Chapter 3 - ‘Raised Out of the Ruins’

Summary

Chapter 3 focuses on space and the visual dimensions of the memory of the dissolution. Concentrating on the period between the late sixteenth century and the late seventeenth century, it examines the work of a number of antiquaries who produced topographies and images of former monastic sites. Taking previous scholarship on the ‘nostalgic’ element in antiquarian topographies of the dissolution as its main point of departure, this chapter addresses the role of monastic ruins together with those sites that were converted to new uses, both spiritual and secular, in shaping changing perspectives on the suppression. It argues that we should pay more attention to converted spaces – whether parish churches or private homes – which could function to reinforce the project to forget the dissolution across the generations. To support this argument, this chapter also features a substantial discussion of the visual afterlives of the dissolution. It illuminates what recent scholarship has described as a seventeenth-century visual culture of ‘pastness’, but also hypothesises the emergence of a parallel and equally powerful visual culture of the present. Ultimately, it suggests that topographical writing and images were genres in which senses of loss could converge with gain, past with present, and remembering with forgetting.