Senses of the Past: Remembering the English Reformation - HIS00171M

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Module summary

In the first of her 2017 Reith lectures for the BBC the late, great, historical novelist Hilary Mantel declared: ‘As soon as we die, we enter into fiction… Once we can no longer speak for ourselves, we are interpreted. When we remember… we don’t reproduce the past, we create it.’ This module interrogates the relationship between history and memory, and the processes of creating the past by looking back on one of the most powerful turning points in the history of the West - the Catholic and Protestant Reformations.

Focusing particularly on England (although set firmly within wider British and European contexts) the module explores how the religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries profoundly reshaped perceptions and senses of the past, transformed acts of remembrance and the culture of memory, and stimulated shifts in the historical method itself. This module traces how memories of the English reformation evolved following Henry VIII’s break with Rome up to the present day, by engaging with a variety of primary source material, including popular song, literature and polemic, material objects, and surviving buildings and the contemporary landscape. Students will use these sources to shed fresh light on the debates that continue to shape scholarly remembrance of the post-Reformation past.

Module will run

Occurrence	Teaching period
A	Semester 1 2026-27

Module aims

The aims of this module are to:

• Develop skills of source analysis and interpretation
• Assess a range of source material and relevant secondary works; and
• Develop students’ powers of evidence-based historical argument, both orally and in writing.
  

Module learning outcomes

Students who complete this module successfully will:

• Demonstrate a knowledge of a specialist historiographical literature;
• Present findings in an analytical framework derived from a specialist field;
• Solve a well-defined historiographical problem using insights drawn from secondary and, where appropriate, primary sources.
• Set out written findings using a professional scholarly apparatus.
  

Module content

Students will attend a 1-hour briefing in week 1. Students will then attend a 2-hour seminar in weeks 2-4, 6-8 and 10-11. Weeks 5 & 9 are Reading and Writing (RAW) weeks during which there are no seminars, and during which students research and write a formative essay, consulting with the module tutor. Students prepare for eight seminars in all.

Seminar topics are subject to variation, but are likely to include the following:

1. The Art and Science of Memory
2. Making History
3. Reforming the Landscape
4. Popular Perceptions of the Past
5. Memorialisation
6. Contested Memory
7. Myth-Making
8. Re-Imaginings
   

Indicative assessment

Task	% of module mark
Essay/coursework	100.0

Special assessment rules

None

Additional assessment information

Students submit a 2,000-word formative essay in week 9.
A 4,000-word summative essay will be due in the assessment period.

Indicative reassessment

Task	% of module mark
Essay/coursework	100.0

Module feedback

Students will typically receive written feedback on their formative essay within 10 working days of submission.

Work will be returned to students in their seminars and may be supplemented by the tutor giving some oralfeedbackto the whole group. All students are encouraged, if they wish, to discuss thefeedbackon their formative essay during their tutor’s student hours—especially during week 11, before, that is, they finalise their plans for the Summative Essay.

For more information, see theStatement on Feedback.

For the summative assessment task, students will receive their provisional mark and written feedback within 25 working days of the submission deadline. The tutor will then be available during student hours for follow-up guidance if required. For more information, see theStatement of Assessment.

Indicative reading

For reading during the module, please refer to the module VLE site. Before the course starts, we encourage you to look at the following items of preliminary reading:

• Walsham, Alexandra. et al. eds. Memory and the English Reformation. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.)
• Whyte, Nicola. ‘High Culture and Popular Culture: Memory, Custom and Landscape’. In Tamm, Marek and Arcangeli, Alesandro. eds. A Cultural History of Memory in the Early Modern Age. (London: Bloomsbury, 2022.)
• Wood, Andy. The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England.(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.)