Abstract
This chapter sets out the aims of this study – to investigate how and why the Restoration regime and its supporters utilised widely distributed, inexpensive pamphlets and broadsides to prescribe which aspects of the Civil Wars and Interregnum were to be remembered, how they were to be remembered, and which aspects were to be forgotten. This chapter discusses the extent to which theories associated with Memory Studies can plausibly be adapted and applied to a seventeenth-century context, and offers a discussion of the types of primary source material that form the evidentiary basis of the study.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 59.
- 2.
Geoffrey Cubitt, History and Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 200.
- 3.
Ronald Hutton, The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales 1658–1667 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), also studies these years but emphasises the first four and maintains that focusing heavily on them is due to the nature of the material. He points out, “both the issues and the events of public life were much more numerous in the earlier period than the later, and generated considerably more surviving evidence” (2). The present study takes 1667 as its end date as the disasters around that time, namely the plague and fire, represent the end of the early Restoration years. This notion is supported by Jonathan Scott in England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), who claims that “By 1667…the party was over” and mass disillusionment with the Restoration regime had begun (166), and by Paul Seaward, The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1660–1667 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) who writes, “the year 1667 appeared to mark not just the end of an administration, or of a policy, but also the limits to the reconstruction of the old regime” (327).
- 4.
Seaward, 4.
- 5.
Ibid., 12.
- 6.
The “memory boom” is best exemplified by acknowledging the proliferation of terms associated with memory studies: “cultural memory, historical memory, local memory, official memory, popular memory, public memory, shared memory, social memory, custom, heritage, myth, roots, tradition”, Jacob J. Climo and Maria G. Cattell (eds.), Social Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives (Oxford: Altamira Press, 2002), 4.
- 7.
In History and Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), Geoffrey Cubitt suggested that these terms are not synonymous. He defines social memory as “a set of processes that are not necessarily neatly bound by the dividing lines between different human communities, and that within any community are likely to generate a diversity of understandings both of what pasts ought to be evoked or described or celebrated, and of the particular contents that representations or evocations of each of those pasts should incorporate or articulate”. Collective memory, on the other hand, is defined by Cubitt as “the species of ideological fiction, itself often generated by and within these processes of social memory, which presents particular social entities as the possessors of a stable mnemonic capacity that is collectively exercised, and that presents particular views or representations of a supposedly collective past as the natural expressions of such a collective mnemonic capacity” (Cubitt, 18). Cubitt’s definitions, while important in developing theories about memory, are very specific and do not always allow for the incorporation of various perspectives from other approaches to Memory Studies. Conversely, Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nunning (eds.), A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), combine the terms and acknowledge that, while they are “multifarious notions” due to their incorporation within a variety of academic fields which apply their own methodologies and perspectives, no clear distinction can be made between the terms (1–2). Correspondingly, discussing “social” and “collective” memory, Andy Wood, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), explains that there is a “partial, creative overlap between the two concepts” (26).
- 8.
Alon Confino, “Memory and the History of Mentalities” in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nunning (eds.), A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 79.
- 9.
Ibid., 79.
- 10.
Edward Legon, Remembering Revolution: Seditious Memories in England and Wales, 1660–1685 (PhD thesis, University College London, 2015).
- 11.
Wood, The Memory of the People, 21.
- 12.
Ibid., 26.
- 13.
Judith Pollmann and Erika Kuijpers, “Introduction: On the Early Modernity of Modern Memory” in Erika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann, Johannes Müller, and Jasper van der Steen (eds.), Memory Before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 6–10.
- 14.
Ibid.
- 15.
Ibid., 11.
- 16.
Ibid., 14.
- 17.
Brecht Deseure and Judith Pollmann, “The Experience of Rupture and the History of Memory” in Erika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann, Johannes Müller, and Jasper van der Steen (eds.), Memory Before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 316.
- 18.
For example, Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (1993); Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (1989); Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory (1988).
- 19.
Deseure, 316.
- 20.
Terdiman, 3–4.
- 21.
See Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Adam Fox, “Remembering the Past in Early Modern England: Oral and Written Tradition”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (sixth series), 9 (December 1999), 233–256; Keith Thomas, The Perception of the Past in Early Modern England (Creighton Lecture, University of London, 1985).
- 22.
Keith Thomas, The Perception of the Past in Early Modern England (Creighton Lecture, University of London, 1985).
- 23.
Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 16–17.
- 24.
Jason Peacey, “Pamphlets” in Joad Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 455.
- 25.
James Sutherland, The Restoration Newspaper and its Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), vii–5.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
Joad Raymond, “News” in Joad Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 378.
- 28.
Jerome Friedman, Miracles and the Pulp Press During the English Revolution: The Battle of the Frogs and Fairford’s Flies (London: University of London Press, 1993), xii.
- 29.
For examples, see Chelsea Rice McKelvey, “The ‘Glorie, Might & Maiestie’ of Early Modern Sermons”, Literature and Theology (2013), 1–15; Matthew Neufeld, The Civil Wars After 1660: Public Remembering in Late Stuart England (Sussex: Boydell, 2013); Kevin Sharpe, Rebranding Rule: The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy, 1660–1714 (London: Yale, 2013); Kevin Sharpe, Reading Authority and Representing Rule in Early Modern England (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); Rosamund Oates, “Sermon and Sermon-going in Early Modern England”, Reformation, 17 (2012), 199–212; Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Peter McCullough, Hugh Adlington and Emma Rhatigan (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams (eds.), Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004).
- 30.
Friedman, xi.
- 31.
Sir Thomas Craig, Scotland’s Sovereignty Asserted (London, 1605).
- 32.
Daniel Woolf, “Memory and Historical Culture in Early Modern England”, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 2:1 (1991), 307.
- 33.
Fox, 396.
- 34.
Harald Welzer, “Re-Narrations: How Pasts Change in Conversational Remembering”, Memory Studies, 3:1 (2010), 5.
- 35.
Woolf, 304–305.
- 36.
Colin Kidd, “Protestantism, Constitutionalism and British Identity under the Later Stuarts” in Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts (eds.), British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533–1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 321, 337.
- 37.
Wood, 12.
- 38.
Henry Brome and Henry Marsh (eds.), Rump: or an Exact Collection of the Choycest Poems and Songs Relating to the Late Times. By the Most Eminent Wits, from Anno 1639–1661 (London, 1662), 1.
- 39.
Ibid.
- 40.
For more detail on the issues of “truth” and “falsity” in cheap print, see Jason Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 95–98.
- 41.
The Kingdomes Intelligencer of the Affairs Now in Agitation in England, Scotland, and Ireland: Together with Foraign Intelligence: To Prevent False Newes (London, December 31–January 7 1661), 7–8.
- 42.
Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?” in Homi Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990), 11.
- 43.
George Savile quoted in J.P. Kenyon, Halifax: Complete Works (London: Penguin Books, 1969), 49.
- 44.
Rachel Weil, “Thinking about Allegiance in the English Civil War”, History Workshop Journal, 6:1 (2006), 183; Erin Muphy, “I remain, an airy phantasm’: Lucy Hutchinson’s Civil War Ghost Writing”, English Literary History, 82:1 (2015), 95.
- 45.
Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution, 71.
- 46.
Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson (eds.), Early Modern Women Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 317.
- 47.
Carolyn A. Edie, “The Popular Idea of Monarchy on the Eve of the Stuart Restoration”, The Huntington Library Quarterly, 39:4 (1976), 345–346.
- 48.
Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 380–381.
- 49.
The term “lieux de memoire” (or “sites of memory”) was developed by French historian Pierre Nora. It originated with the notion that there is no spontaneous memory and therefore we must deliberately create places where memory resides (archives, documents, museums, anniversaries, celebrations, etc.), as these activities do not occur naturally. He further asserts that because history deforms and transforms memory, we must have sites of memory in order to remember. See Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire”, Representations, 26 (spring 1989), 7–25.
- 50.
Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”, New German Critique, 65 (spring/summer 1995), 133.
- 51.
These limitations are considered in Jason Peacey’s Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda During the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Surrey: Ashgate, 2004) and have also been applied in the current study.
- 52.
Tim Harris, “Understanding Popular Politics in Restoration Britain” in Alan Houston and Steve Pincus (eds.), A Nation Transformed: England After the Restoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 142–143.
- 53.
Ibid., 146.
- 54.
Jonathan Sawday, “Re-Writing a Revolution: History, Symbol, and Text in the Restoration”, The Seventeenth Century, 7:2 (1992), 184.
- 55.
Paul Connerton, “Seven Types of Forgetting”, Memory Studies, 1:1 (2008), 57–71.
- 56.
I am not claiming here that the theories and approaches to memory studies that have been selected to apply to the analysis of collective cultural memory in early Restoration pamphlets and broadsides form an exhaustive list. Neither is the wealth of primary sources available and applicable for study under each theory exhausted.
- 57.
Cubitt, 211.
- 58.
This approach is taken from Peter Burke’s Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (New York: Cornell University Press, 2001), introductory chapter. It is also applied in the introductory chapter to Peter Sherlock’s Monuments and Memory in Early Modern England (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Peters, E. (2017). Introduction – Remembering the Civil Wars: Royalist Print Culture in Early Restoration England. In: Commemoration and Oblivion in Royalist Print Culture, 1658-1667. Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50475-9_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50475-9_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-50474-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-50475-9
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)