Religious space, resistance, and the formation of memory in early modern England.

摘要

This study examines patterns of cultural adaptation to the sequence of alterations of religious space in sixteenth- and early seventeenth- century England. The dissolution of the monasteries, the suppression of chantries, and the reframing of parish church space established under Tudor and early Stuart monarchs initiated adaptive responses among English lay people and the local clergy. My focus lies on reception to such changes in religious spaces within communities in Wiltshire and Cheshire.;This dissertation argues that a reciprocal relationship between spatial identity, resistance, and the formation of memory inhibited full acclimatization to alterations of religious space, preserving connections to the material culture of the pre- Reformation past. Evidence indicates that adaptive strategies evolved over the course of an extended temporal framework. For those generations who directly experienced pre-Reformation spaces, spatial identity, together with habitus, account for the durability of relationships to suppressed material culture. Overt resistance, as well as resistant accommodation, a strategy of negotiation that held the potential for less than complete compliance, characterized two immediate responses to crown directives. Whereas they focused on preserving elements of a pre-Reformation past, a subsequent process of resistant adaptation altered religious spaces for a post-Reformation present, fostering the creation of syncretic, hybrid forms that maintained elements of both. Memory served as a product and producer of spatial identity and as a form of resistance. Personal and communicative memory formed critical links between the past and the more developed, late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century expressions of cultural and historicized, intellectual memory. While the evolutionary framework of adaptive patterns examined here offers a model with which to discuss general processes of adaptation to alterations of religious material culture, such patterns were far from fixed. Political, economic, and religious developments, together with varying local conditions, held the potential to affect significantly all responses at the local level. The duration of this evolutionary process in the counties under study carries with it implications for the debate over what has been termed a "Long Reformation." It further suggests important correlations between the long-term effects of memory and the development of rival confessional and national identities.