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Difficult Pasts: Post-Reformation Memory and the Medieval Romance

Online ISBN:
9781526175502
Print ISBN:
9781526157898
Publisher:
Manchester University Press
Book

Difficult Pasts: Post-Reformation Memory and the Medieval Romance

Mimi Ensley
Mimi Ensley
Flagler College
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Published online:
21 September 2023
Published in print:
28 February 2023
Online ISBN:
9781526175502
Print ISBN:
9781526157898
Publisher:
Manchester University Press

Abstract

Difficult pasts combines book history, reception history and theories of cultural memory to explore how Reformation-era audiences used medieval literary texts to construct their own national and religious identities. It argues that the medieval romance book became a flexible site of memory for readers after the Protestant Reformation, allowing them to both connect with and distance themselves from the recent ‘difficult past’. Central characters in this study range from canonical authors like Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser to less studied figures, such as printer William Copland, Elizabethan scribe Edward Banister and seventeenth-century poet and romance enthusiast, John Lane. In uniting a wide range of romance readers’ perspectives, Difficult pasts complicates clear ruptures between manuscript and print, Catholic and Protestant, or medieval and Renaissance. It concludes that the romance book offers a new way to understand the simultaneous change and continuity that defines post-Reformation England. Overall, Difficult pasts offers an interdisciplinary framework for better understanding the role of physical books and imaginative forms in grappling with the complexities of representing and engaging with the past.

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