Book contents
- Memory and the English Reformation
- Memory and the English Reformation
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Events and Temporalities
- 1 Nailing the Reformation
- 2 Remembering the Dissolution of the Monasteries
- 3 Remembering the Past at the End of Time
- 4 Henry VIII’s Ghost in Cromwellian England
- 5 Remembering Mary, Contesting Reform
- 6 Converting the Cross
- Part II Objects and Places
- Part III Lives and Afterlives
- Part IV Rituals and Bodies
- Index
6 - Converting the Cross
Monuments, Memory and Time in Post-Reformation England
from Part I - Events and Temporalities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 October 2020
- Memory and the English Reformation
- Memory and the English Reformation
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Events and Temporalities
- 1 Nailing the Reformation
- 2 Remembering the Dissolution of the Monasteries
- 3 Remembering the Past at the End of Time
- 4 Henry VIII’s Ghost in Cromwellian England
- 5 Remembering Mary, Contesting Reform
- 6 Converting the Cross
- Part II Objects and Places
- Part III Lives and Afterlives
- Part IV Rituals and Bodies
- Index
Summary
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.
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- Information
- Memory and the English Reformation , pp. 132 - 150Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020