Remembering the Reformation

Posted on 13 September 2017

York and Cambridge AHRC-funded research project produces major digital exhibition for 500th anniversary of the Reformation.

A major digital exhibition for the 500th anniversary of the Reformation has gone live on the Cambridge University Library website. It draws on the internationally important collections of Cambridge University Library, York Minster, and Lambeth Palace in London, along with six other collections in the UK.

2017 is the 500th anniversary of an event that is widely regarded as having precipitated the Protestant Reformation: the posting of Martin Luther’s 95 theses on a church door in the small German town of Wittenberg on 31 October 1517. In the intervening centuries, this episode has become deeply embedded in myth and legend. Although scholars now doubt whether it occurred in precisely this form, its anniversary is serving to stimulate fresh discussion and debate about the momentous schism within Christendom that took place in its wake, and its long term repercussions and effects.

This exhibition is one of the principal fruits of Remembering the Reformation an interdisciplinary and collaborative research project generously funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. Bringing together historians (Alex Walsham and Ceri Law, University of Cambridge) and literary scholars (Brian Cummings and Bronwyn Wallace, University of York), it investigates how Europe’s multiple and competing Reformations were remembered, forgotten, contested, and re-invented. It explores how the memories of these movements were created and emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as the complex, plural, and enduring legacies such memories have left.