An Exploration of Four Sixteenth-Century Artefacts from St Helen's Ranworth: Conformity, Decency, Moderation and Memory in the Post-Reformation era.

Garrard, Nicholas James Havelock (2019). An Exploration of Four Sixteenth-Century Artefacts from St Helen's Ranworth: Conformity, Decency, Moderation and Memory in the Post-Reformation era. PhD thesis The Open University.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.ro.00010457

Abstract

The impact of the sixteenth-century English Reformation on parish life is an academically fertile and contested subject. The growth of interdisciplinary studies and material culture studies in particular has shed new light on the extent to which ordinary peoples’ faith and world-view changed in response to official reforms.

This thesis brings a fresh perspective to these issues. Through close analysis of four early Reformation-era artefacts from one rural Norfolk parish, a composite view has emerged. The artefacts from St Helen’s Church, Ranworth, owed their existence to official injunctions or reformist pressures and have been interrogated from a range of material, liturgical and textual perspectives drawn from the disciplines of material culture studies, art, church and social histories.

The examined artefacts are a printed volume of Erasmus’ paraphrases on the gospels and Acts of the Apostles, an Elizabethan communion cup, a wall monument of 1579 and the late Elizabethan parchment transcript of the Ranworth parish register. Attention has been given to the ordinances that instigated them and ways in which they were adopted, used and adapted by a sixteenth-century community that they were imposed upon.

This visual and materially-based investigation throws new light on a number of current areas of academic focus in Reformation studies. Examining artefacts from different genres that are joined by a shared location and chronology have yielded insights into their surrounding culture and themes of conformity, decency, moderation and memory which predominate current academic debates.

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