Preface

Abstract

This Special Issue emerges from an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded network, Memory and Community in Early Modern Britain, which investigated two related topics: the memory cultures of early modern Britain and the question of how that period is remembered today.

The network ran for two years, from 2013 to 2015. In a series of events hosted by each of the four institutions involved (University of East London, Queen’s University Belfast, Newcastle University, Liverpool John Moores University), we explored these topics in relation to wider themes in memory studies: how memory both makes and unmakes community identity, the memory and commemoration of suffering, material objects and memory practices, memory and subjectivity, and the politics of memory. The project brought together researchers working in a range of academic fields and disciplines, including history, English, archaeology, textiles and anthropology, as well as memory studies, with heritage and culture industry professionals, practitioners and creative artists, participants in local history projects, and members of non-academic groups and societies with an interest in the early modern period.

Located primarily on the interstitial ground where history, literature and memory studies meet, the essays included here are a small selection, but one which directly engages the central issues explored and reflects the wide-ranging and collegial discussions that characterised the network meetings. We would like to acknowledge with gratitude the energy and enthusiasm of the participants in these meetings and to thank them for their contributions to a set of challenging and thought-provoking conversations that have had many outcomes beyond this publication; we wish it had been possible to have included more of their papers. We also thank the AHRC and the universities involved for their support.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biographies

Kate Chedgzoy is professor of Renaissance Literature and Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion for Humanities and Social Sciences at Newcastle University. She is the author of Women’s Writing in the British Atlantic World: Memory, Place and History, 1550-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and a contributing editor of Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead (eds), Theories of Memory: A Reader (Edinburgh University Press, 2007). She has published on Shakespeare and early modern women’s writing and is currently researching children and childhood in early modern culture.

Elspeth Graham is professor of Early Modern Literature at Liverpool John Moores University. She has published on a range of issues relating to memory, ranging from early modern women’s writing and political and religious autobiography to, most recently, memory and reputation in William Cavendish’s cultural productions. She also contributes to the field of medical humanities where she has written on trauma, ethics and medical communications and worked on dementia. Since 2004, she has been involved in a major urban regeneration project, Shakespeare North, which is building a reproduction Cockpit in Court theatre in Prescot, Merseyside, to commemorate the town’s Elizabethan theatrical heritage.

Katharine Hodgkin is professor of Cultural History at the University of East London and UEL Director of the Raphael Samuel History Centre. She has co-edited (with Susannah Radstone) two collections of essays on memory studies, Contested Pasts: The politics of Memory (Routledge, 2003) and Regimes of Memory (Routledge, 2003). She has published a number of articles on early modern culture, with a particular focus on life writing and memory, and has also worked on the history of melancholy and mental disorder (Madness in Seventeenth-Century Autobiography, Routledge, 2007; Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England: The Autobiographical Writings of Dionys Fitzherbert, Ashgate, 2010). She is currently working on a monograph, The Self in Time: Memory, Subjectivity and Life Writing in Early Modern Britain.

Ramona Wray is reader in English at Queen’s University Belfast. She is the author of Women Writers of the Seventeenth Century (2004), the co-author of Great Shakespeareans: Welles, Kozintsev, Kurosawa, Zeffirelli (2013), the editor of Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (2012) in the Arden Early Modern Drama series and the co-editor of numerous other works, including The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts (2011) and Reconceiving the Renaissance: A Critical Reader (2004). Her essays on early modern women’s writing and Shakespeare on film have appeared in journals such as Critical Survey, Shakespeare Bulletin, Shakespeare Quarterly and Women’s Writing.