Generations: Age, Ancestry, and Memory in the English Reformations

This book examines England's plural and protracted Reformations through the novel prism of the generations. Approaching generation as a biological unit and a social cohort, it demonstrates that the tumultuous religious developments that stretched across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries not merely transformed the generations but were also forged by them. It provides compelling new insights into how people experienced and navigated the profound challenges that the Reformations posed in everyday life. Alexandra Walsham investigates how age and ancestry were implicated in the theological and cultural upheavals of the era and how these in turn reconfigured the nexus between memory, history, and time. Generations explores the manifold ways in which the Reformations shaped the horizontal relationships that men, women, and children formed with their siblings, kin, and peers, as well as the vertical ones that tied them to their dead ancestors and their future heirs. It highlights the vital part that families bound by blood and by faith played in the making of current events and in recording the past for posterity. Drawing on previously untapped archival evidence, in tandem with a rich array of printed texts, visual images, and material objects, this study offers poignant glimpses of individual lives and casts fascinating light on how families were both torn apart and brought closer together by the English Reformations.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1: Youth and Age 2: Kith and Kin 3: Blood and Trees 4: Generations and Seed 5: History and Time 6: Memory and Archive Conclusion

About the Author :
Alexandra Walsham is Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge. A Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and of the British Academy, she has published extensively on the religious and cultural history of early modern Britain and Europe and is the author of several prize-winning monographs. She co-edited the journal Past and Present for a decade and delivered the Ford Lectures at the University of Oxford in 2018.

Review :
The publication of Generations... is something of an event in the writing of early modern history... An impressive contribution to early modern history-writing... becomes also a message for the whole discipline. magisterial... there is much to be gained in thinking about how different experiences and emotional dynamics drove tensions between... Generation Calvin and Generation Laud. [an] extraordinary achievement... a work of formidable scholarship, and a deeply humane and fascinating read... a profoundly sympathetic but also penetrating analysis of the lived religious experience of early modern men, women and children, as they moved through their own life cycles, through the life cycles of their religious churches and communities... this book testifies to the ways in which the history of the English Reformation is itself coming of age. Generations is an outstanding achievement... an enormously instructive, richly illustrated and deeply stimulating scholarly contribution that asks and examines key questions about age, ancestry and memory amidst the fundamental religious, political and cultural changes that now call England's Reformations ... superb ... All those wishing to read an outstanding 'social and cultural history of religion with the theology put back' should start with this book. No short review can do justice to the richness (and the riches) of this study... The result is a book that makes a profound contribution to our understanding of ... England's "long Reformation". Its deep insights into the dynamics of religious and cultural change during the early modern era in England and beyond offer a stimulus and guide to all scholars engaged in research into the wide range of themes and topics it addresses. Generations is a major achievement. [a] massive work of imaginative scholarship... No attempt at a brief summary of this book's main arguments can do justice to the subtle sensitivity of its author's discourse or the complex interweaving of its themes... a ground-breaking discussion of the theme of generations, it also succeeds in throwing fresh light on the much-studied English Reformations. It is hard to do justice to such a rich and thought-provoking study in a short review... This is a book that one can turn to again and again for informative commentary and new insights into a whole variety of themes… Walsham, with her usual originality and ability to pick out the important patterns from a vast array of evidence, makes here a major intervention into the historiography.