In 1700 a mathematician submitted a paper to the Royal Society in which he attempted to calculate, among other things, the rate at which oral testimony – that is, memory – decayed over long periods of time. It’s a quixotic idea, to be sure. But that such a thing might even be attempted speaks not only to the emerge of an empirical mindset, but to the transformations wrought on how people conceived of themselves, their contemporaries, and their families – and how they remembered the past – by the processes of what we call the Reformation.
Pay no heed, the Apostle Paul wrote, “to fables and endless genealogies”. What St Paul’s correspondent thought of this advice is unknown, but it fell on deaf ears among the people of 16th and 17th century England. The era was, as the historian JH Plumb has said, one of ‘genealogical fever’. Some identified King Arthur or Brutus, the legendary founder of Britain, among their ancestors. Others claimed descent from biblical figures such as Noah. The Catholic Lord Lumley was far from alone in tracing his antecedents all the way back to the garden of Eden, a boast that prompted James I’s caustic response: ”By ma saul I did na ken Adam’s name was Lumley”.
Memorial culture in the late medieval world had been a mutual, collective activity. Remembering the dead in prayer was undertaken through a extensive range of institutions, including monastic houses, chantries, guilds and other fraternities. The scale of this work was staggering. One surviving list of those held in perpetual memory, created for the guild of St Chad at Lichfield Cathedral and dating to 1532-3, contains 51,000 names, neatly organised into extended family lists and groups. As Natalie Zemon-Davis noted, the medieval dead were “an age group”, a powerful demographic, if you will, deeply embedded in daily ritual and spiritual life.
But the Reformation put the dead beyond the reach of the living. As Alexandra Walsham writes in Generations: Age, Ancestry and Memory in the English Reformations, “at a stroke, the dead were consigned to an absent past to which grieving relatives no longer had access”. To paraphrase, people moved from a world in which the living and the dead formed a single community bound by affinities and mutual bonds of duty and care to one in which generations rose and fell in a perpetual cycle of forgetting. The obsession with genealogy was one way to shore your family’s name against oblivion, of asserting permanence. It also functioned as a form of reputation management. Lord Lumley’s father had been executed in the aftermath of the Pilgrimage of Grace; the long reach of consanguinity obscured such stains.
But the search for deep-rootedness was also a reaction to innovation. It wasn’t just stability that went hand in hand with antiquity; as Walsham notes, inevitability did too. It was important for Protestant thinkers to argue away the accusation of novelty: a tripartite history of the world was created in which the early church was succeeded by the era of Antichrist, after which the Reformation would usher in the end times. (We still unthinkingly use this scheme today when we refer to the Middle Ages.) Protestantism thus wasn’t revolutionary; it was a restoration of the principles of the early church.
That this reflected a cultural anxiety about novelty is evident from the fact that the same cyclical argument would be used by the Laudians in the 17th century: the reassertion of ceremony and sacrament that characterised the Laudian reforms of the 1630s was understood by its proponents as a restoration of the ‘beauty of holiness’ that had been lost to the Calvinist ascendency within the Church of England. Far from being “scandalous Innovation”, the Laudian bishop Matthew Wren said, these ecclesiastical policies were driven by the urge for ‘Renovation’, for returning the church to its usages in the early decades of the English Reformation. “Let the old Usages carry it,” Wren declared.
Richard Bancroft, James I’s archbishop of Canterbury, attacked Calvinist claims that their model of church government linked them directly to the early church by making the analogy with familial genealogies explicit. The heralds at the College of Arms, he wrote, can take a man whose “Gentilitie be not of fiftie yeares standing: yet if neede require, William Conquerors time is nothing: they will fetch it from Adam”. So “the Geneva Discipline… must needes be a Lady, of auncient stocke… To leape over a thousand and five hundred yeares, at the first skippe, over almost two thousand yeares at the next, and in a manner to Noahs Arke at the third: is but a small matter with them”.
There were other ways in which the Reformation forced people to think about their inheritances too, in particular the idea of original sin. For medieval Christians, Walsham writes, the consequences of Adam and Eve’s fall were akin to “a mere absence of righteousness rather than a state of ingrained depravity”. But all the leading minds of the Reformation were more seduced by St Augustine’s view of mankind’s innate wickedness, in which original sin was a kind of genetic moral defect. Children absorbed “evyll lustes and appetites” while still in the womb, according to a catechism translated by Cranmer. They were in breach of the Ten Commandments even before they were born. Women often internalised the pains of childbirth itself as a just punishment from God – “for the guilt and transgression of my progenitors”, one noblewoman’s self-penned prayer said. Few doubted, meanwhile, that both sin and its just rewards were hereditary. Catholic polemicists like Nicholas Sander noted that Henry VIII’s providential punishment was the extinction of his dynasty in the very next generation. Scriptural injunctions about God “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation” were painted on the walls of some parish churches.
Walsham uses the term ‘generation’ loosely. “Instead of trying to define [it] with any precision, I have actively embraced its ambiguities,” she writes. Which is to say that Generations is a large, allusive and nuanced work that actively resists easy summation. Walsham herself compares her book to a kaleidoscope; it is an apt analogy. Generations thematic structure itself moves in cycles around and across the early modern period, refracting the changing experiences and perceptions of successive generations of English men and women – as well as of the different confessional cohorts within each generation, from recusant Catholics to the Fifth Monarchy Men and every point in between.
But for all the book’s multiplicity, Walsham’s core insight, I think, is that we can’t consider the doctrinal and other debates and developments of these centuries without also considering the generational attitudes and reactions that underpinned them – as well as the generational language of the human life-cycle through which they were often understood. Not for nothing did Protestant polemics equate the medieval church with a kind of moral and intellectual infancy: “We be past chyldehod,” one 1548 text ran, “away than wyth childish phantasies”.
As Walsham herself observes, to some extent this is not a new insight. Christopher Hill noted back in the 1970s in The World Turned Upside Down that “the fiercest and most anguished battles were waged within the home, between the generations”. But even contemporaries were aware of the friction. The early eruptions of reformist protest in the 16th century were blamed on ‘lewd laddys’ who made ‘merry mockery of their parents’; rather proving the point, some wag even threw a pudding at the Marian Bishop of London Edmund Bonner. The same rhetoric was later applied to the sectaries during the Interregnum, when “every beardless Boy… will step into a Pullpit”. Arguably, it wasn’t a new insight then either. “Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth?” Jesus says in the gospel of Luke. “I tell you, Nay; but rather division… The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother.”
What Walsham does, however, is to use the concept of generational identities and generational friction to illuminate the complex ways in which the theological, political and social changes of the early modern period forced people to look at themselves and each other anew. Walsham would never put it as crassly as this, but just as we find it helpful to look at generational conflict through the prism of baby boomers and millennials, for example, so there are rich veins of insight to be found in thinking about how different experiences and emotional dynamics drove tensions between, as it were, Generation Calvin and Generation Laud.
I have used the ‘Reformation’ in the singular in this review for familiarity’s sake, but Walsham makes a compelling case for the plural she uses in her book’s subtitle. The medieval concept of reformatio was a process, an ongoing cycle of renewal, rather than an event. What we call the Reformation, in England at least, was really a series of convulsions. On the eve of the Restoration, some were still placing the Reformation, or the completion of it, at some point in the future: “Jesus Christ… works us up age after age to a further Reformation, to more light and holiness,” claimed a Fifth Monarchist pamplet in 1659. The idea of spiritual defeat, that a better future lay dead buried in the past, was another novelty many had to learn to live with.
This is an extended version of a review that first appeared in the June 2023 issue of The Critic.
Mathew Lyons 