselment (2014). pp. 3-10, 38-39, 76-87, 98-102. [29 pages]
• Frances Matthew’s list of the birth dates of her children, York Minster Library, c.
1629:
https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/reformation/artifacts/the-birth-of-all-my-children-
frances-matthews-family-notes/ [1 page]
Recommended secondary reading:
• Andrew Cambers, 'Reading, the Godly, and Self-Writing in England, circa 1580-1720',
Journal of British Studies, 46 (2007) [online]
• Judith Pollmann, Memory in Early Modern Europe (2017), ch. 1 [online]
• Mark Freeman, ‘Telling Stories: Memory and Narrative’, in S. Radstone and B.
Schwarz (eds), Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates (2010) [online]
Further Reading:
• James Amelang, The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern
Europe (1998)
• Judith H. Anderson, Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in
Tudor-Stuart Writing (1984)
• Irena Backus, ‘What is a Historical Account? Religious Biography anad the
Reformation’s Break with the Middle Ages’, Archiv fur Reformationsgeschichte, 101
(2010).
• Irena Backus, Life Writing in Reformation Europe: Lives of Reformers by Friends,
Disciples and Foes (2007). [legal deposit]
• Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly (eds), Early Modern
Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices (2006) [legal deposit]
• Effie Botonaki, ‘Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen’s Diaries: Self-Examination,
Covenanting and Account Keeping’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 30 (1999) [online]You can also read
