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
- Part II Objects and Places
- Part III Lives and Afterlives
- 13 Compromise Refashioned
- 14 History, Heresy and Henry V
- 15 The Letters of the Martyrs
- 16 Competing Lives and Contested Objects
- 17 Visual Memory, Portraiture and the Protestant Credentials of Tudor and Stuart Families
- 18 Legends, Shrines and Ruined Tombs
- Part IV Rituals and Bodies
- Index
18 - Legends, Shrines and Ruined Tombs
Memory and Reformation in Female-Voiced Complaint
from Part III - Lives and Afterlives
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
- Part II Objects and Places
- Part III Lives and Afterlives
- 13 Compromise Refashioned
- 14 History, Heresy and Henry V
- 15 The Letters of the Martyrs
- 16 Competing Lives and Contested Objects
- 17 Visual Memory, Portraiture and the Protestant Credentials of Tudor and Stuart Families
- 18 Legends, Shrines and Ruined Tombs
- Part IV Rituals and Bodies
- Index
Summary
This chapter focuses on Samuel Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond (1592) and Michael Drayton’s Matilda (1594). Both poems are dedicated to women from overlapping and affirmedly Protestant circles, focused around the Sidneys and the Dudleys: namely, Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (Rosamond), and Lucy Harrington, soon to be Countess of Bedford (Matilda). Yet Drayton and Daniel suffuse their poems with references to aspects of pre-Reformation devotional culture and flash-points of sixteenth-century religious controversy: indulgences, legendaries of saints’ lives, monasticism, Purgatory, prayers for the dead, pilgrimage, confession. Whilst some allusions can be read ironically, the deployment of these religious allusions is not consistently or straightforwardly critical. This chapter consequently explores the ambivalent shadow cast by these poets’ recourse to emblems of pre-Reformation piety and to the fault lines of Reformation ideology, and examines the way in which these complainants’ desire to tell their stories simultaneously activates memories of Reformation. It argues that, in doing so, Daniel and Drayton comment on the fictionality and potential transience of their own poetic memorials, and interrogate the way in which memory is posthumously preserved and contested in an age in which historical reputations were being rewritten, and which bore witness to deliberate acts of erasure.
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- Memory and the English Reformation , pp. 334 - 350Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020