Book contents
- Memory and the English Reformation
- Memory and the English Reformation
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Events and Temporalities
- 1 Nailing the Reformation
- 2 Remembering the Dissolution of the Monasteries
- 3 Remembering the Past at the End of Time
- 4 Henry VIII’s Ghost in Cromwellian England
- 5 Remembering Mary, Contesting Reform
- 6 Converting the Cross
- Part II Objects and Places
- Part III Lives and Afterlives
- Part IV Rituals and Bodies
- Index
5 - Remembering Mary, Contesting Reform
The English Sonnets of the Litany of Loreto
from Part I - Events and Temporalities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 October 2020
- Memory and the English Reformation
- Memory and the English Reformation
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Events and Temporalities
- 1 Nailing the Reformation
- 2 Remembering the Dissolution of the Monasteries
- 3 Remembering the Past at the End of Time
- 4 Henry VIII’s Ghost in Cromwellian England
- 5 Remembering Mary, Contesting Reform
- 6 Converting the Cross
- Part II Objects and Places
- Part III Lives and Afterlives
- Part IV Rituals and Bodies
- Index
Summary
In the early seventeenth century, an English Catholic priest whose identity remains obscure penned a remarkable sequence of forty-four sonnets based on the Marian titles of the Litany of Loreto. The sequence relies heavily upon tradition for its content (the author goes so far as to annotate his sonnets with sources for his claims about Mary) and upon repetition for its themes and verbal texture. In these sonnets, the poet seeks to reanimate Marian devotion in order to combat what he sees as the disruptions and discontinuities of the Reformation. His poems studiously avoid offering new ideas, for novelty is, in his view, the project of the Protestant Reformation. Instead, his sequence proposes that litany prayer and devout repetition constitute a form of sacred memory, one modelled on a liturgical understanding of memory and re-presenting, that may ensure the continuity of tradition despite the Reformation's threats.
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- Memory and the English Reformation , pp. 117 - 131Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020