Introduction: Putting the Past to Work,
Working through the Past
Matthew Neufeld
abstract Following in the new directions that studies in historical culture have
taken, the present issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly, edited by Matthew
Neufeld, features work on the uses of the past in early modern England. In this
introduction, Neufeld makes the case for the more capacious approach toward
the historical in early modern England evinced in this special issue. In particular,
the essays foreground the growing interest in non-textual and popular representations of the past. keywords: The Uses of History in Early Modern England
(2006), edited by Paulina Kewes, with afterword by Fritz Levy; popular representations of the past; social and cultural memory; Daniel Woolf; historical evidence
and “truth-in-history”
in the winter of 1664, Richard Lewis of Brecknockshire testified about
aspects of his recent past to a special commission concerned with accounting for particular public funds collected during the 1640s and 1650s.1 In his testimony, Lewis
admitted that he had taken up residence around a decade earlier in the rectory attached
to Llangattock parish, the previous occupant having been sequestered for delinquency.
According to Lewis, over the next several years he collected the tithes and revenues
connected to the rectory, handing over an agreed portion to the local Committee for
the Ejection of Scandalous Ministers and another to the ejected clergyman. In a summary he declared that during his residence at the rectory he had “justly paid all that
was due from him without any gayn.” Lewis then quoted several clauses from the
Indemnity and Oblivion Act that, he claimed, relieved him from any liability for the
tithes he had collected before 1660. The last line of the document in which his testimony appears (probably written in his own hand) suddenly shifts the focus of his
account from his past fiscal probity to his long-standing political allegiance. Lewis
1. Stephen K. Roberts, “Public or Private? Revenge and Recovery at the Restoration of Charles II,”
Historical Research 59 (1986): 172–88.
Pp. 483–497. ©2013 by Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. issn 0018-7895 | e-issn 1544-399x. All rights
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huntington library quarterly | vol. 76, no. 4
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declares that “he now is and ever heretofore from the time of his birth and nativitie
hitherunto was a sure and faithfull subject and trewe man of our Soveraigne Lord the
King that now is.”2 The climax of Lewis’s testimony is thus a vow of lifelong fidelity to
the Stuart monarchy before, during, and after a period sometimes referred to as the
“late troubled times.”
Why Lewis chose to conclude with such an affirmation is uncertain, but clearly
he believed that it would help his case. Lewis evidently wanted the representatives of
the Court of Exchequer to interpret his past actions through the lens of his confessed
resilient royalism. Obviously, the return of the monarchy in 1660 had made it politically expedient for men such as Lewis to recall their experiences during the Interregnum as if, all along, the return of Charles Stuart had been their heart’s greatest
hope. The Restoration, its settlements, and their political consequences made some
kinds of personal stories about recent events more useful than others.3
The events of the immediate past were, however, more than simply a pile of
rough-cut logs that individuals such as Lewis could fashion into useful representations
for political exculpation. The past exerted a force that would shape and orient the
experience of men and women in post–Civil War England for many years afterward.
Working through that past would involve a series of both ongoing and episodic negotiations—within individual minds, among individuals, and within and between
groups and collectives—concerning how best to move forward through the reality
that the past had made of the present.4
A key aim of this issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly is to examine cases
of ordinary people in early modern England working through the reality of the past.
The phrase “working through” the past is more commonly used in the field of psychoanalysis than in historical scholarship.5 Nonetheless, Dominick LaCapra has suggested that it is appropriate language for any approach to the past that seeks to confront
problems while simultaneously attempting to counteract denial, unthinking repetition, and damaging repression. At the heart of working through the past is the effort to
achieve a certain perspective on it, one that provides a degree of control over and
responsible action toward the renewal of life in the present.6 The essays in this special
issue show that comparable efforts were part of everyday life in early modern England,
2. TNA, E 113/1 (Brecon), Testimony of Richard Lewis, February 1664.
3. For a fuller discussion of these issues, see Matthew Neufeld, The Civil Wars after 1660: Public
Remembering in Late Stuart England (Woodbridge, U.K., 2013).
4. On the structured nature of temporal experience, see David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History
(Bloomington, Ind., 1986), 22–28.
5. Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis II),” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII (1911–1913): The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique, and
Other Works, trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud (London, 1964), 145–56, originally published as
“Erinnern, Wiederholen und Durcharbeiten (Weitere Ratschläge zur Technik der Psychoanalyse, II),”
Internationale Zeitschrift für ärtztliche Psychoanalyse 2 (1914): 485–91.
6. Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998), 20–21, 39–42.
introduction
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even if the actors would not have understood their efforts in the way LaCapra has
suggested.
Our understanding of the complex ways in which history was constructed and
contested in England between 1500 and 1800 owes a great debt to a convergence of
aims and methodology among historians and literary scholars who became influential at the turn of the twenty-first century. To a significant degree, the propensity of
scholars of literature to historicize fictional texts, and the greater willingness of some
historians to acknowledge the fictive component of historical writing, were consequent on increased attention to the role of narrative in history.7 A special issue of the
Huntington Library Quarterly edited by Paulina Kewes, entitled The Uses of History in
Early Modern England, epitomizes the fruitfulness of this interdisciplinary collaboration.8 Following in the new directions that studies in historical culture have taken, the
present issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly features work on aspects of the uses
of the past in early modern England. The essays foreground the growing interest in
non-textual and non-elite reconstructions of the past in early modernity. Their focus
is less on the problem of determining the truth about the past, whether in historical
writing or fictional literature, and more on what the past meant for early modern people, and on the way it impinged on a range of social and cultural practices.
My purpose in this introduction is to make the case for a more capacious
approach toward the historical in early modern England. I will argue that broadening
the focus of study from histories to the past, as the essays in this special issue do, offers
a better opportunity to recapture some of the variety and depth of engagements with
times past that were undertaken by Englishwomen and Englishmen across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Such an expanded and expanding field of inquiry
ought to encompass the literary and the non-textual, elite and popular narrations,
along with reconstructions of both the momentous and the quotidian. Additionally, it
will be beneficial for students of “the past of the past” to remember that the past was
both a malleable resource and an incontrovertible reality for early modern people. As
the title of this introduction suggests, the past could be put to work by individuals and
communities, but the past also worked itself out in multiple ways within and through
them. Before I outline the intellectual pneuma of this issue, it will be useful to distinguish it from the one that animated The Uses of History and from the prospectus for
further study outlined in Fritz Levy’s afterword to that volume. I will then go on to a
brief account of recent developments within the history of the past, especially as these
concern early modern England.
7. A concise account of this intellectual moment is found in Chris Lorenz, “History and Theory,”
in The Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol. 5, Historical Writing since 1945, ed. Axel Schneider and
Daniel Woolf (Oxford, 2011), 13–35, esp. 23–29. The urtext of contemporary American narrative philosophy of history is Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
Europe (Baltimore, 1973).
8. Huntington Library Quarterly 68, nos. 1 and 2 (2005). The special issue was published in book
form, with an index, as The Uses of History in Early Modern England, ed. Paulina Kewes (San Marino,
Calif., 2006). Page references throughout this volume are to the book version.
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matthew neufeld
The Objectives of The Uses of History in Early Modern England
The general aims of The Uses of History reflect a cautiously positive appropriation of
the poststructuralist challenge to established epistemological and disciplinary boundaries separating fictional literature from historical writing.9 Put simply, Kewes sought
to bring together for comparative analysis genres, historical periods, and problems
that earlier generations of scholars treated separately. Most obviously, three of the contributions directly concern the historical or political implications of fictional literature, including the eighteenth-century novel.10 Furthermore, essays in the volume on
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, Milton’s ideological disputes with the Levellers, and late Stuart
secret histories are written by scholars based in literature departments.11 Similarly, the
chronological range of the subject matter extends well beyond the long-standing
boundary in literary studies between the Renaissance and Restoration periods, suggesting that “early modernity” did not end in 1700, let alone 1660. Related to this implication of cultural continuity across the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries is the volume’s
incorporation of religious historiography—evidence of a characteristic postrevisionist
receptiveness to the polemical power of religious languages and reasoning from the
Renaissance to the early Enlightenment era.12 Unsurprisingly, therefore, along with
the essays on Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, The Uses of History features four essays on confessional historiography from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.13
While shedding a great deal of light on the wide variety of literary genres through
which history was reconstructed and represented in early modern England, the volume is overwhelmingly centered on the cultural products of either educated or affluent writers—that is, England’s social and cultural elites. Moreover, the agenda for
future research outlined by Fritz Levy’s thoughtful afterword suggests that the works
of such individuals will remain the primary focus of scholarship on perceptions of the
past in early modernity. For example, Levy notes that to achieve a better grasp of the
entire scope of writing about the past, much research remains to be done on the admittedly vast corpus of published “histories.” Furthermore, when discussing the “utility of
history,” Levy refers exclusively to written works. Given that many of the essays in the
9. Paulina Kewes, “History and Its Uses,” The Uses of History, 5–9.
10. Blair Worden, “Historians and Poets,” 69–90; Richard Dutton, “‘Methinks the truth should live
from age to age’: The Dating and Contexts of Henry V,” 169–99; Karen O’Brien, “History and the Novel
in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” 389–405.
11. Martin Dzelzainis, “History and Ideology: Milton, the Levellers, and the Council of State in
1649,” 265–83; David Womersley, “Against the Teleology of Technique,” 91–104; John N. King, “Guides
to Reading Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,” 129–45; Eve Tavor Bannet, “‘Secret History’: Or, Talebearing Inside
and Outside the Secretorie,” 367–88.
12. See England’s Long Reformation, 1500–1800, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (London, 1998). On revisionism
in twentieth-century Stuart historiography, see Ronald Hutton, Debates in Stuart History (Basingstoke,
U.K., 2004), 6–31.
13. Christopher Highley, “‘A Pestilent and Seditious Book’: Nicholas Sander’s Schismatis Anglicani
and Catholic Histories of the Reformation,” 147–67; Felicity Heal, “Appropriating History: Catholic and
Protestant Polemics and the National Past,” 105–28; John Spurr, “‘A special kindness for dead bishops’:
The Church, History, and Testimony in Seventeenth-Century Protestantism,” 307–28; Andrew
Starkie, “Contested Histories of the English Church: Gilbert Burnet and Jeremy Collier,” 329–45.
introduction
487
volume cross lines of genre, period, and discipline, it is not surprising that he would
restate the question of boundaries, particularly those between history and other kinds
of writing. Interestingly, Levy also suggests that the long-standing problem of historical evidence and “truth-in-history”—a problem that has vexed early moderns and
scholars coming to terms with post-modernity—will continue to be a key concern of
researchers.14 In other words, studies of the uses of history will remain largely within
the Renaissance problematic of accounting for the emergence of new ways of accumulating knowledge about the past. Henceforth, Levy argues, they will have to broaden
their focus from the secular and factual to include the sacred and poetic.15
For Levy, the convergence of literary and cultural historians working on the uses
of history in early modern England appears ultimately to have increased the volume of
material they need to analyze in order to understand changes in historical thought.
More kinds of literature will need to be considered, but for the most part in the same
way as before. I would like to suggest, by contrast, that there has recently been a
remarkable shift in the way many scholars approach early modern encounters with
the historical, and that this has dramatically transformed the understanding of the
uses of history in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.
The Presence of the Past and Early Modern England
Since the mid-1990s, it has become increasingly common within the humanities and
social sciences to encounter discussions about the presence and power of the past.
Very often the key word in such discussions is “memory,” usually accompanied by the
descriptors “collective,” “social,” and “cultural.”16 Why have such kinds of memory, and
remembering, generated such a flurry of interest? One reason is suggested by the
efforts of modern nation-states, and groups within them, that have grappled with what
are deemed regrettable and tragic parts of their past: the republics of Germany and
South Africa are probably the two most familiar examples.17 But the women and men
who witnessed the twentieth century’s epic conflicts are gradually passing away, provoking a concern over a rapidly receding past, heightened by the pace of social and
technological change. The commitments of identity politics, furthermore, have inspired increasing investigations of past injustice.18 Until recently, however, there have
14. Fritz Levy, “Afterword,” Uses of History, 409–14, 416; cf. Donald R. Kelly and David Harris
Sacks, introduction to The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain, ed. Sacks and Kelly (Cambridge, 1997).
15. Joseph M. Levine, Humanism and History: Origins of Modern English Historiography (Ithaca,
N.Y., 1987).
16. On this development, see Alon Confino, “History and Memory,” in The Oxford History of
Historical Writing, 5:36–51.
17. David Gross, Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture (Amherst,
Mass., 2000); and Richard Ned Lebow, “The Memory of Politics in Postwar Europe,” in The Politics of
Memory in Postwar Europe, ed. Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudio Fogu (Durham, N.C., 2006), 1–39.
18. Jean-Clément Martin, La Vendée de la mémoire, 1800–1980 (Paris, 1989); Commemorations:
The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, N.J., 1994); Martha Minow, Between
Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston, 1998);
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matthew neufeld
been few studies of the ways in which early modern communities addressed the problem of a difficult past.19
The growing interest in social and cultural ways of remembering is something
early modernists can and should welcome, although not uncritically.20 Some scholars,
for example, accept the utility of thinking about non-individual ways of remembering
for understanding a historical period or process, while distinguishing such collective
encounters or engagements with the past from the goals and outcomes of professional
historical writing. It is argued that the former is primarily concerned with finding a
present-centered role for an aspect of or from the past, while the latter seeks to uncover
the truth about the past. History must not, therefore, be confused with memory.21
Yet it has long been argued that memory mattered for history in early modern
England. Both elite and popular perceptions of the past greatly influenced how the
English conducted public affairs. These perceptions can even explain why and how
some individuals chose to intervene politically at certain times or in relation to particular issues.22 This argument has recently been provocatively recapitulated by Jonathan
Scott.23 According to Scott, both personal and public memories of the violence and
upheavals of the recent past explain (indeed, almost overdetermine) the responses of
the political nation to events after 1660. Restoration England was, in Scott’s estimation, a “prisoner” of its public memory of the late civil discords.24 Moreover, Scott’s
emphasis on the importance of public memory underlines his conviction that concerns over dangers of popery and arbitrary government had a unifying power in Eng-
Erna Paris, Long Shadows: Truth, Lies, and History (Toronto, 2000); T. G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson,
and Michael Roper, “The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration: Contexts, Structures, and
Dynamics,” in The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration, ed. Ashplant, Dawson, and Roper
(New Brunswick, N.J., 2000), 3–86; and Eelco Runia, “Burying the Dead, Creating the Past,” History
and Theory 46 (2007): 313–25.
19. A notable exception concerning early modern England is Mark Stoyle, “Remembering the
English Civil War,” in The Memory of Catastrophe, ed. Peter Gray and Kendrick Oliver (Manchester,
2004), 19–30.
20. Wulf Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective
Memory Studies,” History and Theory 41 (2002): 179–97.
21. See Pierre Nora, “General Introduction: Between Memory and History,” in Realms of Memory:
Rethinking the French Past, ed. Pierre Nora, trans. Mary Trouille (Chicago, 2001), 1–6. Not surprisingly, this contention has been challenged by a few historians, such as Peter Burke, “History as Social
Memory,” in Memory: History, Culture, and the Mind, ed. Thomas Butler (Oxford, 1989), 97–113; and
Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Burlington, Vt., 1993); and strongly reasserted by
others, including David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge, 1998),
101–4, 112–20.
22. For example, see B. Behrens, “The Whig Theory of the Constitution in the Reign of Charles II,”
Cambridge Historical Journal 7 (1941): 42–71 at 44.
23. Jonathan Scott, “England’s Troubles: Exhuming the Popish Plot,” in The Politics of Religion in
Restoration England, ed. Tim Harris, Paul Seaward, and Mark Goldie (Cambridge, 1990), 108–31; Scott,
“England’s Troubles, 1603–1702,” The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture,
ed. R. Malcolm Smuts (Cambridge, 1996), 20–38; and Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century
English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge, 2000), 20–39.
24. Scott, England’s Troubles, 26–39, 162–66.
introduction
489
lish political culture across what might be called the “short seventeenth century”
(1618–89).25 By contrast, Grant Tapsell and George Southcombe have recently argued
that while Restoration England was understandably obsessed with defining the
authority of the monarchy in terms of the past, particularly the civil wars, the impact
of “England’s troubles” qualitatively transformed the political and religious context
after 1660.26
Tapsell and Southcombe are not unique in putting remembering and memory
at the center of their analysis of early modern England. As I will show, since the publication of The Uses of History, memory appears to have overtaken history in studies
focused on early modern English perceptions and applications of the past. While it
might be tempting to suggest that this shift represents the belated acceptance of an academic fad among early modernists, the main trends of this work indicate that historians are using memory to rethink enduring historical problems in innovative ways. In
particular, attending to perceptions and uses of the past can help explain significant
cultural change and violent conflict. It just so happens that similar problems have
been, to this point at least, the main concern of many working within cultural and
social memory studies.27
Early modernists who have recently applied the frameworks of social or cultural
memory have for the most part focused on the experience and representation of two
significant moments of change and conflict—the British Reformation and its putative
seventeenth-century descendant, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. On the other hand,
much recent work examines how and why the memory of these events was employed
in the construction of identity or as a resource for ideological debate. For example, a
number of works published after The Uses of History examine how the Reformation
and those invested in its success reconstructed England’s past along either protoProtestant or anti-Catholic lines. Jennifer Summit’s award-winning monograph shows
how the archives and libraries assembled by scholars seeking to vindicate the new
political and religious order essentially invented much of what would become England’s “Middle Ages.” The textual tools ostensibly devised to help the future to know
the past, and to foster continuity between “now” and “then,” in fact erased much of
what had been and foregrounded the discontinuity wrought by religious change.28
Diarmaid MacColloch’s recent article, though not invoking social or cultural memory,
25. This is a concern shared by the contributors to The Uses of History; see above, p. 486.
26. Grant Tapsell and George Southcombe, Restoration Politics, Religion, and Culture (Basingstoke,
U.K., 2009), 18–19.
27. For example, see Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York, 1980); David
Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); and Jeffrey
Olick, The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility (New York, 2007).
28. Jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2008);
cf. Patrick Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium
(Princeton, N.J., 1994). For a similar argument about the Reformation’s impact on England’s
“mnemonic culture,” see Alexandra Walsham, “History, Memory, and the English Reformation,”
Historical Journal 55 (2012): 899–938 at 936.
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demonstrates how one seventeenth-century scholar, Robert Ware, literally invented
a famous anecdote about Elizabeth I to bolster the standing of bishops in the postRestoration Protestant Church of Ireland.29
Other work has foregrounded those social groups that either re-invented their
past in response to the Reformation or appropriated aspects of their past to contest its
outcome. For example, Andy Wood’s analysis of the 1549 rebellions contains an illuminating discussion of the way in which popular recollections of the uprisings in Norfolk were weapons of plebeian resistance to the increasingly heavy hand of agrarian
capitalism and the Tudor state.30 Focusing attention further up the social scale, Peter
Sherlock examines funerary monuments built by the gentry after the Reformation,
tracing their re-invention of familial and status privileges over time. These lapidary
testimonies were designed to convey novel understandings of a family’s place within
their locality, while also taking into account the new meaning of death and the body
after the proscription of purgatory from the reformed English Church.31 Similarly,
Jan Broadway’s account of the rise of local history writing among the gentry underlines the usefulness of erudition about the genealogical and regional past for both
new and established aristocratic households. The gentry could be especially keen to
assert their connection to their locality and its people during a period of social and
religious change.32 Philip Schwyzer, to consider a last example, makes a convincing
case that much of the power of Shakespeare’s Richard III derives from a particular
moment in the cycles of the cultural memory of the Wars of the Roses and the Henrician Reformation. The play appeared at precisely the period when active memories—
recollections of firsthand witnesses—of the last Plantagenet were lost forever, while at
the same time the generation able to recall England before Henry’s break with Rome
was passing away.33
Unlike the religious and political reformations, the English civil wars did not
produce widespread rewritings of national, local, and family histories. However, the
period witnessed the advent of new political and religious groups that turned to the
past as part of their quest for legitimacy or toleration. The events of the 1640s and 1650s
also prompted many people to reassess or rewrite their past in order to make sense of
the present. For example, Tim Cooper argues that Richard Baxter and John Owen, two
notable Puritan clergymen, parted fellowship because their experiences—and by
extension, their personal memories—of the civil wars differed.34 Similarly, Andrew
29. Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Foxes, Firebrands, and Forgery: Robert Ware’s Pollution of Reformation History,” Historical Journal 54 (2011): 307–46. I did not have an opportunity to include Susan
Guinn-Chipman, Religious Space in Reformation England: Contesting the Past (London, 2013) in this
discussion.
30. Andy Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2007).
31. Peter Sherlock, Monuments and Memory in Early Modern England (Aldershot, U.K., 2008).
32. Jan Broadway, “No Historie So Meete”: Gentry Culture and the Development of Local History in
Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Manchester, 2006).
33. Philip Schwyzer, “Lees and Moonshine: Remembering Richard III, 1485–1635,” Renaissance
Quarterly 63 (2010): 850–83.
34. Tim Cooper, “Why Did Richard Baxter and John Owen Diverge? The Impact of The First Civil
War,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 61 (2010): 496–516.
introduction
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Hooper’s evaluation of Sir Thomas Fairfax’s memoirs demonstrates how the former
New Model Army leader refashioned aspects of his military and political career,
largely seeking exculpation for the regicide.35 By contrast, according to R. C. Richardson, while Reverend John Nalson was not himself a veteran of the conflict, he willfully
refashioned the 1640s into an image of the 1680s in his monumental Impartial Collection, as well as his pamphlets, in order to “re-fight the civil wars.” In practice, this meant
reprinting documents to prove the inherently seditious intentions of Dissenters
and Whigs.36 Only slightly less vituperative was Nalson’s contemporary Sir William
Dugdale. As Stephen K. Roberts shows in an essay focused on the antiquary’s postRestoration career, Dugdale employed his erudition in a historical attack on Exclusionists in the 1680s, the so-called Short View of the Late Troubles in England, although
his desire to maintain cordial connections with such Presbyterians as Edward Harley
and John Rushworth kept the work from descending to the level of a diatribe.37 Both
Richardson and Roberts recapitulate Scott’s point that for many people in late Stuart
England, the civil wars were far from over.38
For some people, however, it was not the civil wars but the consequences of the
Restoration settlements that were most important for shaping and sustaining the life
and continuity of their communities. This was particularly true for minority Protestant groups in late Stuart England. Historical writing became a crucial genre in the formation of Dissenting identity, as John Seed has argued. Most famously, Reverend
Edmund Calamy’s account of the clergymen ejected on “Black Bartholomew Day”
became very important for fostering among eighteenth-century Presbyterians and
Congregationalists a separate and enduring religious identity, one that was grounded
in a powerful narrative of victimization at the hands of the established Church.39
That this posture of righteous suffering in the face of an oppressive polity was to a great
extent the result of post–Civil War politics is evident from an example of pre–Civil War
historical writing examined by Peter Lake.Thomas Ball’s Life of John Preston was
intended, Lake argues, to guide politique godly men to act in ways that would contest
both thorough monarchy and Laudian churchmanship, while eschewing the quasirepublican model offered by the Puritan commonwealths of New England. Additionally, Lake demonstrates that the memory of the 1620s presented in Ball’s history of
35. Sir Thomas Fairfax, “Memorials,” Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 36. A version of the memoir was
published by Fairfax’s cousin Britain in 1696. See Andrew Hooper, “Black Tom”: Sir Thomas Fairfax
and the English Revolution (Manchester, 2007).
36. John Nalson, An Impartial Collection of the Great Affairs of State (London, 1682). See R. C.
Richardson, “Re-fighting the English Revolution: John Nalson (1637–1686) and the Frustrations of
Late Seventeenth-Century English Historiography,” European Review of History 14 (2007): 1–20.
37. Sir William Dugdale, A Short View of the Late Troubles in England (London, 1682). See
Stephen K. Roberts, “Ordering and Methodizing: William Dugdale in Restoration England,” in
William Dugdale, Historian, 1605–1686: His Life, His Writings, and His County, ed. Christopher Dyer
and Caterine Richardson (Woodbridge, U.K., 2009), 66–88.
38. Scott, England’s Troubles, 162–66; and Ronald Hutton, The Restoration: A Political and Religious
History of England and Wales, 1658–1667 (Oxford, 1993), 290.
39. John Seed, Dissenting Histories: Religious Division and the Politics of Memory in EighteenthCentury England (Edinburgh, 2009).
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Preston’s career was meant to show politically engaged Puritans how best to contest
Charles I’s Personal Rule.40 Thus, Ball marshaled memory to change the course of
English history.
The scholarship briefly reviewed above, like the contributions to The Uses of History, draws mostly on written or printed texts for arguments about the legacies of the
Reformation and violent conflict in Stuart Britain. Recently, these complex problems
have been tackled from the standpoint of the natural environment.41 Articulations
about the past and its meaning appeared not only in the space of the printed page but
also in fields and along roads. For example, Nicola Whyte’s study of Exchequer records
reveals that features of the landscape provided a crucial resource for resolving disputes
over land use in early modern England. Thus, while the Reformation removed one or
more layers of meaning from particular markers, such as roadside crosses, the evidence
of disputes over access rights suggests that local people were quite capable of refiguring
what were once pointers to the sacred for their own more mundane purposes. It was
not, Whyte argues, so much that these religious symbols were crosses as that they were
old, making them useful markers in the struggle over the extent of land and rights of
entrance to it.42 The Reformation thus gave material traces of the natural and human
past new uses and meanings.
The argument that the Reformation fostered a straightforward diminution of
the sacred in early modern conceptions of time and space is now made with much less
confidence, thanks in large measure to the work of Alexandra Walsham. Two of her
books, one on providence in Elizabethan and early Stuart England, and a more recent
one concerned with the impact of religious change on the experience of the natural
world from 1500 to 1800, present a distinctly anti-Weberian interpretation of Protestantism’s cultural legacy. The religious Reformation did not lead to the contraction or
weakening of the numinous sphere but rather the translation (in the sense of being
carried over) and transmutation of the images, metaphors, and stories by which Irish
and British people understood Creation and their place within it. The natural world
may have been re-envisioned as Britain became a country of Protestants (while Ireland was officially Protestant but practically Catholic, especially outside Ulster), but it
also strongly shaped the contours and character of belief, practice, and the senses of
the past.43
40. Peter Lake, “The ‘Court,’ the ‘Country,’ and the Northamptonshire Connection: Watching the
‘Puritan Opposition’ Think (Historically) about Politics on the Eve of the English Civil War,” Midland
History 35 (2010): 28–70.
41. On the mnemonic use of the landscape, see David Rollison, The Local Origins of Modern Society:
Gloucestershire 1500–1800 (London, 1991), 71–73; I thank Gary Rivett for this reference.
42. Nicola Whyte, Inhabiting the Landscape: Place, Custom, and Memory, 1500–1800 (Oxford,
2009), 127–61; Whyte is careful, nonetheless, to avoid linking new uses for ancient symbols with a
Weberian “disenchantment of the world” thesis; cf. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic:
Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1971), 58–89.
43. Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999); and Walsham,
The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland
(Oxford, 2011).
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Working With and Working Through the Past
While the questions Levy poses in his afterword to The Uses of History will undoubtedly engage researchers for a long time to come, the foregoing review of a portion of
the literature concerning history and remembering in early modern England suggests
a move beyond the Renaissance problematic of true-versus-false knowledge about the
past. On the one hand, the essays in this issue broaden the scope of study by looking at
practices as well as texts, and at popular as well as elite forms of representation. On the
other, they are concerned with the past and its uses. While the first ambition could be
seen as yet another incremental change to the field of historical thought, the latter
should be regarded as a qualitative shift in the approach to and understanding of the
power and place of the past for early modern people.
In a sense, the shift of subject and approach advocated by this issue echoes the
intellectual trajectory of one of the leading scholars of “the historical” in the early modern period, Daniel Woolf. This can be quickly charted by comparing the title of
Woolf ’s first monograph, published in 1990, with that of his third, which appeared
more than a dozen years later. In the former, which centered on historical writing
before the civil wars, the key word was “history,” while thirteen years later it was “the
past.” The change in emphasis to “the past” in Woolf ’s later book was both necessary
and significant—first, because it testified to both the wider range of sources under
consideration and to the non-elite social origins of some of their producers, and second, because it foregrounded his engagement with the questions and concerns posed
by students of historical culture. Historical writing and indeed writing in general made
up only one, albeit an increasingly significant, component of the “modes of discourse
within which the past is recovered, represented and transmitted” in the twelve generations after the Battle of Bosworth Field.44
The contributors to this special issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly aspire
to foreground the gains that a more capacious approach to the presence of the past in
early modern England makes possible. However, they recognize (as Woolf has done
previously) that they are not innovators. After all, it has been over four decades since
Sir Keith Thomas discussed “The Appeal to the Past” in his monumental Religion and
the Decline of Magic;45 and it is almost exactly thirty years since he delivered a lecture
titled “The Perception of the Past in Early Modern England.” In this lecture, Thomas
noted that “the past was . . . ever present in the minds of the common people.” Thus,
an appreciation of popular memory in post-Reformation England is nothing new.
Nor is the awareness that the past could be put to use for a variety of reasons. For
example, according to Thomas, early modern England had two myths concerning its
pre-Reformation past, one that supported the social order and one that subverted it.
These conflicting visions, he argued, represented two contending value systems, each
with its own ideal of where the nation ought to be headed politically and religiously.
44. Daniel Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England: Erudition, Ideology, and “The Light
of Truth” from the Accession of James I to the Civil War (Toronto, 1990); and Woolf, The Social Circulation
of the Past: English Historical Culture, 1500–1730 (Oxford, 2003), 9.
45. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 461–514.
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Puritans and Laudians each constructed a myth about the medieval past that could be
dislodged neither by “historical research,” nor, as Thomas implies, by the violent upheavals of civil war.46
Thomas’s lecture opened up new vistas on the past and its uses, yet concluded
with a recapitulation of the Renaissance problematic of true-or-false knowledge. In
particular, Thomas reminded his audience of the relative powerlessness of academics
to alter the “historical perceptions of ordinary people.” While I certainly agree that historians (and researchers in cognate disciplines) have a responsibility to tell the truth
about history that is not incumbent to the same extent on laypeople, I would argue that
there are gains to be made by shifting the focus from historical epistemology to historical ontology.47 By that I mean simply that there is much we can learn about the power
of the past in early modern England by attending to its reality for ordinary people.
There is still much we do not understand and cannot explain about why some elements of the past were at times more vivid to some people than to others. As the essays
in this volume show, the past formed and re-formed the outlooks and actions of large
and small communities—from social movements to parish republics to clergy families. Furthermore, the past had political uses beyond the more familiar exemplary narratives conveyed in historical writing, including arranging the local landscape,
asserting the pre-eminence of a particular county dynasty, and mobilizing citizens to
demand their ancient rights. Often it was through the process of discovering or constructing a usable past that ordinary women and men were spurred to contest the
unequal distribution of power in the local or national community.
The essays in this special issue present important case studies of elite and nonelite women and men who used objects, texts, and images from or about the past to
alter perceptions, justify their sense of identity, or vindicate a particular course of
action in the present. It is clear from these contributions that interpretations and representations of the past could be and were contested at moments of significant religious or political upheaval. The articles by Gary Rivett and Philip Baker foreground
instances from the Civil War era in which individuals with different amounts of cultural capital and social power struggled to bring the past to bear on contemporary
negotiations for a new political and religious settlement. Baker’s essay, “Londons Liberties in Chains Discovered: The Levellers, the Civic Past, and Popular Protest in Civil
War London,” sheds light on the power and use of the nation’s medieval past during the
1640s. While not denying that a variety of factors influenced the campaign, Baker
points out that the failure among researchers fully to locate the Levellers and their ideas
in a civic context is a major oversight. Indeed, he contends that the Levellers’ physical
inhabitancy, and their identification with the city’s medieval rights and freedoms,
46. Keith Thomas, The Perception of the Past in Early Modern England: The Creighton Trust Lecture
1983 (London, 1983), 9, 21–23.
47. This formulation was first suggested to me by Michael Bentley, “Are Historical Periods Real?”
(unpublished paper, American Historical Association conference, New York, 2008); admittedly, my
emphasis on the reality of the past is somewhat different from his. See Michael Bentley, “Past and
‘Presence’: Revisiting Historical Ontology,” History and Theory 45 (2006): 349–61. Again, I thank
Gary Rivett for this reference.
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undoubtedly fashioned (if not determined) central elements of a program that should
be located within a pre-existing tradition of popular protest surrounding the historical
rights of London’s citizenry.
In “Peacemaking, Parliament, and the Politics of the Recent Past in the English
Civil Wars,” Rivett explores an overlooked aspect of Civil War era historical writing:
the construction and publication of a historical work conducive to a secure peace. Parliament commissioned two separate histories in early 1647: a translated version of
Arrigo Davila’s Historie of the Civill Warres of France and Thomas May’s History of the
Parliament of England. These historical writings faced strong competition from a variety of publications that were intended to hold parliamentary authority to account for
its promises, obligations, and responsibilities while attempting to legitimize their own
peacemaking agendas. Such publications, Rivett argues, indicate that historical writing was a component of metropolitan public discourse and a major factor mobilizing
individuals and institutions to become politically active.
The past was, of course, put to use in a wide variety of less violent and less
overtly political circumstances. Lucy Munro’s essay, “Speaking History: Linguistic
Memory and the Usable Past in the Early Modern History Play,” opens a window onto
the uncanny temporality of late Elizabethan history plays, including Shakespeare’s
2 Henry IV and Henry V, and Anthony Munday’s Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon. While twenty-first-century writers often use old-fashioned vocabulary and
syntax to lend verisimilitude to a historical narrative, their sixteenth-century counterparts instead drew on contemporary debates about the nature and status of the English
language, using archaic style as part of a complex meditation on the relationship
between past and present, and between recollection and representation. For example,
in the faux-chivalric diction of Shakespeare’s Pistol, the dramatic language is temporally unstable, at once recalling the past but also actively re-creating and re-embodying
it. That is, the language looked forward to the present of the 1590s just as much as the
character’s speech adhered to the historical period that was being re-created.
Re-creating the past was also a concern for newly ascendant families among
the gentry, as Jan Broadway points out. Her essay, “Symbolic and Self-Consciously
Antiquarian: The Elizabethan and Early Stuart Gentry’s Use of the Past,” centers
around two material modes through which the past circulated socially among the
gentry and their localities: a particular style of funeral monument and the genre of
narrative painting. Her study adds to our understanding of county communities in
seventeenth-century England, since a connection to the medieval past was fundamental to gentle families seeking to assert their status and power within a locality, even as
they were forced to come to terms with social and economic change.
Enclosing common or waste lands transformed the physical as well as the
mnemonic landscapes of early modern England. Nicola Whyte’s essay, “An Archaeology of Natural Places: Trees in the Early Modern Landscape,” examines the material
dimensions of oral recollections in early modern England. Her analysis explores the
way in which old trees were multivalent markers within local customary topographies.
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For example, since old trees were both signs of times past and identifiable places, they
manifested the temporal and spatial contexts of oral remembering. Similarly, ancient
trees could divide communities from one another while simultaneously serving as
places of gathering. Trees were non-human features through which and at which ordinary people remembered who they were in relation to Creation, and where new
understandings of humanity’s place in the natural environment were tested and
worked through, sometimes with great difficulty.
Fiona McCall’s essay, “Children of Baal: Clergy Families and Their Memories
of Sequestration during the English Civil War,” examines an overlooked legacy of the
English civil wars. She explores the ways in which the children of Anglican clergymen
sequestered for delinquency during the 1640s and 1650s interpreted and structured
their sometimes-traumatic experiences, or firsthand accounts of these experiences,
for posterity. McCall seeks to uncover why Anglican families remembered what they
did about humiliating aspects of their family history, and why they did not seek to
reveal their recollections until the early eighteenth century. She makes a strong case
for both the accuracy and the utility of family memories of Puritan persecutions,
which dozens of Anglican survivors worked through in writing at the dawn of
Augustan England.
While none of the contributors to this volume would argue that the individuals
they have studied straightforwardly intended to work through the past, their respective analyses deepen our understanding of the ways in which the past was put to work
in early modern England. Paradoxically, new perspectives on and fresh uses for the
past had to be discovered precisely because the past worked itself through the experience of individuals. For example, in the very recent past, the killing of fellow Englishmen mobilized Parliamentary politicians to seek historical validation for what they
believed was the best chance for peace. The powers that London citizens attempted to
claim for themselves derived from decisions and actions taken in the very distant
past—a past whose traces admittedly were open to a wide variety of present meanings.
The sometimes-violent sequestrations of clergy families during the civil wars and
Interregnum continued to poison Anglican relations with Dissenters decades after the
return of the monarchy. Many more examples could be added.
The essays in this special issue provide ample evidence that early modern English people could put the past to work for them consciously, even as the events of the
past worked themselves into their responses and reactions to the present, and their
fears for the future. Even if they did not conceive of the present as the product of an
actual past, they were aware that the present could be shaped by its force—which
might be a weight or a lever, a stumbling block or a tool. But for the fact of the Restoration, we would never have known how important it was for Richard Lewis to be
remembered as a constantly faithful subject of the Stuart monarchy—even, as he
wanted posterity to think, while he was collecting the revenues from a sequestered
clergyman’s rectory.
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I would like to thank Gary Rivett, Phil Baker, and Daniel Woolf for their encouragement and
helpful criticism. Elements of the research undertaken for this introduction were funded by the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. For assistance at various stages of
preparing this special issue, I would like to acknowledge the support of the University of Warwick’s
Humanities Research Centre, the University of Warwick’s Department of History, Roberts
Funding, Ronald Hutton, Mark Knights, and Nadine Lewycky.
matthew neufeld, an assistant professor of early modern British history
at the University of Saskatchewan, is the author of The Civil Wars after 1660: Public
Remembering in Late Stuart England (2013).