ABSTRACT
This point can be put schematically, as I have done here. But it is also supported by what we know of the dynamics of religious memory in early modern England. What Ivic and Williams claim of the “amnesia” that was imposed on the early modern English as the precondition for a certain form of Protestantism is true, and the history of attempts by early modern Protestant regimes to root out the appurtenances of Catholicism is well documented. Eamon Duffy, for instance, has detailed the assault on the rites, ceremonies, and customs of the Catholic church, as well as its literal icons. In Henry VIII’s reign, he notes, “men and women . . . had seen the monasteries and friaries go, the shrines pillaged, the lights in parish churches snuffed out, the Pope’s name scratched or cut out of the parish liturgical books” (Duffy 1992: 462). Iconoclasm under Edward was more severe yet, and continued under Elizabeth. For instance,
brasses and obit inscriptions calling for prayers for the dead . . . were ripped up from gravestones . . . the removal and the images and petitions of the dead was an act of oblivion, a casting out of the dead from the community of the living into a collective anonymity.
