The Inheritance of Loss: Post-Reformation Memory Culture and the Limits of Antiquarian Discourse

Abstract

This essay explores the impact of the Reformation on the structures of early modern memory culture. Starting from recent historiographical revisions of post-Reformation practices of commemoration, it examines the interplay of remembering and forgetting in antiquarian scholarship — a discourse which confronted directly the problems posed by the destruction of material and ritual means for commemoration. While antiquarian discourse in particular conceived of its project in terms of salvaging the material objects of England’s past from the grave of oblivion, some scholars developed complex notions of the constructive role forgetting might play in a larger, transcendental vision of immortality. Reading Browne’s Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall (1658) against the background of antiquarian texts like Camden’s Britannia (1596; 1610), Stow’s Survey of London (1603), and Weever’s Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631) the essay charts the different strategies developed to come to terms with the painful memories of the Reformation, which constitute the thematic concern of these texts, as well as memory culture profoundly shaped by the forces of oblivion.