Memory, and the processes by which individuals, groups or communities remember, represent or forget the past, has been a burgeoning field of study since the early 1990s. In 1992 the anthropologist James Fentress and historian Chris Wickham collaborated on a project which probed the concept of ‘social memory’. They sought to provide new perspectives on the past by considering how the philosophy and psychology of remembering contributed to the self-definition of such diverse societies as medieval Iceland and modern Brazil. Indeed, such geographical and chronological versatility has become a marked feature of memory studies. This work was followed in 1995 by a translation of a seminal article on collective memory and cultural identity by the German Egyptologist Jan Assmann, which was originally published in 1988. Building on the markedly different approaches taken by the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs and the art historian Aby Warburg earlier in the twentieth century, Assmann developed a theory of cultural memory that articulated the complex interaction between memory, culture and society. Since then, an avalanche of studies on memory has been produced by scholars across a range of academic disciplines. In fact, memory studies can claim quite persuasively to be a truly interdisciplinary exercise at a time when interdisciplinarity is much vaunted.

The study of memory has been of no less interest to historians of early modern England. Most notably, Daniel Woolf, Alexandra Walsham and Andy Wood are each identified with the exploration of early modern memory. Matthew Neufeld has also published on the legacy of the British civil wars for cultural memory in later Stuart England. This work drew a riposte from Edward Legon in his 2015 dissertation on seditious memories in England and Wales. Legon argued, quite rightly, that Neufeld over-privileged the royalist interpretation of events and assumed that those who supported the Stuarts were able to ‘invent’ the past with impunity after 1660. Yet both scholars approach the subject as if New British History had never happened. Where Ireland or Scotland fit into their picture is presently unclear.