Generations: Age, Ancestry, and Memory in the English Reformations

Generations draws on a rich array of evidence to highlight the vital part played by families bound by blood and by faith in the religious revolution that stretched across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It provides poignant glimpses into how people navigated the profound challenges that the English Reformation posed in everyday life, injecting fresh energy into tired debates.
Approaching generation as a biological category and a social cohort, Generations demonstrates that the tumultuous religious developments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries not only transformed the generations that experienced it, but were also forged and created by it. Walsham investigates how age and ancestry were implicated in the theological and cultural upheavals of the era and how these in turn reconfigured the nexus between memory, history, and time. Generations explores the manifold ways in which the Reformation shaped the horizontal relationships that early modern people formed with their siblings, kin, and peers, as well as the vertical ones that tied them to their dead ancestors and their future heirs.

Drawing on previously untapped archival evidence, in tandem with a rich array of printed texts, visual images and material objects, this study offers poignant glimpses of individual lives and casts fascinating light on how families were both torn apart and brought closer together by the Reformation.