There is a brief epilogue that discusses President Jacques Chirac’s 1995 address at the Vél d’hiv memorial site, in which he acknowledged the French state’s complicity in the implementation of the Final Solution. I interpret the speech and subsequent developments which enshrined the idea that France was nation of Justes (a handful of misérables apart) as an effort to incorporate the Shoah itself into a national narrative with a neo-Gaullist inflection. I just sketch in the idea. As much as I admire Lanzmann’s movie, I didn’t want the reader to think that the history of deportation memory ended there.

In the conclusion, I return to the questions raised at the outset, the most important ones having to do with resistant-centered concentrationary memory and the purported silence about the fate of the Jews. In my view, the received wisdom on these issues, although not altogether wrong, is misleading in several respects. From the outset, the Deportation and how it was remembered were politicized phenomena, generating competing narratives and a fragmentation of memory (concentrationary memory was never as unified as it is often said to have been). Jews joined in the fracas, once again right from the outset, but they positioned themselves as one voice among many, not as the dominant voice. And everywhere, in the first postwar decades, religion—whether Catholic or Jewish—and religious forms shaped the ways in which the Deportation was represented. Indeed, Catholics and Jews entered into dialogue in these early years about the Jews’ special fate, an exchange that was often painful and tense but that over time enabled a level of mutual understanding, all the while bringing the reality of the genocide to public attention and this well before the Six Day War or even the Eichmann trial. In one critical respect, I do not propose to alter received wisdom: the Jewish side of the story gained in strength with the passage of time. It was not turning points like 1961 or 1967, however, that proved decisive so much as processes: interfaith dialogue and the openings it created for Jews to make themselves heard and generational shift which injected a new and transformative note of militancy into the Jewish story and its dissemination.

This chapter focuses on Samuel Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond (1592) and Michael Drayton’s Matilda (1594). Both poems are dedicated to women from overlapping and affirmedly Protestant circles, focused around the Sidneys and the Dudleys: namely, Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (Rosamond), and Lucy Harrington, soon to be Countess of Bedford (Matilda). Yet Drayton and Daniel suffuse their poems with references to aspects of pre-Reformation devotional culture and flash-points of sixteenth-century religious controversy: indulgences, legendaries of saints’ lives, monasticism, Purgatory, prayers for the dead, pilgrimage, confession. Whilst some allusions can be read ironically, the deployment of these religious allusions is not consistently or straightforwardly critical. This chapter consequently explores the ambivalent shadow cast by these poets’ recourse to emblems of pre-Reformation piety and to the fault lines of Reformation ideology, and examines the way in which these complainants’ desire to tell their stories simultaneously activates memories of Reformation. It argues that, in doing so, Daniel and Drayton comment on the fictionality and potential transience of their own poetic memorials, and interrogate the way in which memory is posthumously preserved and contested in an age in which historical reputations were being rewritten, and which bore witness to deliberate acts of erasure.

This chapter examines ‘the Stainton Missal’, a small folio in 8s, which survives in York Minster Library. It was printed in Paris in 1516 for use in York. The provenance covers a narrow geographical field, spanning the Reformation in emblematic form. In the exactly 500 years of its life, to this day, it has never moved outside of a small triangle in North Yorkshire, between York itself and the edges of the Dales and the Moors. However, the sensational aspect of the book is concealed by these details. At the opening of the Te igitur at the beginning of the Canon, the eye is confronted, we might say assaulted, by a vigorous slash, diagonally across the image of the Cross. Below, through the next dozens of leaves, is another, deeper gouge, in the opposite direction to the slashed crucifix, forming a reverse cross. The book is an astonishing example of iconoclasm. In this chapter, this macabre object is opened out to the fate more broadly of the fate of ritual books. How does the destruction of books relate to their consecration or preservation, and how does this relate to the history of memory before and after the Reformation?

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.

Richard Hooker wrote in 1594 that public worship was performed ‘not only with words, but also with certain sensible actions, the memory whereof is far more easy and durable than the memory of speech can be’. This chapter explores some of the ‘sensible actions’ which the post-Reformation Church of England inherited from the liturgy and worship of the medieval church, such as kneeling at communion, the sign of the cross in baptism and bowing at the name of Jesus. The significance of these gestures was widely acknowledged by Protestant reformers, who feared that they allowed elements of Catholic doctrine and worship to retain a foothold in popular memory. Some reformers argued that they should be abolished altogether, while others sought to harness their mnemonic power by giving them new meanings. The chapter argues that by looking at how the reformed Church remade its bodily regime, we can gain crucial insights into how it remembered and renegotiated its past.

This chapter explores how Tudor and Stuart families used portraiture to project and record their Protestant identities and reformed lineages over several generations. It asks why portraits as familiar visual sources displayed within a domestic context became important and considers how visual mnemonics were leveraged to secure spiritual status and determine ancestry or broader social status in a rapidly changing social order. The chapter demonstrates how the display of portraiture helped families recall and celebrate the personal narratives of their own Reformation histories in later centuries. It shows how portraiture could provide an assurance of constancy to reformed Christian ideals and a sense of spiritual stability over time, offering evidence of a potential pattern of election to Christian salvation.

The first part of the introduction explores how historians and literary scholars have approached early modern memory and sketches the trajectory of recent work on the memory of the English and European Reformations. It then examines the ways in which the religious revolution transformed the memorial culture it inherited from the medieval past and the manner in which it engendered new strategies of remembering and forgetting, commemoration and amnesia. The second section explains the architecture and structure of the volume, which is divided into four parts (1) Events and Temporalities; (2) Objects and Places (3) Lives and Afterlives; (4) Bodies and Rituals. It probes the temporal; spatial and material; biographical; and ceremonial and corporeal dimensions of the memory of the English Reformation, establishing a series of conceptual frameworks for the essays that follow. The Reformation is reconceptualised less as a unitary moment of rupture than as ongoing struggle to reconfigure the nation’s ecclesiastical and cultural heritage and to accommodate the unruly legacy of the past. A prolonged development involving impulses towards both historical preservation and oblivion, it continues to be refought in memory and the imagination.

This chapter explores the post-Reformation afterlives of two rock crystal reliquaries. It examines the biographies of these material artefacts ejected from churches and monasteries in tandem with liturgical items manufactured for following the advent of Protestantism. It investigates how these reliquaries navigated the upheavals of the sixteenth century and were repurposed for the clandestine Catholic community. Such containers for sacred relics were converted into table salts for secular domestic use and continued to be cherished as antiquities long after the Dissolution. Some of these objects were later recycled again as vessels for preserving holy relics, bequeathed in memory of the deceased or presented to mark a life event such as birth, baptism or marriage. This further phase of reuse was enhanced by awareness of their previous purpose and proximity to relics. Some were later given by recusants to religious houses overseas in an effort to preserve the patrimony of the Catholic faith. Such sacred objects reflect the way in which symbolic and spiritual meaning was endorsed by the imaginative memory accrued by subsequent generations within Catholic families and institutions.

This chapter examines the post-Reformation afterlives of churchyard, wayside and market crosses. It explores how they were implicated in the Protestant war against idols alongside the manner in which many were recycled for alternative purposes, probing the new layers of meaning they acquired as they were modified and the contested legacies they left to the generations that inherited them. Particular attention is paid to crosses upon whose decapitated pedestals subsequently became the base for sundials. It argues that crosses converted into timekeepers not merely illuminate the interconnections between memory and materiality, space and temporality, in post-Reformation culture. They also offer insight into the evolving concept of the ‘monument’ itself. They afford a glimpse of the process by which things designed to provoke remembrance became things worthy of preservation as historic artefacts themselves. They became signposts to a disappearing past that had to be fossilised lest it be lost.

This chapter explores literary representations of believers’ baptism published during the English Revolution. It focuses, in particular, on two surviving testimonies recounting participation in the ordinance originating in Fifth Monarchist communities: Anna Trapnel’s prophetic commemorations of her baptism recorded in 1654 and 1657-8, and the spiritual experiences of twelve-year-old Caleb Vernon published in 1666 as a spiritual antidote to the plague. The recounting of believers’ baptism in Fifth Monarchist communities was shaped by various political, social and doctrinal concerns originating both inside and outside the movement. The ordinance became a nexus of various imaginative affirmations of dissenting identity, including the connection of a present, commemorative act with a triumphant vision of the victorious saints in the near future. Baptisands recognised the commemorative function of baptism as a visible demonstration of their own spiritual regeneration and Christ’s resurrection (as well as other biblical models). However, this chapter will also explore how these surviving testimonies verge on bringing the past into the present, sometimes invoking divine presence through the physical gestures they describe. In such accounts, partly designed to urge fellow dissenters to undergo the ordinance, some believers appear to have transposed the pre-Reformation focus on immanence and sensory experience required by ritual acts.

This chapter adds to our understanding of popular memory by considering how English Catholics memorialised the effects of the Reformation through music, and focuses on Catholic songs that were preserved and circulated in manuscript miscellanies. Catholic musical responses to the Reformation can be divided into three necessarily interrelated categories: self-memorialisation; the composition of music that represented and remembered religious change; and musical memorials by future generations of Catholics which were informed by previous musical traditions. Composing, collecting and copying songs into manuscript miscellanies were creative, transformative activities; writing preserved visual evidence of acoustic events, and imprinted the music, words and ideas more firmly into the minds of the individuals holding the pen. Acts of preservation also subjected the songs to transformations due to their spatial context on the page. As well as thinking about their performers, composers and subjects, we also need to focus on the material aspects of the songs themselves. As a result, this chapter ends by focusing in particular on the little known manuscript miscellany BL Add MS 38599 started by Richard Shanne (1561-1627) from Methley, West Yorkshire. Attending to the commemorative layers of preserved manuscript miscellanies, it challenges existing binary understandings of confessional identity and memorial practices.

This chapter explores the reception of the visible legacy of sixteenth-century image-breaking in the years surrounding the English Civil War. For all its violence, the iconoclasm of the early Reformation never succeeded in banishing all superstitious images from English churches and cathedrals. In many places of worship, reminders of the old religion survived into the seventeenth century in the form of defaced carvings, headless statuettes, damaged picture windows and partially razed memorial brasses. Rightly or wrongly, seventeenth-century observers came to associate Reformation iconoclasm with a strategy of instructive defacement, intended to preserve visible examples of Catholic superstition marked with the imprint of reforming zeal. The Laudian reornamentation of English churches in the 1620s and 1630s led many puritans to conclude that the strategy of defacement had been a failure, and to call for a new wave of more thorough-going iconoclasm. Yet others, including John Milton, continued to embrace selective defacement as a model for coping with both literary and material idols.

Most cognitive changes are usually described as problems with memory. These cases are an example of the importance of identifying what cognitive process is afffected in order to improve diagnosis and management.

Men’s adventure magazines faded in popularity by the opening of the 1970s, the same time as the American war in Vietnam was drawing to its conclusion. Popular media stories of returning veterans hardly lived up to the ideals portrayed in the magazines. Unlike World War II, the war in Vietnam could not be looked back upon nostalgically. Boys had come back not as victorious heroes but as men broken by war. While this storyline was equally fraught with imprecision, it nonetheless challenged the dominant narratives of adventure magazines. Thus, we should ask why a society desires to remember war and male veterans in certain ways. Many veterans’ memoirs, in fact, reflected key aspects of the prevailing narratives within adventure magazines, even as they contested the idea that war was ennobling. How we talk about wartime expectations on heroism, violence, and sex matters. Men’s magazines contributed to a normalization process of sorts, helping tropes about masculinity and gender become embedded into the larger popular culture of the Cold War era. And in times of war – and, arguably, peace as well – this is can be dangerous. War erodes the veneer of civilization that makes behaviors in fantasyland seem more possible and, thus, acceptable.

Reconciliation requires individuals and groups to address past and present inequality, injustice, and violence to construct better futures based on stronger social bonds and a respect for human rights. Yet, the theoretical threads connecting the concepts are rarely unraveled. This chapter uses psychological frameworks to better understand reconciliation in relation to human rights. The authors propose that in postconflict settings, reconciliation and human rights are interdependent and mutually reinforcing, and neither is truly possible without the other. First, the authors briefly review understandings of reconciliation and how they are advanced by postconflict mechanisms such as truth commissions. Second, the authors explain how reconciliation may be connected to greater respect for human rights. Third, Colombia is used as a case study to demonstrate the complex relationships between forgiveness, reconciliation, and human rights. Finally, the chapter offers future directions for research at the intersection of human rights, psychology, and reconciliation.

Examines Quintus’ use of memory as a device for literary recapitulation. Considers what happens when Quintus’ characters, who are ‘still in the Iliad’, remember the Iliad incorrectly. It is argued that rather than offering a correction of Homer’s version of events, Quintus uses the pliability of memory as a retrospective figure to defend and continue the act of poetic selectivity. He is therefore able to provide Homer’s response to charges of lying prevalent in revisionist strands of his imperial reception (e.g. in Dio Chrysostom, Dares, Dictys and Philostratus – who emerge as key players in this chapter).