The Introduction makes a case for reuniting memory studies and affect studies: like twins separated at birth, these two vibrant fields of in the study of Renaissance literature and culture have existed alongside each other, in spite of their conceptual entanglement, since antiquity. An overview of recent developments in contemporary theorizations of memory and affect is followed by an investigation of how they might be connected in the historical frameworks of early modern faculty psychology, Galenic humoralism, and, to use a modern term, distributed cognition.

The conclusion lays out the four key arguments of the book. Firstly, manorial structures remained important to community governance across the late medieval and early modern eras. Secondly, the impetus for this continued vitality came from communities of tenants who recognised the value of manorial structures for their own needs. Thirdly, manorial governance could create a degree of inequality within communities, but this was constrained and varied between villages. Fourthly, state formation did not radically disrupt these manorial structures. These arguments lead to several historiographical interventions. They challenge the notion of a late medieval decline, support positive interpretations of lord-tenant relations, demonstrate that long-term dynamics could create a ‘middling sort’ and suggest some reasons for England’s early development of high state capacity. Finally, the chapter makes some comparisons with other European regions, demonstrating that while the emergence of local elites managing aspects of their community’s economy and society was universal, the exact relationship between lord, state and community created different governance structures.

The introduction starts by showing how the Swallowfield Articles, the famous record of the early modern ‘politics of the parish’, reveal the persistent importance of the ‘medieval’ manorial court leet to local governance. It then provides an overview of both the medieval and early modern historiography, showing how a newer set of contributions has emphasised continuity between these eras by revealing the importance of manor courts after 1500, a long-run connection between state and locality stretching back into the Middle Ages, and the existence of a medieval local elite. It shows that a flaw in the literature remains the lack of cross-period studies which this book tackles by exploring the functions of manorial offices, who filled these offices, and the ways in which officeholding systems changed in response to the decline of lordship and the process of state formation using a long-run time frame stretching from 1300 to 1650. Next, the key features of the case-study manors (Horstead, Cratfield, Little Downham, Worfield and Fordington) are discussed. The final section provides a plan of the book.

This chapter asserts the influence of Francis Bacon’s natural philosophy on the early modern English essay, noting in particular how the Baconian commitment to scientific experiment and empirical investigation informed the work of early essayists such as Robert Boyle, Samuel Hartlib, and William Cornwallis. The author argues that the humanist form of the essay was also harnessed to the practical and utilitarian ends of managed state capitalism, including agriculture and political economy.

The Unton Portrait at the National Portrait Gallery, London, is among the most famous representations of memory and mortality in early modern England. It depicts Sir Henry Unton (c. 1558–1596), his life and death. This chapter argues that the Unton Memorial Picture deserves to be reconsidered not primarily as a narrative of Unton’s life and death, but as a meditation on memory and mortality. Analysis of the spatial organisation of the portrait shows how early modern English elite culture approached the arts of death in the wake of the Reformation. Equal weight was given to life, death and its attendant rituals, and to the afterlife, including the fate of body, soul, and memory. Close reading of the architecture and imagery of Unton’s monument as depicted in the portrait demonstrates that the tomb was at the forefront of the stylistic development of English sepulchral art. This allows the portrait to be redated to around 1606, a decade after the death of its subject, and understood as part of a programmatic approach to Unton’s memory authored by his widow Dorothy. The chapter contributes to development of a theory of memory and commemoration authentic to the English Renaissance.

This chapter explores the historical evidence for cultural attitudes to menstruation. The most commonly promoted medical theories as to why women experienced a monthly bleed are discussed. The many words and circumlocutions early moderns used to describe menstruation and related female reproductive bleeding are considered, along with prevailing cultural expectations about this event.

Rebecca Tomlin uses an archive of some three hundred alms petitions made c.1580–1600 at St Botolph’s Church, Aldgate, London to show how early modern compassion was an emotion that was governed by judgement. The chapter explores the strategies adopted by petitioners to move almsgivers to generosity; how almsgivers decided who deserved their charity, how petitions seek to move money from donor to petitioner, and how early modern charity is connected to compassion. Tomlin discusses how early modern compassion was an emotion that was governed by the giver’s judgement about the merit of the petitioner and the truth of his or her story, and how the identities of both the petitioner and the potential donor are mutually formed in the performance of petitioning. The chapter shows that the expression of generosity through cash was encouraged not by emotive descriptions of physical or emotional suffering but by focus on the economic consequences of disasters. Collections seem to gesture towards some kind of restitution of the pre-existing social order, rather than evoking lament and emotional empathy, although a sense of social solidarity also seems to have been operative when collections were gathered for local causes.

Kristine Steenbergh argues that the Reformation impacted traditional practices cultivating compassion. Late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century sermons reveal a concern over the disappearance of traditional habits of charitable giving and affective meditation, and explore new forms of nurturing a capacity for sharing in the suffering of others. Clergymen thought that a mollified heart requires constant practice. With the loss of traditional habits of charity, they feared their congregations’ hearts were in danger of hardening against the sight of suffering. These concerns are expressed in a recurrent image: in their sermons, preachers worry that the members of their congregation suffer from hardened, closed and dry bowels. The concept of the ‘bowels of compassion’ is central to early modern practices of charity and fellow-feeling: these organs need to be soft and moist to open and stretch towards those in need, to share in their suffering. The active process of compassion was seen as a long-term process of softening the bowels – a concept that brings together religious terminology with humoral and bodily notions of the workings of compassion.

Alison Searle examines the formal procedures connected to compassion in James Shirley’s The Sisters (licensed 26 April 1642). She focuses on the problems posed by outsiders: the compassion of bandits dwelling as an anti-society in the woodlands, the recurring trope of the vagrant/beggar/gypsy/actor used to interrogate histrionic techniques deployed to evoke compassion and the complexities of policing the performance of compassion within the early modern Protestant state. Shirley’s play elucidates the ways in which compassion could create new, dangerous communities, as well as exposing the limits of existing groups. By postulating the ruler as a potential object of compassion, the play proleptically examines one of the most pressing political questions of the English Civil War: can the monarch be an object of compassion? The play’s invitation to feel pity for the plight of the king creates a political space for subversive action. If one can empathise with the king, is he a potential peer?