Remembering the Reformation

Remembering the Reformation was a major AHRC-funded research project based at the Universities of Cambridge and York which ran from 2016 to 2019. Interdisciplinary in conception and scope, the project was a stimulating collaboration between historians (Alex Walsham and Ceri Law, University of Cambridge) and literary scholars (Brian Cummings and Bronwyn Wallace, University of York) which investigate how the European Reformations were remembered, forgotten, contested and re-invented.

It had four strands: lives and afterlives, events and temporality, places, objects and spaces; ritual, liturgy and the body. The research carried out illuminated the manner in which memories of the Reformation emerged and were created in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as the complex and plural legacies such memories have left.

The project staged a range of academic and public engagement events, including workshops, conferences and colloquia, public lectures, educational workshops for children, and public exhibitions. It generated a major digital exhibition involving material from Cambridge University Library, Lambeth Palace Library and York Minister Library: https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/reformation/. Two substantial volumes of essays emerged from the project: Memory and the English Reformation (Cambridge UP, 2020) and Remembering the Reformation (Routledge, 2020). For more information and some fascinating blogs, see the project's website: https://remref.hist.cam.ac.uk/.