Electronic afterlives: digitisations from the Remembering the Reformation exhibition

We’re pleased to announce that as part of the legacy of the Remembering the Reformation digital exhibition we are able to present fuller digitisations of two of our exhibits, in collaboration with two of our partners.

Stainton Missal, f101r
Stainton Missal folio 101 (recto). From the York Digital Library (click here to visit page)

The Stainton (or ‘wounded’) Missal is not only an important liturgical text of late medieval Catholicism but also, through its later, iconoclastic defacement yet survival, an emblem of the violence of Reformation memory. It is thus an artefact of complex and contradictory processes of remembering and forgetting, of destruction and preservation. This volume is now fully digitised, and can be viewed here. We are very grateful to our partners at York Minster Library for making this possible. You can also learn more about the Missal — which has become the flagship image of our project — here.

‘Table of the X. first Persecutions of the Primitiue Church’
‘Table of the X. first Persecutions of the Primitiue Church’. From Cambridge Digital Library here.

The illustrations from John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments — or ‘Book of Martyrs’ — are among the most well-known images from sixteenth-century England, and have been seen as an integral part of a book that proved to be one of the most enduring acts of early modern memory-making. In collaboration with Cambridge University Library, we were able to digitise all 160 images from the stunning and unique 1570 edition held by the library, which is a contemporary coloured presentation copy. These images, along with further information on the illustrations, can be seen here. Huge thanks to all from Cambridge Digital Library, and particularly Huw Jones, for their hard work in preparing this digitisation for publication.

Both of these digitisations are fully and freely available to all. We hope that they will not only prove useful and lasting resources for other scholars, but also that they will reach out to a wider audience and help to make these two fascinating items better known.