ABSTRACT
Although the concept of the ‘everyday’ has been the subject of much recent debate as to its definition and scope, this issue had been no less controversial in early modern England. By the second half of the sixteenth century a whole series of objects that, prior to the Reformation, had been kept in private houses as an aid and stimulus to daily prayers and devotions were now condemned by the state and subject to serious criminal sanction. The Protestant authorities not only sought to reform the liturgical calendar of saints’ days and rituals that had formerly regulated community life, they sought also to stamp out the daily rituals and devotions that had been practised within the domestic seĴing. In spite of the risks involved, many within Elizabethan England’s Catholic minority continued to employ such objects in what might be described as a material sub-culture. There remains very liĴle investigation of these objects owing to their oĞen ephemeral nature and consequent rarity, and also for the persistent marginalisation of this minority group within the dominant discourse of English historiography.1 By following the ‘biography’ of one such object, this chapter will seek to raise questions as to the contested nature of objects that some sought to normalise as ‘everyday’, others condemned as highly dangerous, and later generations dismissed as culturally irrelevant.
