The title of this volume may give the impression that the book focuses solely on how the Reformation is recalled as a fixed event from the past, but in fact the book addresses a more comprehensive theme of memory as it applies to how the Protestant, Catholic, and radical streams of Reformation were forgotten, debated, and reinvented from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The volume emerged as part of an interdisciplinary project that ran jointly at the Universities of Cambridge and York from January 2016 to September 2019, including a major conference at Cambridge in September 2017. A surge of interdisciplinary work over the past few decades on how societies remember has been applied to the Reformation and its interpretation since the sixteenth century. The influence of the French-Jewish historian Pierre Nora, and his extensive work on lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) has been acknowledged by the editors as important: “A lieu de mémoire, Nora says, can be ‘any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of a community’” (4). This phrase has been adopted as a leading metaphor for memory studies in the last generation, and Nora's ideas have left their imprint on several essays in the volume, even if some modify and challenge his conclusions in light of recent evidence.
The book features fourteen articles from scholars of a broad range of disciplines, including historians of early modernity, church history, and late medieval and early modern literature. The editors have carefully divided the fourteen essays into seven sections of paired chapters, focused on reflective themes such as fragmented memory and invented memory. Sometimes a pair of essays find common ground through a shared foundational concept such as oblivion. At other times, the editors have paired essays that contrast with one another in productive ways.
This volume is particularly strong in its presentation of the ways the Reformation formulated itself around symbols of collective memory, and how those acts of collective memory are monumentalized. By “symbols,” contributors by no means limit themselves to narratives found in written texts alone, but include paintings, church architecture, tombs, and other less known kinds of commemorative monuments, such as a drinking trough in memory of martyr Margery Polley erected at Pembury, Kent. This book also takes readers to a broad range of nations, including Germany, France, Poland, and England, and to cities like Leiden and Geneva, without neglecting how the Reformation was remembered in the Nordic countries, the Andes, and among the Anabaptist diaspora of North America.
The editors should also be commended for including how pre-sixteenth-century Hussites and the Waldenses were appropriated and refashioned during the Reformation and subsequent eras. While Stefano Villani's essay on “The British Invention of the Waldenses” might have made more use of the historical-critical scholarship of Thomas S. Freeman and others involved in the British Academy Project on John Foxe (1992–2009) when discussing pre-1655 British reception of the followers of Peter Waldo, it nonetheless demonstrates effectively how later British interpreters reappropriated Waldensianism for their own causes. Reference to the followers of Peter Waldo first appeared in the 1563 edition of Foxe's Acts and Monuments, and was reprinted without change in the 1570, 1576, and 1583 editions. How the Cattley/Townsend edition of Foxe (1837–43) informed collective memory in nineteenth-century England and beyond seems to be a weighty and worthy topic in its own right.
Remembering the Reformation is a fine collection of essays. The conclusions of Andrew Atherstone's excellent article on Victorian and Edwardian memorials to the Reformation martyrs in many ways affirm why the essays in this volume deserve to be widely read. Atherstone demonstrates how stone monuments were anything but fixed during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. On the contrary, martyr memorials were malleable objects of interpretation, very often deliberately messaged and shaped by the campaigning committee or the local press behind them. What better reason for studying the stimulating albeit never simplistic topic of remembering the Reformation?
