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‘Correcting an Error in history’: Battlefield Memorials at Marston Moor and Naseby 1771-1939
- Parergon
- Australian and New Zealand Association of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Inc.)
- Volume 32, Number 3, 2015
- pp. 205-235
- 10.1353/pgn.2015.0189
- Article
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Abstract:
The Battle of Marston Moor (1644) and the Battle of Naseby (1645) are iconic events in the history of the seventeenth-century English Civil Wars. Once living memory had ceased, the practices of individual and collective remembrance and memorialisation developed around these sites, and then took physical form in a series of monuments erected in the pre-World War II period up to 1939. Analysis of archival evidence, and the material form of the monuments and their inscriptions, highlights the ways in which both individuals and groups attempted to establish stable remembrance practices regarding these battles. Perpetuated in the inscriptions is the practice of the inclusion, omission, and conflation of pre- and post-Civil War battlefield events in order to highlight pressing issues of freedoms in the present.