Commemoration and Oblivion in Royalist Print Culture, 1658-1667

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

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2. Introduction – Remembering the Civil Wars: Royalist Print Culture in Early Restoration England

   • Erin Peters

   Pages 1-22

3. Forgetting and Remembering: The Royalist Account of the Past

   • Erin Peters

   Pages 23-67

4. Saints and Demons: Making Royalist Myths

   • Erin Peters

   Pages 69-106

5. Collective Trauma and Restorative Nostalgia: Royalist Remedies

   • Erin Peters

   Pages 107-142

6. Afterword

   • Erin Peters

   Pages 143-147

7. Back Matter

   Pages 149-183

   PDF

This book explores the measures taken by the newly re-installed monarchy and its supporters to address the drastic events of the previous two decades. Profoundly preoccupied with - and, indeed, anxious about - the uses and representations of the nation’s recent troubled past, the returning royalist regime heavily relied upon the dissemination, in popular print, of prescribed varieties of remembering and forgetting in order to actively shape the manner in which the Civil Wars, the Regicide, and the Interregnum were to be embedded in the nation’s collective memory. 


This study rests on a broad foundation of documentary evidence drawn from hundreds of widely distributed and affordable pamphlets and broadsheets that were intended to shape popular memories, and interpretations, of recent events. It thus makes a substantial original contribution to the fields of early modern memory studies and the history of the English Civil Wars and early Restoration.

• Early modern
• Media
• Monarchy
• Civil War
• Propaganda

“Carefully researched and highly readable book, one that will be of interest not only to those interested in early modern memory, but to scholars of Restoration culture and early modern print more generally. The book’s particular strengths are its innovative use of concepts from the broader memory studies project to shed fresh light on forms of remembering (and forgetting) in the past, the careful analysis of wide range of printed sources, and the sensitive treatment of royalism … .” (Ms. Imogen Peck, Reviews in History, history.ac.uk, October, 2017)

• University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, United Kingdom

  Erin Peters

Erin Peters is Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Gloucestershire, UK.

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