The Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England

Memorial Cultures of the Post Reformation

Andrew Gordon, Thomas Rist

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138279698
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317044345
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The early modern period inherited a deeply-ingrained culture of Christian remembrance that proved a platform for creativity in a remarkable variety of forms. From the literature of church ritual to the construction of monuments; from portraiture to the arrangement of domestic interiors; from the development of textual rites to drama of the contemporary stage, the early modern world practiced 'arts of remembrance' at every turn. The turmoils of the Reformation and its aftermath transformed the habits of creating through remembrance. Ritually observed and radically reinvented, remembrance was a focal point of the early modern cultural imagination for an age when beliefs both crossed and divided communities of the faithful. The Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England maps the new terrain of remembrance in the post-Reformation period, charting its negotiations with the material, the textual and the performative.

Chapter 1
Introduction: The Arts of Remembrance

Andrew Gordon and Thomas Rist

Remembrance Rediscovered

In his best-selling manual of practical piety The Rule and Exercise of Holy Dying (1651), Jeremy Taylor describes the ministrations necessary to lead the dying subject to repentance of his sins: ‘Let this be done by prudent insinuation’, he writes, ‘by arts of remembrance, and secret notices’.1 Taylor’s instructions are mediated through structured experiences of remembering which combine examination of conscience with a wider set of cultural referents typical of contemporary deathbed scenes. In our appropriation of Taylor’s phrase to headline this volume, we seek to describe the diverse spectrum of remembrance practices at work within early modern England. It is the contention of this volume that ‘arts of remembrance’ were omnipresent in early modern culture: manifest in tombs, statues and churches, but also in the décor of houses and arrangement of manuscripts, as well as in the literary construction of poetry and the performance practices of the theatre. In their material diversity these works testify to a habit within cultural production of the period that sees in the created object the enactment of remembrance. It is the habit of creating not on the basis of memory, but as remembrance, that the ‘arts of remembrance’ denote.

In recent scholarship, memory has been a key axis of development. Forms of artificial memory in the Renaissance have attracted considerable interest with the influence of the classical arts of memory explored in conjunction with the formative impact of humanist rhetorical training.2 Yet Garrett Sullivan jr, has criticized a critical overemphasis on artificial memory in his incisive study of how cultural discourses of both memory and forgetting shaped Shakespearean drama. In the process, Sullivan draws important distinctions between memoria (the faculty and site of storage in the brain), recollection (the process of memory retrieval) and remembering, which denotes not cognitive acts but social performances.3 Investigation of social forms of remembering has drawn on the work of Aby Warbug and Maurice Halbwachs to attempt the theorization of collective memory, most influentially in Jan Assman’s differentiation of communicative memory – a living memory transmitted and rehearsed in direct forms of social interaction – from cultural memory, denoting the objectification of memory in a wide range of materials, sites and performances.4 While a number of studies have privileged the latter, with a work such as Pierra Nora’s monumental Les Lieux de la Memoire predicated upon the suppression of living memory in twentieth century France, the early modern period emerges as a complex moment of memorial transformation and encounter. The development of systems of archival memory, the spread of habits and materials of recording, were aspects of an expansion in memorial resources that overlapped with ongoing local investment in collective rites and practices of memorial inscription.5 Such productive tensions in the memorial fabric of a culture have been traced elsewhere. Gerdien Jonker’s The Topography of Remembrance, challenged Assman’s dissociation of communicative and cultural memory with her resonant study of Mesapotamian culture, where the threat of memorial crisis revealed a deeply-felt need to remember, rehearsed through a wide range of ritual and material engagements with the dead.6 The ruptures of Reformation brought the prospect of memorial crisis to early modern Europe, provoking intense reflection on the social functions of memory and the terrifying spectre of oblivion. Remembering, as Sullivan notes, comprises both ‘the claim made on the subject that he or she remember’ and ‘the act of remembering’ itself, and the contemporary inscription of both practice and duty with religious meaning ensured that remembrance was the dominant memorial figure of the period.7 Thus the arts of remembrance do not look inward to the mind, but outward to the culture. As the essays gathered together here demonstrate, the arts of remembrance were tangible, legible and visible everywhere in the early modern surrounds.

A key to understanding the arts of remembrance is the matter of ‘remembrance’ itself. Christ’s command at the Last Supper to do this ‘in remembrance of me’ (Luke 22:19; 1 Cor. 11–25; King James Bible) announces the Christian preoccupation with remembrance, and its central place within liturgy since the early church. But the Reformation highlights the different forms which such remembrance might take, in view of the claim of the Latin mass ‘hoc est corpus meum’ (this is my body). ‘How many weighty strifes and important quarrels’, Montaigne would ask, ‘hath the doubt of this one silable, Hoc, brought forth in the world?’8 The challenge to the real presence by reformers produced a contest between the Eucharist as real presence and the linguistic sign, discovering a rich field of imaginative practice in arts as well as polemic.9 The significance of remembrance is by no means confined to the liturgical or theological. Christ’s injunction to the disciples entails a command to perform actions – to do remembrance – meaning that remembrance is inextricable from the wider society in which its actions are performed. Christ’s body is itself a dominant image for social identity sustained through a long heritage of communal practices.10 In the Jewish festival of Passover at which Christ would celebrate the Eucharist, the action of eating and drinking is itself constitutive, ‘making memory part of your own body even as your own body is part of the community engaged in the ritual of eating’.11 This sense of eating as communal participation remained central to the celebration of the Eucharist, defining the body of Christendom. The importance we attach to the Eucharist as a touchstone for the arts of remembrance is reflected in the structure of our collection, which opens with Lucy Wooding’s exploration of the relation between the Eucharist and other contemporary forms of remembrance.

Those forms notably include the remembrance of the dead. Christ’s anticipation of His crucifixion is directed towards posterity and therefore concerns the transformations in ritual and belief surrounding the commemoration of the dead that have come lately to preoccupy historians of the early modern. Peter Marshall has noted that contemporary religious beliefs about the dead associated with the Eucharist enjoyed ‘real cultural autonomy, and exercised a genuine causal power’.12 Though thanatologists and other early modern historians have kept their focus more or less strictly on the dead and the rituals and beliefs surrounding them, the larger cultural consequences of remembrance remain to be explored. Just as Marshall could look back on ‘the social history of death’ within living memory as ‘an undiscovered country’ so now with the place of the dead more firmly established, the attendant cultures of remembrance represent a new horizon, encompassing the material means through which this cultural imagination found expression.13

One aim of the present project, then, is to voice again the neglected power of the dead in all its cultural richness: to demonstrate the causal role of remembrance in material arts and creativity as a whole; and to suggest that these arts were remembrances made manifest. Beyond the demonstration of this inter-connection between remembrance and cultural production, however, a second aim of the collection is to address an implicit question. As we have seen, remembrance was not a neutral activity in the period. In highlighting the multiple ways in which the contemporary arts were rooted in remembrance, the essays in this volume provide different perspectives upon the extent of religious engagement involved. The studies explore how far a portrait, a bed, or a carefully compiled manuscript might relay the theological and devotional contests of the day, measuring the intensity with which objects of remembrance relayed their devotional messages and the strategies they deployed. These artefacts, then, hold politico-religious meanings which when taken together reveal the extent to which theology, so often seen as an abstraction, found material expression in remembrance.

Contemplating remembrance in terms of materialized theological engagement requires us to scrutinize the place of the secular in early modern society. In allowing different positions on the question to be heard, the volume acknowledges that one of the effects of the Protestant Reformation was, paradoxically, to distance some people from religion. As Patrick Collinson observed, the conflict of the Reformation ‘was sufficiently deep-seated and complex to shatter the unity of Western Christendom irreparably because it concerned matters of belief that either were fundamental or were perceived to be fundamental’. The result was the emergence of early modern subjects who, by the later sixteenth century, ‘did not know what to believe or, if they did, could not tell when they might be called on to believe contrary things’.14 Enclosing the phrase ‘Protestant Nation’ in quotation marks, Ethan Shagan shows how troubled modern understandings of early modern, religious sensibilities have become.15

Behind the examples of individuals unfastened from the embrace of their religious identities by rapidly changing demands in devotion, lurks the larger question of Weberian Entzauberung, variously rendered in English as ‘disenchantment’ or ‘demystification’. Weber’s thesis now gets mixed reviews. Many historians today reject or ignore its totalizing aspect, seeking what Shagan calls the Reformations ‘on the ground’.16 Yet for Alexandra Walsham the ‘routinisation of charisma’ retains its prominence within explanations of the emergence and development of Protestantism. She cites ‘the growing systematisation of theology and doctrine, the formalisation of worship, the emergence of a professional trained ministry, and the crystallisation of an ecclesiastical hierarchy’, as symptoms of this process, alongside the transition from outdoor prayer and preaching to indoor sermon and service.17 Her recent Reformation of the Landscape represents a major response to Weber’s depiction of Protestantism as engine in the historical process of disenchantment. Walsham’s study sees the emergence of Protestant folklore rooted in the beliefs and practices of the English countryside ‘as one of the keys to its [central theological tenets’] ability to put down deep and permanent roots’.18 Brad Gregory answers Walsham’s appeal for assessments of Weber’s thesis that are free both of ‘retrospective, mythologizing rhetoric’ and associations of ‘Protestantism with “progress”’, proposing a ‘genealogical history’ that avoids ‘assumptions about historical periodization that … hamper an adequate understanding of change over time’.19 In Gregory’s sweeping study, demystification is an ‘unintended’ result of the Reformation, the same forces that established a rooted Protestantism producing modern secularity through a series of historical bifurcations. For the history of remembrance, whose symptoms fall within this paradigm of Protestant transformation, the Weberian concept of ‘demystification’ deserves consideration.

Deriving from an Elizabethan book of discipline by the Puritan Walter Travers, the 1644 Directory for the Public Worship of God has proved a remarkable document for historians delineating the era’s transformations in burial customs and beliefs about the dead. The second paragraph of the order ‘Concerning Burial of the Dead’ presents a recognizably Protestant rationalization of commemorative burial:

And because the customs of kneeling down, and praying by, or towards the dead Corps, and other usages, in the place where it lies, before it be carried to Buriall, are Superstitious: and for that, praying, reading, and singing, both in going to, and at the Grave have been grosly abused [and] are in no way beneficiall to the dead … let all such things be laid aside.20

The passage echoes generations of Protestant attacks on popish ‘superstition’ in general, exemplifying the reformed trend of reclassifying aspects of the sacred – in this case the Catholic belief that prayer for the dead might benefit them – as erroneous. This demystifying statement is framed by the following prescription:

When any person...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: The Arts of Remembrance
• Part I Materials of Remembrance
• Part II Textual Rites
• Part III Theatres of Remembrance
• Select Bibliography
• Index