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Reformation, civic culture and collective memory in English provincial towns

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

Robert Tittler
Robert Tittler
Affiliation:
Dept of History, Concordia University, Montreal, H4B 1RH, Canada
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Abstract

This essay explores the concept of collective memory as a component of political culture in pre- and especially post-Reformation provincial towns. Pre-Reformation political culture depended heavily on a collective memory shaped by traditional religious experience and institutions. When so many of these were destroyed by the Reformation, it became necessary for the ruling elites of provincial towns to create alternative cultural forms, and thus to refashion a usefully legitimizing political culture. Three forms of this refashioned and legitimizing collective memory – civic regalia, civic portraiture and historical writing – are examined as they applied to the provincial urban milieu in the years c. 1540–1640.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , December 1997 , pp. 283 - 300
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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References

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32 See, the portrait of Giles Tooker of Salisbury, clutching the charter he did so much to obtain for the borough, reprinted in Haskins, C., Salisbury Corporation Pictures and Plate, 2 (Salisbury, 1910; 1st pub. 1888), 9–12.Google Scholar

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51 Daniel Woolf's much more exhaustive study of the issue has yielded a map of the towns producing urban chronicles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to be published in his forthcoming The Origins of Modern Historical Culture. No less than thirty locations are indicated. My thanks to him for sharing this information with me.

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