ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the range of nostalgic responses to the loss of the monasteries and suggests that the sentiments were readily available to an eighteenth-century reader like Jane Austen. It describes the contours of a "nostalgic tradition" that begins in the sixteenth century and survives into Austen's day and explains the tropes and conventions of its chief "genres". Nostalgia for the ceremonies, prayers, and rituals of the dissolved English religious houses was closely related to disappointment about the destruction of the buildings themselves. The literature of monastic nostalgia includes four major genres: polemical attacks on the Dissolution, lamentations for traditional piety, antiquarian tracts, and sacrilege narratives. Despite the legal and physical danger of expressing sympathy for the monastic past, sixteenth-century writers produced several important lamentations. Of all of the sixteenth-century lamentations for monastic piety, none is as detailed and systematic in its examination of these issues as Michael Sherbrook's The Falle of Religiouse Howses, Colleges, Chantreys, Hospitalls, &c.
