Remembering the Reformation (Remembering the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds)

This stimulating volume explores how the memory of the Reformation has been remembered, forgotten, contested, and reinvented between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries.

Remembering the Reformation traces how a complex, protracted, and unpredictable process came to be perceived, recorded, and commemorated as a transformative event. Exploring both local and global patterns of memory, the contributors examine the ways in which the Reformation embedded itself in the historical imagination and analyse the enduring, unstable, and divided legacies that it engendered. The book also underlines how modern scholarship is indebted to processes of memory-making initiated in the early modern period and challenges the conventional models of periodisation that the Reformation itself helped to create. This collection of essays offers an expansive examination and theoretically engaged discussion of concepts and practices of memory and Reformation.

This volume is ideal for upper level undergraduates and postgraduates studying the Reformation, Early Modern Religious History, Early Modern European History, and Early Modern Literature.

Brian Cummings is Anniversary Professor of English at the University of York and a Fellow of the British Academy. He edited The Book of Common Prayer (2013) and his book Mortal Thoughts (2013) won the Dietz Prize of the Modern Language Association of America. With Alexandra Walsham, he co-directed the AHRC project ‘Remembering the Reformation’ between 2016 and 2019.

Ceri Law has worked at Queen Mary University of London, Cambridge University, and the University of Essex. She is the author of Contested Reformations in the University of Cambridge, c.1535–84 (2018). She was a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the AHRC ‘Remembering the Reformation’ project between 2016 and 2019.

Karis Riley has degrees in Philosophy, Classics, and English Literature and is currently completing a book on Milton and the passions. She was a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the AHRC ‘Remembering the Reformation’ project between 2018 and 2019.

Alexandra Walsham is Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy. She has published five books, including The Reformation of the Landscape (2011), which won the Wolfson History Prize in 2012. With Brian Cummings, she co-directed the AHRC project ‘Remembering the Reformation’ between 2016 and 2019.