2 - Remembering the Dissolution of the Monasteries

Summary

This chapter examines how the suppression of religious houses undertaken by Henry VIII’s government between 1536 and 1540 was transformed into the event that has come to be known as the ‘Dissolution of the Monasteries’. It begins by considering this transformation through the lens of an eye-witness chronicle, compiled by Charles Wriothesley in the 1530s and 1540s. The second part of the chapter then turns to explore how the protracted and uneven process witnessed by Wriothesley acquired the qualities of temporal specificity and cultural significance that are the hallmarks of historical events. It traces evolving perspectives across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with a view to highlighting that the ‘Dissolution of the Monasteries’ was an invention of posterity: it emerged only in hindsight and largely in critical perspective. The final part of the chapter asks how early modern processes of naming, commemorating and selectively forgetting the dissolution have shaped modern historical scholarship. In seeking to expose the ‘Dissolution of the Monasteries’ as a seventeenth-century construct, this chapter also exposes modern historians’ reliance on a vocabulary and temporal framework that were themselves products of the dissolution and the wider English Reformation.