Philip Schwyzer

Lees and Moonshine: Remembering Richard III, 1485-1635

Not long after Shakespeares birth in 1564, the last witnesses to the reign of Richard III (1483–85) would have reached the end of their lives. Richard III (ca. 1592) occupies a distinctive historical moment in relation to its subject, the period after the extinction of living memory, but still within the horizon of secondhand or communicative memory. This essay explores how memories and postmemories of Richards reign were preserved, transmitted, and transformed over the course of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth. While registering the powerful influence of emerging contexts, including the Reformation and, ultimately, Shakespeares play, these memories remained distinct from, and sometimes at odds with, textual history. They survived because they offered their bearers a resource for interpreting and resisting the predicaments of the present, from the problem of tyranny to the legacies of the Reformation.

Mummy is Become Merchandise: Literature and the Anglo-Egyptian Mummy Trade in the Seventeenth Century

In Thomas Browne’s ‘Fragment on Mummies’, Egypt is represented as both ancient and amnesiac, quite incapable of giving any good account of herself or her former glories. The quoted passage couples a general meditation on the entropic power of Time with a specific comment on the state of Egyptian civility in the seventeenth century. As a meditation, it echoes and bears comparison to Browne’s Hydriotaphia, and some readers have held it in no less esteem. As a comment on Egypt, it is typically ‘Orientalist’ in the sense of the term developed by Edward Said. The ‘mumbling’, senile East cannot articulate, much less represent itself; it must be interrogated, deciphered, transformed into an object of knowledge by the (presumably) European ‘traveller’ who ‘paceth amazedly’ in the shadow of the pyramids. ‘Egypt itself is now become the land of obliviousness and doteth.’ Oriental forgetfulness serves as the starting point for an English project of selfless scholarly recovery that will eventually be used in turn to justify colonial rule.2

Fallen idols, broken noses: Defacement and memory after the Reformation

The Henrician and Edwardian Reformations of the 1530s and 1540s were marked by successive waves of iconoclasm in English churches and cathedrals. Statues, screens, wall paintings, and windows were among the idols targeted. While some objects and artworks were destroyed or effaced entirely, others remained in situ, bearing the marks of iconoclastic violence. Even today, many English cathedrals harbour numerous examples of defaced images which have suffered beheading or scoring of the face and hands, but have been neither repaired nor removed. This article explores how various post-Reformation observers including Protestants, Catholics, antiquaries, and poets understood and responded to defaced images, arguing that traditionalists and reformers found a paradoxical common cause in the curation of iconoclasm.

“A Tomb Once Stood in This Room”Memorials to Memorials in Early Modern England

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Duke University Press via the DOI in this record

No Joyful Voices: The Silence of the Urns in Browne’s Hydriotaphia and Contemporary Archaeology

Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia: Urne-Burial, or a Brief Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk is, amongst other things, a report on the excavation and analysis of several dozen early Anglo-Saxon crematory urns. This point is worth emphasizing at the outset, as those ‘other things’ have traditionally claimed the lion’s share of critical attention. Charmed by the sonorities of Chapter Five in particular, literary critics have found it easy—and perhaps comforting—to conclude that Hydriotaphia is only ostensibly concerned with early medieval grave ware. Like the conventional anecdote at the start of a New Historicist essay, the urns are understood to serve as the inessential springboard for an inquiry into deeper and more humane questions of mortality, remembrance, and forgetting. In spite of the fact that a significant proportion of the short treatise is devoted to direct description and discussion of the ceramic vessels and their contents, critics have often preferred to regard them as a mere prompt for an inquiry into the limits of knowledge.1 Browne emerges looking less like the contemporary and collaborator of William Dugdale than like an earthy East Anglian Montaigne.

Late Losses and the Temporality of Early Modern Nostalgia

For more than a century following the English Reformation, poets and historians continued to refer to the dissolution of the monasteries and the destruction of Church monuments as ‘late’ or recent events. The insistence on ‘lateness’, as in Shakespeare’s ‘bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang’, signals the writer’s refusal to allow the moment of loss to recede in time. The destruction of Bishop Grandisson’s tomb in Exeter Cathedral provides a striking example. Probably destroyed in the 1530s, its desecration was referred to in a series of texts from the 1580s through the 1660s as a ‘late’ event.