The Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England: Memorial Cultures of the Post Reformation ed. by Andrew Gordon and Thomas Rist (review)

Each of the ten essays in this volume contends that the ‘arts of remembrance were omnipresent in early modern culture’ (p. 1). Remembrance in this volume takes three forms, which make up the sections of this book: ‘Material Remembrance’ – consisting of material culture created for commemoration, such as statues, tombs, portraiture, and furniture – ‘Textual Rites’, and ‘Theatres of Remembrance’. This volume also has a special focus on the impact of the post-Reformation period on contemporary forms of commemoration.

Lucy Wooding’s essay on remembrance and the Eucharist serves as a fine opening to the strongest section of this book. Wooding’s essay explores how contemporaries coped with their desire to remember and respect the dead after the post-Reformation Protestant church eschewed Purgatory and prayers for the dead. Wooding does an excellent job of delineating the various ways that people remembered the dead through prayer, not only to ensure early release from Purgatory, but also to express love.

Robert Tittler’s essay on portraiture also examines the ways in which the Reformation affected memorial practices, this time for Catholic recusant families. As portraits were often displayed in family homes in prominent areas, they served as propaganda intended to affirm the social status of the family, provide visual legitimation and differentiation of status, and for Catholics, reify the family history of loyalty and sacrifice to their faith. Like Wooding, Tittler also asserts that the abandonment of Purgatory and ‘associated forms of prayer and remembrance’ (p. 40) caused contemporaries to look for other ways to ensure remembrance.

Furniture and household fixtures work in much the same way as portraiture in Tara Hamling’s essay, which introduces the unexamined domestic interior as a space of remembrance. Hamling argues that furniture and fixtures in homes functioned like monuments, to establish and prove status, to commemorate rites of passage, such as marriage and death, and to serve as a ‘permanent record and reminder of ancestral and familial heritage’ (p. 61). In the following essay, Oliver D. Harris charts the ‘genealogical obsessions’ of three gentlemen (p. 13). The attempts of these men to establish an exhaustive genealogy led to the establishment of elaborate family vaults, mausoleums, and even a forged pedigree.

The essays that make up the second section of this volume, ‘Textual Rites’, focus on remembrance via texts, in the form of poetry, religious history, political accounts, and posthumous memorialisation through the literary. Thomas Rist examines George Herbert’s ‘poetic materials’, specifically the materials used in churches as objects of remembrance. Rist argues that Herbert’s fixation on these materials was a response to conflicting notions of religious objects in the post-Reformation period. Tom Healy’s study of Actes and Monuments, the ecclesiastical history penned by John Foxe, focuses on how this text enacts remembrance among believers. Marie-Louise Coolahan illustrates how widowers chose to arrange posthumous manuscripts of their wives’ work in order to represent them as ‘the reformed ideal of womanhood: religious devotion enacted in writerly activities’ (p. 163).

The essays of ‘Theatres of Remembrance’ concern remembrance in the theatre. Janette Dillon examines representations of conflict over religious iconography as expressed through staged images, and answers larger questions about iconography and collective memory. Philip Schwyzer illustrates the commemoration of historical events through re-enactments in Shakespeare’s plays, specifically Henry at Blackfriars and Richard at Rougemont. Andrew Gordon’s essay on the afterlife of comedy focuses primarily on the clown Richard Tarlton, and how the comic remembrance of the dead is tied to ideas about Purgatory and ghosts.

The subjects of these essays are diverse and will be of use to historians and scholars of literature and theatre. Coupled with their focus on changing post-Reformation culture, they make for fascinating reading, and an invaluable resource for scholars of memory and post-Reformation religious culture...