Reviews

The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England by Andy Wood

adamjames's review

5.0

A really interesting and thought-provoking look into custom and popular memory, which created a 'usable past' in order to legitimise the "ancient" claims to rights, space, and resources that were sites of localised conflict throughout early modern England. Sympathetic and piercing in analysis, and impressively researched (drawing from many different academic fields and archives), I feel compelled to give it five stars despite the fact that I found it to be a tad cumbersome and repetitive in parts. There's so many powerful ideas within the book that its hard to write a succinct review. Here's one of the many quotes that stood out to me:

‘Just like being taken on a perambulation transformed piles of stones or bends in hedges into sites of memory, so writing, reading and speaking about local memory were active, generative, creative forces. They bought into being a set of social practices and relationships which, for poorer people in particular, could represent a form of agency. This was, perhaps, the most important reason as to why the gentry and nobility affected such a growing contempt for customary claims: what mattered was not just the claim to material resources, important though this was; at stake also was the capacity of poorer and middling people to deploy shared memories as a source of legitimation and agency’