Now We Are One

‘Anniversaries’: meaningful milestones, or retrospectively constructed narratives reflecting an artificially standardised notion of the passage and significance of time? Team RemRef remains sceptical. On the other hand, we like a birthday party as much as the next team of early modern historians and literary scholars and, as Brian’s most recent addition to our blog noted, the ‘Remembering the Reformation’ project has just turned one. It therefore seems appropriate, in this project centred on memory, that we spend just a little bit of time and web space recounting our own recent past.

‘Remembering the Reformation’ was officially launched on 28 January 2016, when Professor Eamon Duffy gave our first public lecture on ‘Rome Ruined, Rome Recalled: Reformation, Memory and the “Antiquity of Godliness”’ at the University of York in an event that was fully booked well in advance. If you missed this and have spent a whole year kicking yourself about it, fear not: the lecture recording is still available! The next day we held our first public workshop jointly with York Minster Library. We explored a few key items from the Minster’s collection, including the ‘wounded missal’, Elizabethan communion cups, and a set of rosary beads associated with the Babington family, with an audience of around 50. The range and depth of reactions to these objects, and the Reformation memories they evoke, was both fascinating and instructive.

Although ‘Remembering the Reformation’ was live, it took some time for our team to be officially complete: I started full-time work on the project in April, and Bronwyn completed the team in May. Our next big team event came soon after this, with the two-day ‘Memory and the Library’ workshop held in June. A full report on this event — a collaboration between our project and the Cathedral Libraries and Archives Network — is available for those who want to know more.

Over the summer ‘Remembering the Reformation’ went on tour! First, in August, we ran a (pleasingly packed!) roundtable session at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference held in Bruges. Then, in September, all four researchers presented some of their project work-in-progress at the Reformation Colloquium held at the University of Newcastle. Earlier that month Brian and Alex took part in a conference in Zwingli’s city, Zurich, which challenged some their settled assumptions about the Swiss Reformation.

Relaxing after our roundtable at the SCSC
Relaxing after our roundtable at the SCSC

 

One of the greatest pleasures of this project has been exploring the collections of, and working with, a wide range of libraries, archives and museums. Cambridge University Library, York Minster Library and Lambeth Palace Library are our three partners for our digital exhibition (to be launched later this year — watch this space!), and we’ve benefited enormously from the welcoming, generous and kind staff at all three collections. In October we were lucky enough to get exclusive use of Lambeth Palace Library for the day, and had a fantastic time exploring its Reformation books and manuscripts and — as our most liked tweet to date reveals — getting up close with some of the material objects in the collection. The very next day we had another equally envy-inducing trip (seriously, I saw other historians turning green as I told them how I’d been spending my time), this time going behind the scenes at the V&A where we met a range of expert curators and saw and handled an amazing array of early modern items, including sacred silver, devotional jewellery, and stained glass panels. Our visit coincided with the spectacular Opus Anglicanum exhibition. In December we were spoilt yet again with another fantastic visit; this time to The National Archives, where curators shared their knowledge with us, assembling a range of records associated that really showcased the breadth and potential of their collections for scholars of the Reformation. It is easy to think of TNA as a valuable but very familiar resource; this trip and the expertise of the curators reminded us all of its very rich under- and un-explored possibilities. We hope to collaborate with colleagues there later in 2017 in running a workshop for postgraduates.

Playing with Popish Plot playing cards at the V&A
Playing with Popish Plot playing cards at the V&A

 

Alongside our trips to Lambeth and the V&A, October also saw two more significant events for the project. On 21–22 October we held our ‘Remembering the English Reformation’ workshop at the University of York. Here twenty-four speakers gathered to present and discuss papers addressing the four strands of the project, each taking a case-study as its starting point before broadening into wider themes about religious change and memory. The focus was on discussion, debate, and collaboration, but Brian also engaged in a spot of historical re-enactment — dramatizing the mutilation of the medieval missal that has become our trademark (having trouble picturing this? Luckily Cathy Shrank captured the moment!). We were delighted to be joined by curators in charge of planning the Faith Gallery at Auckland Castle, Co. Durham.  We are currently working towards developing a volume of essays arising from this event.

Workshop in the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge (October 2016)
Workshop in the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge (October 2016)
Workshop in the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge (October 2016)

In October, we also held a second public workshop on ‘Books, Manuscripts and the Memory of a Movement’, one of the huge range of events organised as part of the annual Cambridge Festival of Ideas. This time we were generously hosted by Trinity College’s Wren Library, and we were very fortunate to be able to display items from the Wren’s own collection, including a startling portrait of (‘Bloody’) Bishop Bonner from the Master’s Lodge, the splendid coloured-in presentation copy of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, and a unique Protestant relic — a miniature box containing the finger bone of the English bible translator Miles Coverdale, which the Librarian had dug out of a dusty cupboard! We were also very pleased to be able to bring over some early printed books from Cambridge University Library — fully insured for their short journey by van across the Cam! Perhaps unsurprisingly, the chance to see treasures from these two collections attracted a large and engaged audience, and we all had a lot of fun inspecting these remarkable books and manuscripts and thinking about their links with Reformation, cultural change and memory. We recovered from a hectic fortnight with a church (and pub) crawl, taking in churches in Ickleton, Kedington, Long Melford and Lavenham, with Pevsner and Simon Jenkins as our guides.

I said we liked a good party: Team RemRef on our church crawlI said we liked a good party: Team RemRef on our church crawlI said we liked a good party: Team RemRef on our church crawl
I said we liked a good party: Team RemRef on our church crawl
I said we liked a good party: Team RemRef on our church crawl

 

Much of the success of our October workshop, and so many others we held and participated in this year, came from collaboration and the willingness of other people to lend their time and expertise to helping us. There are too many people we need to thank to name them all here, but we should particularly highlight a few: Emily Dourish and Suzanne Paul (Cambridge University Library), together with all their colleagues in Rare Books and Manuscripts who have tirelessly fetched so many items for us; Sarah Griffin and Vicky Harrison (York Minster Library); Hugh Cahill and Giles Mandelbrote (Lambeth Palace Library); Tessa Murdoch (V&A); Marianne Wilson (The National Archives); Nicolas Bell and Sandy Paul (Wren Library); and all those who have spoken at and participated in the events that we’ve held throughout this year. Finally, we owe an immense amount to Tom Taylor, our project administrator (and a talented scholar of eighteenth-century literature in his own right), who has masterminded many of our activities, not least the creation of our website. We are doing our best to convert him into an early modernist!

It’s been a busy year, then, but there’s plenty more still to come. 2017, and the Luther Quincentenary, is going to be a big one for most Reformation scholars. It is already shaping up to be an exciting year for ‘Remembering the Reformation’: we’re looking forward to launching our digital exhibition, to holding our major conference in Cambridge, 7–9 September (registration will open soon!), and to a range of other events, opportunities and collaborations, including a trip to the crucible of the Reformation, Wittenberg, to participate in the REFO500 Conference in May. Anniversaries might be artificial constructs, but they’re pretty good opportunities to take stock of how far you’ve come and how much you’ve got to look forward to — so happy birthday to us!