ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the English Reformation deployment of the words ‘memory’ and ‘remembrance’ packs a dynamically aggressive, non-restorative, anti-tradition punch. Cultural historians are predisposed to prize memory, since memory is the very stuff of historiographical tradition. ‘Memory’ is one of those apple pie words that connote the tradition — the passing on — of a given community. The memorial project is caught, and almost stilled, between the effort to remember and the pressure to forget. Reflection on the painting will help us understand both Reformation memorialisation, or rather de-memorialisation, and the existential anguish of that de-memorialisation. Determination to remember that unreproducible moment of the past produces its own powerful impulse to destroy competing forms of memory, and in particular the competing, soul-destroying memory system that was passed on by tradition. The aggression of that anti-tradition, memorial effort leaves an indelible residue of melancholy in the painting.
