Outputs (25)

‘Chronicles of many strange Occurrences’: early modern English parish registers and the memories of local communities (2025)
Journal Article
Atherton, I. (2025). ‘Chronicles of many strange Occurrences’: early modern English parish registers and the memories of local communities. The Seventeenth Century, 1-28. https://doi.org/10.1080/0268117x.2025.2477773

English parish registers listing baptisms, marriages, and burials are commonly source mined for curiosities, but are rarely examined holistically. Building on recent work that has seen sixteenth-century registers as records of memory, this article an... Read More about ‘Chronicles of many strange Occurrences’: early modern English parish registers and the memories of local communities.

The Aftermath of Battle (2024)
Book Chapter
Atherton, I. (2024). The Aftermath of Battle. In Britons and Their Battlefields: War, Memory, and Commemoration since the Fourteenth Century (27-49). Oxford University Press (OUP). https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198912880.003.0002

Scholars typically lose interest in a battlefield as soon as the outcome is clear and the killing ends. But any army had a series of post-battle rituals which, though ignored by historians, are key to understating both the meaning of the battle for c... Read More about The Aftermath of Battle.

The Naming of Parts; Battlefield Naming and Memory (2024)
Book Chapter
Atherton, I. (2024). The Naming of Parts; Battlefield Naming and Memory. In Britons and Their Battlefields: War, Memory, and Commemoration since the Fourteenth Century (50-80). Oxford University Press (OUP). https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198912880.003.0003

Naming a battle is not an automatic process determined simply by location, but a deliberate and often contested act. This chapter examines the naming process from the fourteenth to the twenty-first centuries, arguing that there are five types of batt... Read More about The Naming of Parts; Battlefield Naming and Memory.

‘We Will Remember Them’: Battlefield Remembrance and the Cult of the Fallen since 1914 (2024)
Book Chapter
Atherton, I. (2024). ‘We Will Remember Them’: Battlefield Remembrance and the Cult of the Fallen since 1914. In Britons and their Battlefields: War, Memory and Commemoration since the Fourteenth Century (242-305). Oxford University Press (OUP). https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198912880.003.0008

The First World War is argued here to be evolutionary not revolutionary in terms of conflict memory, and is viewed through the lens of the creation and practices of the Imperial (later commonwealth) War Graves Commission. Its principles, developing b... Read More about ‘We Will Remember Them’: Battlefield Remembrance and the Cult of the Fallen since 1914.

Burial and the Battlefield War Memorial in the Late Middle Ages (2024)
Book Chapter
Atherton, I. (2024). Burial and the Battlefield War Memorial in the Late Middle Ages. In Britons and their Battlefields: War, Memory and Commemoration since the Fourteenth Century (83-105). Oxford University Press (OUP). https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198912880.003.0004

At the heart of late medieval post-bellum practices was the burial of the dead, by which a battlefield became sacred ground. Commonly, the battlefield would then be marked by the erection of some form of structure such as a cross or a battlefield cha... Read More about Burial and the Battlefield War Memorial in the Late Middle Ages.

The Reformation of the Battlefield in Early Modern Britain (2024)
Book Chapter
Atherton, I. (2024). The Reformation of the Battlefield in Early Modern Britain. In Britons and their Battlefields: War, Memory and Commemoration since the Fourteenth Century (106-152). Oxford University Press (OUP). https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198912880.003.0005

The Reformation meant not just ecclesiastical change but a transformation of the ways by which Protestants remembered the past. A hitherto overlooked aspect of that reformation of memory is the reformation of the battlefield. The abolition of prayers... Read More about The Reformation of the Battlefield in Early Modern Britain.

The Nineteenth-Century Invention of the Modern Battlefield (2024)
Book Chapter
Atherton, I. (2024). The Nineteenth-Century Invention of the Modern Battlefield. In Britons and their Battlefields: War, Memory and Commemoration since the Fourteenth Century (186-241). Oxford University Press (OUP). https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198912880.003.0007

Many of the traits associated with the modern battlefield, its commemoration and the tourism associated with it, are first seen not (as scholars often assume) at Gettysburg (1863) in an American context or in the First World War (1914–18) in a Europe... Read More about The Nineteenth-Century Invention of the Modern Battlefield.

Britons and their Battlefields: War, Memory, and Commemoration since the Fourteenth Century (2024)
Book
Atherton, I. (2024). Britons and their Battlefields: War, Memory, and Commemoration since the Fourteenth Century. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198912880.001.0001

While much attention has been paid to the commemoration of conflict in the twentieth century, this book is the first to consider conflict memory in the long term, arguing that modern practices were not created out of the mud of the trenches, but evol... Read More about Britons and their Battlefields: War, Memory, and Commemoration since the Fourteenth Century.

The Rediscovery of the Battlefield in the Eighteenth Century (2024)
Book Chapter
Atherton, I. (2024). The Rediscovery of the Battlefield in the Eighteenth Century. In Britons and their Battlefields: War, Memory and Commemoration since the Fourteenth Century (153-185). Oxford University Press (OUP). https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198912880.003.0006

In the 1720s and 1730s a new series of battlefield monuments began to be erected on past battlefields such as Lansdown (1643), the Boyne (1690), and even on the presumed site of the ancient Alleluia Victory (429). The chapter argues that these were t... Read More about The Rediscovery of the Battlefield in the Eighteenth Century.

Recollection in the Republics: Memories of the British Civil Wars in England, 1649-1659: by Imogen Peck, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2021, xiv + 232 pp.,£60 (hardback), ISBN 9780198845584 (2023)
Journal Article
Atherton, I. (2023). Recollection in the Republics: Memories of the British Civil Wars in England, 1649-1659: by Imogen Peck, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2021, xiv + 232 pp.,£60 (hardback), ISBN 9780198845584. Cultural and Social History, 20(3), 462-464. https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2023.2210866