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1 results

  • 6 - Converting the Cross

  • from Part I - Events and Temporalities
  • Edited by Alexandra Walsham, University of Cambridge, Bronwyn Wallace, Ceri Law, University of Cambridge, Brian Cummings, University of York
  • Book:
    Memory and the English Reformation
    Published online:
    30 October 2020
    Print publication:
    12 November 2020, pp 132-150

  • Summary

    This chapter examines the post-Reformation afterlives of churchyard, wayside and market crosses. It explores how they were implicated in the Protestant war against idols alongside the manner in which many were recycled for alternative purposes, probing the new layers of meaning they acquired as they were modified and the contested legacies they left to the generations that inherited them. Particular attention is paid to crosses upon whose decapitated pedestals subsequently became the base for sundials. It argues that crosses converted into timekeepers not merely illuminate the interconnections between memory and materiality, space and temporality, in post-Reformation culture. They also offer insight into the evolving concept of the ‘monument’ itself. They afford a glimpse of the process by which things designed to provoke remembrance became things worthy of preservation as historic artefacts themselves. They became signposts to a disappearing past that had to be fossilised lest it be lost.