Remembering the Reformation

Alexandra Walsham, Brian Cummings, Ceri Law, Karis Riley, Alexandra Walsham, Brian Cummings, Ceri Law, Karis Riley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367150754
• eBook ISBN: 9780429619922
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

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.

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Introduction

Remembering the Reformation

Brian Cummings, Ceri Law, Karis Riley, and Alexandra Walsham

It was said that Theodore Beza, the great theologian of Geneva, after he reached the age of eighty, could say ‘perfectly by heart’ — in Greek — any verse from St Paul’s epistles, or indeed anything ‘he had learned long before’, but whatsoever he was newly told, he forgot straightaway.¹ The anecdote appears in a miscellany written by members of the family of Sir Marmaduke Rawdon (1583–1646), a Yorkshire merchant and Civil War soldier, where it is used to illustrate the commonplace topic ‘Of Memory’. Memory, the writer states, following classical theories of psychology still in vogue, is constructed like a ‘treasure house’. This metaphor goes back to the oldest surviving Latin book of rhetoric, Rhetorica ad Herennium, where memory is defined as a natural quality, yet one that can be perfected by artificial techniques. Through training and discipline we can overcome our cognitive deficiencies: for example by imagining each of the things we are trying to recall as a room within a house.² This helps the mind to retrieve information in an orderly way from within its vast storage system. Elsewhere, however, Cicero warns of a storehouse that has become too large for its own good. He recalls the view of Themistocles, from the time when the science of mnemonics was first being introduced. Informed that it would enable him to remember everything, Themistocles replied that ‘it would be a greater kindness’ if he were taught how to forget.³ Likewise, in the Rawdon family’s commonplace account of Beza’s extraordinary powers of memory, the reader is urged to be wary: like a purse, if the memory store becomes over full, it cannot shut; and its contents will spill out. Beza, it is implied, tried to remember too much, and so forgot how to forget.

For a modern reader, Beza’s reported experience is an agonisingly accurate rendition of the characteristic symptoms of dementia. Some way that this is described in a seventeenth-century manuscript reminds us that memory was understood very differently in previous periods, less in terms of neuroscience or medicine, and more in terms of an art or craft. A characteristic way of imagining memory in the Middle Ages, Mary Carruthers shows, is rhetorical.⁴ For example, Peter of Ravenna’s Phoenix, sive artificiosa memoria (Venice, 1491) encourages his readers to organise subjects in their heads by reference to imaginary loci (or ‘places’) to remember them by. Peter claimed to have devised one hundred thousand ‘places’ in his mind as a young man, enabling him to locate different memories at will. Memory is thus a process of conscious visualisation as much as a neural network. Peter’s work was published in many editions in many countries, and translated and abbreviated by others, making it the best-known memory text of the Renaissance.⁵ When looking back to the past, it is worth recalling that people remembered differently then.

The history of memory

The distinctive historical formation of remembering and forgetting is the subject of this book: how the experiences of the tumultuous years of the Reformation are reflected in complex and often contradictory processes of memorialisation. This is a two-way process: the Reformation transforms public and private experiences of memory; in turn, the processes of memory affect the way that the events and people of the Reformation are interpreted and analysed. Raphael Samuel has identified how religious memory has been ‘the crucible of the national idea’.⁶ At a local level, Samuel remarks how places of religious worship form centres of memorial emotion.⁷ The Reformation lies at the heart of these contested religious identities. This is by no means limited to the enforcement of establishment traditions: puritanism and non-conformity, Samuel claims, are equally significant codes of cultural incorporation. Memory is the home of dissent as much as official tradition. The Reformation is thus a complex ‘theatre of memory’.

History, of course, is not the same thing as memory. The records of Beza’s life speak to the concerns of this volume in both trajectories, in suggesting how memory informs and invades the writing of history, and how history reshapes and revisits the materials of memory. Beza was born in Vézelay in Burgundy in 1519 in the heart of Catholic France, the nephew of a Cistercian Abbot, before a single writing by Martin Luther had yet appeared in his native country. At the time of his death in Geneva in 1605, however, Beza was the most celebrated surviving figure of the combined Protestant revolutions in doctrine, belief, and behaviour.⁸ His scholarship in ancient languages analysed the society and beliefs of the Biblical epochs in order to challenge every aspect of his own childhood faith. His life therefore speaks eloquently of divisive memory: of the reinvention of the past in the name of the profoundest social change. Indeed, Beza contributed to the history of the Reformation by writing a Life of Jean Calvin as a preface to Calvin’s Commentary on Joshua in 1564, published separately as the Discours de la vie et mort de Maistre Jean Calvin and translated into many languages.⁹ Brief though it is, it succeeds in shaping the memorial record of biography into the pattern of Calvinist doctrine. ‘What was hys lyfe’, asks Beza, ‘other than a continuall doctrine, as wel by worde as by writing, and by all his manners and order of lyfe?’¹⁰ In Irena Backus’s words, Calvin’s doctrine becomes (in Beza’s account) ‘both the way he lived, and what he taught in his struggle to establish orthodoxy’.¹¹ Catholic lives of Calvin, unsurprisingly, adopted an opposing narrative. Jerome Bolsec, a double convert, who began as a Carmelite friar, then joined the Reformation in Geneva, then recanted again, re-established his Catholic credentials with Lives of Calvin in 1577 and subsequently of Beza in 1582. In contrast to Beza’s exemplary tale of austerity and chastity, Bolsec presents Calvin repenting on his death-bed, tormented by crab lice, and disowning his own writings, especially the Institutes, which was the foundational text of Calvinists.¹² To match these final moments of Protestant heresy with earlier patterns of behaviour, he accuses Calvin of secret sins: adultery and sodomy. Bolsec repeats this trope in his Life of Beza, who also appears in this light as a serial sexual predator.¹³ What is significant is not the obvious back and forth of lurid fantasy, but the way that history is subject to controversial acts of remembering. Despair in dying is equivalent to changeableness of doctrine, depravity to heresy. To counteract this, Protestant biographers turned Calvin’s last moments into an exemplary tale of steadfast faith. There is no better instance of the importance of remembering, and of the difficulty of verifying it.

At the heart of Remembering the Reformation is the experience of historical change. This collection of essays traces how what we now recognise as a complex, protracted and unpredictable process came to be regarded, recorded, and commemorated as a transformative event. It also probes the enduring, unstable, and divided legacies that it engendered. It examines the Reformation not as a finite set of events in the past, but as an extended idea that has embedded itself in the modern historical imagination. In chronology it ranges from the late Middle Ages to the present day. The essays underline in different ways the extent to which modern historiography of the Reformation is indebted to (and enriched by) processes of memory-making initiated in the early modern period itself. The volume is designed to break out of the paradigms of nationalist historiography in order to explore the memory of what may be seen as alternative and plural Reformations (Protestant, Catholic, and radical). It seeks to stimulate discussion of how memory cultures are associated not only with magisterial and state-led Reformations, but also with religious communities that were thwarted, or threatened. From local versions of memory and religion the volume moves outwards into patterns of global memory which transcend and cross territorial boundaries, and which are diasporic and mobile in character. Likewise, it challenges the periodisation that the Reformation itself helped to create, breaching conventional divides between medieval, early modern, and modern. In this way, concepts of memory and religion are used to question each other, moving from past contexts into the processes by which Reformation consciousness has been and is reframed in modernity.

Theories of memory

This book is informed by the surge of important interdisciplinary work in the last few decades on how societies remember. This has reflected a shift from the ancient and Renaissance concentration on memory as the cognitive faculty of an individual, towards an ethical concept of collective memory framed within the concerns of sociology and anthropology. Mary Douglas has commented on how the work of Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss led to a perception of time ‘not as an intuition, but as a social construct’.¹⁴ From here we are but a step away from the term mémoire collective, first used as the title of the last, posthumously published book by Maurice Halbwachs, who died at Buchenwald in 1945. In an earlier work in 1925, Halbwachs argued that ‘the individual calls recollections to mind by relying on the frameworks of social memory’.¹⁵ Following from this perception, Pierre Nora, the French-Jewish historian, began in 1978 a series of highly influential seminars on memory, arguing that it is never a neutral historical space, the product of spontaneous reflection.¹⁶ Rather, it is through a conscious effort that archives are collected, anniversaries celebrated, or monuments maintained. Modernity, Nora holds, has a compulsion to remember, in a world felt to be transformed irrevocably. If Nora sees this as an effect of secularisation, it is worth pointing out the entry of the Reformation into collective or national conceptions of memory as a significant event. Whatever happened on 31 October 1517 was quickly lost with the individual memory of the participants.¹⁷ It was subsumed into public anniversaries of Luther’s posting of the Ninety-Five Theses, the first of which took place in 1617. Only at this point did a visual iconography for the original ‘event’ come to exist.¹⁸ In 1817, a national festival was organised by students all over Germany: Luther was hailed as a freedom fighter; medals were struck with images of the Reformation events; in more sinister fashion, Napoleonic books were burned.¹⁹ The 400^th anniversary was more muted, taking place as it did in 1917 in the midst of the First World War. In 2017, by contrast, the themes for the 500^th anniversary were reconciliation and globalism. Anybody who visited Wittenberg during the twenty-first century celebration (which in Germany was celebrated over a period of a decade) cannot have failed to notice how the town today is a confection of memorials: from the Luther statue (1821) in the square in front of the Town Hall; to the iron tablet of theses (1858) in the reconstructed Prussian Castle Church; to the Playmobil dolls and Luther bears in souvenir shops.

According to Nora, this is not surprising, since it is change itself that produces the historical formation of memory. The French revolution, European industrialisation in the nineteenth century, and the World Wars of the twentieth, all had this effect. It is in the experience of an irrevocable break with tradition that collective memory becomes necessary, whether as an antidote to anxiety or an expression of solidarity. In the disappearance of ‘a past that is gone for good’, a culture experiences a rupture, and in the process, something like a historical consciousness is formed. In a beautiful, elegiac, and counter-intuitive phrase, Nora adds: ‘We speak so much of memory because there is so little left’.²⁰ Identity in such a time and place is reconstructed around what he calls lieux de mémoire (or ‘sites of memory’).²¹ A lieu de mémoire, Nora says, can be ‘any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of a community’.²² This phrase has been adopted as the leading metaphor of memory studies in the last generation. It has been particularly popular among historians...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: remembering the Reformation
• PART I: Repressed memory
• PART II: Divided memory
• PART III: Fragmented memory
• PART IV: Inherited memory
• PART V: Invented memory
• PART VI: Migrating memory
• PART VII: Extended memory
• Index