Aesthetic Seminar in collaboration with LUMEN

Alexandra Walsham (University of Cambridge)

Converting the Cross: Monuments, Memory and Time in Post-Reformation England

This lecture will examine the afterlives of churchyard, wayside and market crosses in post-Reformation England. It will explore how they were implicated in successive phases of the Protestant war against idols, alongside the manner in which many were recycled for a range of alternative purposes. Approaching these objects as palimpsests, it probes 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 the phenomenon of transforming decapitated crosses into sundials, and to the relationship between this and the reconfiguration of traditional regimes of liturgical and spiritual time. It will be suggested that converted crosses 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.

The lecture is open for the public. After the lecture, the School of Communication and Culture will host a reception for all participants.

Preliminary programme