Amnesia and Oblivion in England’s Long Reformation

Abstract

This essay explores aspects of the history of forgetting in the context of England’s long Reformation stretching from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It considers official strategies for expunging the medieval religious past, through iconoclasm, sanctioned amnesia, and censorship, alongside attempts to counteract and combat this campaign of oblivion. It examines anxieties about forgetting in Protestant culture and the circumstances in which it became necessary to prescribe collective amnesia. It also addresses the more difficult question of what the generations that witnessed and experienced the religious upheavals of the period sought to forget about these decisive developments and why. It probes the elusive realm of selective memory at both collective and individual level, traces its subtle transmutations over time, and reflects on the methodological challenges of interpreting the gaps and silences of the historical record in which forgetting resides.

Keywords

• memory; amnesia; oblivion; forgetting; Reformation