In her compelling history of the “dissolution after the dissolution,” (original emphasis, 1) Harriet Lyon begins with the Henrician allegations of monastic corruption that brought smaller houses under royal control. The rhetoric of reform ended with the “surrender” (36) of all houses and their wealth, including libraries. Yet the presumed conclusion in 1540 ignored confiscations under Edward and Elizabeth. Bringing in fresh sources and reading them against the grain, Lyon argues that the dissolution of the monasteries created a rupture best understood over decades, even centuries.
Surrender, Lyon argues in chapter 1, downplayed government compulsion and houses’ resistance. The term dissolution appeared in 1539, alongside suppression, relinquishing, and so on; the label Dissolution of the Monasteries came a century later. Critiques circulated by the 1530s and 1540s. Among Catholic and conservative voices, a story of “reproach” (53) developed, including resisters’ martyrology. Elizabethans uncomfortably reflected on their participation in and financial benefit from the dissolution. Evangelical critiques focused on the failure to use confiscated property for pious or educational purposes. The evangelical Sir Francis Bigod, opponent of the Pilgrimage of Grace, disapproved of the dissolution and was executed for his opposition to the king, providing a stark example. Lyon concludes with a thought-provoking consideration of the implications for modern historians of relying on archives echoing Henrician rhetoric.
Successive chapters bring Lyon's methods and broadened source base into focus. In chapter 2, she considers how the dissolution was, despite Henrician language of complicit surrender, a rupture in the early modern historical imagination. Chroniclers wrote in support of the Henrician Reformation and after 1547 often reiterated “Henrician impulses” (85) to remember selectively and downplay ramifications. Conservative chroniclers, like John Stow, subtly critiqued Henrician orthodoxy. These narratives furthered the impression of a radical break with the past and hinted at greater anxiety among Protestants about the torn “fabric” (108) of early modern England. Lyon concludes by arguing for chronicles’ vibrancy as a genre well after the medieval period.
Antiquarian narratives and topography reveal “the complexity of the material and spatial dimensions of the memory of the dissolution” (127) through Lyon's careful analysis. Topography preserved and erased the memory of monastic houses in the landscape. Legal records flesh out these cases. Lyon engages with emerging ideas about early modern memory, including storytelling about the dissolution over generations. Ruins signified the demise of medieval monasticism, preserved fragmentary sacred spaces, and generated concern over iconoclasm. Lyon rightly notes the coexistence of contradictory impulses. William Camden's Britannia adds “aesthetic outrage and material loss” (136) to preexisting critique of Henrician greed. Alongside loss, however, conversion preserved spaces and materials. Antiquarian writing celebrated the conversion to parish churches as a sign of the “triumph of the Protestant Reformation and the improvement of piety” (156–57). Buildings converted to gentry houses celebrated gentry families and their exemplary charitable, hospitable acts. Lyon's expanded source base includes somewhat rare, evocative depictions relating to dissolution, peopled by small figures engaged in “dissolution tourism” (177). The image of Kirkstall Abbey seemed to show contradictory impulses that could be further developed. Two well-dressed figures gesture toward the ruins overgrown with plants while a small figure, unremarked upon, approaches the former entrance and suggests the stereotypical impotent poor: seemingly barefoot and hunched over, using a cane, wearing ragged clothes, carrying a sack, approaching the abbey entrance where they would once have sought charity. Lyon is persuasive that antiquarian narratives show gain as well as loss.
Lyon, in chapter 4, draws on novel sources to demonstrate the significance of local experience of the dissolution and the sense of sacrilege that haunted beneficiaries of the dissolution. Legal cases involving former religious properties provide further perspective on life in the religious houses by calling former monks as witnesses. Local experience survived in memories disseminated through chronicles and storytelling. Providential stories of retribution against profiteers and beneficiaries were told across generations, as were ghost stories. Sacrilege was grafted onto older critiques of greed to fuel providential and ghostly interpretations. Henry's deceit, the slanderous accusations against the religious houses, and his own corruption overwhelmed the plot. By this winding path of memory and history, the dissolution, downplayed under Henry, became “one of the most important and controversial moments” (238) of the English Reformation.
Harriet Lyon has written a fascinating study of the dissolution's afterlives, early modern history, and historical imagination. Her analysis of memory across generations adds significantly to historical debates beyond the English Reformation. She has drawn fresh attention to the dissolution of the monasteries, available sources, and the dissolution as effaced or remembered in the years that followed.
