The Reformation of the Battlefield in Early Modern Britain

Atherton, Ian

Abstract

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 for the dead and Protestant allergies to notions of sacred spaces meant that battle sites were no longer considered consecrated ground, and commemorative crosses or chapels were not erected on the battlefields of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Instead, the site of memory shifted from the battlefield to the bodies of wounded veterans, and print became key to the memory of conflict, with the first printed battlefield maps. The early modern period is a crucial break in pre-Reformation conflict memories, and overturns current narratives which often see the commemoration of the First World War as a continuation of medieval traditions of battlefields as sacred ground marked by the graves of the fallen.

Citation

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

• Online Publication Date: Aug 19, 2024
• Publication Date: Aug 19, 2024
• Deposit Date: Sep 6, 2024
• Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
• Pages: 106-152
• Book Title: Britons and their Battlefields: War, Memory and Commemoration since the Fourteenth Century
• Chapter Number: 5
• ISBN: 9780198912859
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198912880.003.0005
• Keywords: deliverance, veteran soldiers, print, battlefield burial, Civil War, reformation of memory
• Public URL: https://keele-repository.worktribe.com/output/889981
• Publisher URL: https://academic.oup.com/book/58081/chapter-abstract/478610855?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=true#no-access-message