This Symposium was held in hybrid format and welcomed researchers from Austria, Canada, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Romania and the UK to Warwick's Institute of Advanced Study as well as online. On behalf of the co-organizers, BEAT KÜMIN (Warwick) opened proceedings with a welcome, introduction of the participants and acknowledgement of the Symposium’s supporters (Humanities Research Centre & Gerda Henkel Stiftung) before beginning a very full day of scholarship and sociability.
KATALIN SZENDE (Budapest) delivered a wide-ranging and nuanced keynote address that considered how the "memory matrix" of parishes as built environments, communities of believers, and territorial entities of governance contributed to identity formation in medieval Central Europe. Szende briefly traced the development of the parish system before examining a huge range of sources to understand how communities constructed, preserved, and transformed their identities through various methods of memorialization. These sources included the invocation of local saints, preserved in church names, relics, and stories of miraculous events; liturgical objects; inscriptions on church walls and baptismal fonts; funerary rites and practices (songs, grave markers, burial locations); and administrative documents as well as local records relating to the financial affairs (deeds, tithes) and the election of parish priests. Szende also considered processions and parish schools as rituals and institutions that bridged the sacred and secular aspects of community identity. Before closing, Szende considered the loss of parish memory through desertion or destruction, as well as the transformation of memory in response to the Reformation and the Ottoman occupation. Szende argued that 'parishes functioned as ideal amalgamation[s] of ecclesiastical institutions and hubs of social security' that created and preserved personal, community, and 'eternal' memory.
Session One focused on medieval culture and featured papers from HEATHER FALVEY (Cambridge/Oxford), JESSICA KNOWLES (Vienna), and CINDY WOOD (Winchester). Common themes included a focus on material culture and physical space, alongside considerations of how individuals and families chose to be remembered in their parish communities. Falvey examined fifteenth-century wills to study the types of mortuary bequests made to church and/or clergy. Common gifts included clothing and livestock. She considered what these gifts signified about how individuals chose to be remembered and what significance such donations had for the recipients. Knowles examined a fascinating survival of late medieval stained glass at All Saints Church, North Street, York, which is likely a pictorial depiction of the poem "The Prick of Conscience", composed in the mid-fourteenth century. The window includes apocalyptic images of the end of the world, and, at the bottom, images of individuals from the family who donated the window. Knowles considered what this rare survival suggests about the concerns of parishioners in fifteenth-century York and about how they wished to be remembered. Cindy Wood argued that the Second Chantry Act of 1547 represented a decisive break with the medieval past and a radical re-formation of how parishioners related to death and the afterlife. She explained how chantries functioned as memorials in the medieval period, before considering how Edwardian religious reforms altered the physical and spiritual experience of worship. Wood focused on Ludlow parish church in Shropshire, where chantries were sold to make space for pews, concluding that after the Reformation, churches emphasized being spaces for the living, rather than places of memory for the dead.
Session two focused on Memory Sources. The presenters raised questions about the types of stories and information that was recorded and remembered in parishes, who controlled the writing process, and who benefitted (or not) from these narratives. IAN ATHERTON'S (Keele) paper demonstrated how registers of baptisms, marriages and burials, recorded by community leaders, preserve a selective history. Atherton emphasized that when we consider what information is not recorded there, we gain a sense of who and what a parish community valued. Registers often recorded major national events (battles, royal deaths, etc.), providing insight into how local communities related to these events. BERNARD CAPP (Warwick) examined Richard Gough's History of Myddle, a well-known parish history based on oral sources. Like Atherton, Capp raised two central questions: whose memories was Gough drawing on, and what sort of memories did Gough believe were worth including in his History? Unlike the parish registers, Gough focused on local events and family matters rather than national events, tracing some of these local families across generations. Capp also argued that Gough's record provides an example of Keith Wrightson's "two concepts of order": official versus local practice. Next, MIIA KUHA (Jyväskylä) examined the funeral sermons of seventeenth-century clergy wives, highlighting how these addresses presented clergy wives as model "mothers of the parish" for other women to emulate. Sometimes printed subsequently, the narratives were "constructed to provide feelings related to the importance of marriage and appreciation of one's spouse". Beat Kümin (Warwick) concluded this panel by presenting on the custom of depositing chronicles, coins, and objects into tower capsules located on top of prominent buildings across the German lands. He placed the phenomenon into a wider ‘concealment mania’ in the region and pointed to the paradox of tower capsules as liminal features: they were simultaneously elevated and concealed above local communities that periodically maintained them.
Session three included presentations by MARTIN DUFFY (Cambridge) and JIM REILLY (Edinburgh). Both presentations considered contested memory in the parishes, but in different national and chronological contexts. Duffy's paper focused on the Irish 'decade of centenaries', commemorated 2012-2022, which highlighted the value of using oral histories to preserve parish memory and facilitate a 'shared narrative' of the past in a society marked by deep religious division. In addition, Duffy drew on various methods of memorialization implemented during the commemorative decade, including artistic displays and museum exhibitions, and reflected on the ethical considerations of such projects. Reilly's paper shifted the focus to late seventeenth-century Scotland. His careful examination of manuscript and print sources, primarily from Robert Wodrow's (d. 1734) important collection, revealed the complex ways clergy and laypersons experienced and interpreted religious persecution in localities including St Andrews, Galloway, and Glasgow. Overall, Wodrow's choices in preserving stories of persecution crafted a deliberate narrative that suited the cause of the Scottish kirk.
Session four featured four papers by CHERYL BUTLER (Winchester), ADINEL DINCǍ (Cluj-Napoca), AIDAN JONES (London), and BÉLA VILMOS MIHALIK (Budapest). Butler’s energetic talk took us to Pear Tree Church in Woolston, Southampton. She traced the ebbs of flows of this church’s history from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century and poignantly demonstrated how the ancient landmark still plays a central role in the identity and sociability of this small community. Adinel Dincǎ’s paper impressively demonstrated the range of sources that he plans to use in his project on accessing memory in the pre-modern parishes of the Transylvanian Saxons. He highlighted the conceptual value of Actor-Network Theory and micro-history when looking at official supplications and petitions submitted by parish priests to various papal offices. At the same time, the talk helpfully raised shared points of interest, such as of the duality of rural/urban experiences and the delicate relationship between oral and literate channels of transmission. Next, Aidan Jones spoke about the significance of St Mildred’s Church in Whippingham on the Isle of Wight for Queen Victoria. It served as the parish church for the Queen when she was based at Osborne House. The paper’s argument centred on the marriage of Victoria’s youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, in 1885, underlining how it formed an intersection between the highest possible echelons of English society and ordinary parishioners. Béla Mihalik rounded this session off by discussing the memory of the old parish in Hungary. He used two case studies to examine how popular memory was constructed and used in eighteenth-century Hungary to establish new Catholic parishes and to disintegrate the Protestant church. Firstly, he used the case of Alattyán from 1769, when a Catholic parish was established in a Calvinist village. The attack against the existing place of worship was justified by the memory of a short-lived Catholic parish in 1701. Secondly, he focused on the town of Jászkisér, which involved a Catholic parish founded by the local community in 1749, despite the will of their landlord, the neighbouring Premonstratensian monastery. The local community’s argumentation was based on the memory of the old parish demolished in the 1690.
The last session of the day featured papers from JASON FROST (Westminster) and KAYE SOWDEN (Canterbury). Frost discussed the tensions that existed between parishioners for burial space over the long eighteenth century. The presentation highlighted their value for scholars in linking the parish church to some of the broader forces at work in this period, such as growing population pressures and commercial forces that increased polarisation between the richest and poorest. In the last paper of the symposium, Kaye Sowden used court records, letters, and personal notes to discuss how the parish of Pluckley in the Weald of Kent became a site of long-standing animosity between the two gentry families of the Derings and Bettenhams. Sowden’s paper powerfully reminded attendees that early modern records often underscored that memory was constructed by local communities rather than outsiders; but sometimes these local memories became of national concern as they were brought before the monarch’s law courts.
The day concluded with a round-table discussion of themes, concepts, methodologies and interpretive paradigms that had been highlighted throughout the day. The wide range of sources (including art, architecture, literature, administrative documents and government records, personal papers, small artefacts, pamphlets, oral histories, among others) was emphasized. The importance of comparative studies (international, chronological, interdisciplinary) was equally underlined. Participants discussed the challenges of using material artefacts to reconstruct the processes and experience of memory, and the challenges and limitations of writing histories of memory. In particular, the discussion focused on issues regarding how historians can interpret sources that reveal contested memories: who decides what gets recorded and preserved, and what gets left out of record? Who, historically, has had access to this material? Who benefits from or is harmed by selective recording/preservation of records, narratives, and material artefacts? And how did these decisions shape community identity, social structures, and religious practice in European parishes? These questions, it was agreed, deserve continued attention from historians.
Conference Overview:
Welcome & Keynote Address
Chair: Beat Kümin (Warwick)
Katalin Szende (Budapest): ‘The parish as a place of memory in medieval Central Europe’
Session 1: Medieval Culture
Chair: Angus Crawford (Warwick)
Heather Falvey (Cambridge / Oxford): ‘Remembering the parish (priest): Mortuary bequests in medieval England’
Jessica Knowles (Vienna): ‘Commemorating Apocalypse: The Fifteen Last Days in All Saints, North Street’
Cindy Wood (Winchester): ‘The Parish Church of Ludlow, the 1547 Chantry Act and Commemoration of the Dead’
Session 2: Memory Sources
Chair: JOHN CRAIG (Simon Fraser)
Ian Atherton (Keele): ‘Early Modern English Parish Registers as Forms of Memory’
Bernard Capp (Warwick): ‘Richard Gough and his Memories of Myddle’
Miia Kuha (Jyväskylä): ‘Remembering the pastor’s wife: Roles and responsibilities of 17th -century Finnish clergymen’s wives in funeral biographies’
Beat Kümin (Warwick): ‘Conceal to Connect: Tower Capsules in the Deposit Culture of the German Lands’
Session 3: Memory Divisions
Chair: Kristi Flake (Warwick)
Martin Duffy (Cambridge): ‘Parish Memory during the Irish Decade of Centenaries 2012-2022’
Jim Reilly (Edinburgh): ‘The contested memory of religious persecution in the early modern Scottish parish’
Session 4: Parishes Remembered
Chair: Miia Kuha (Jyväskylä)
Cheryl Butler (Winchester): ‘Why remember Peartree?’
Adinel Dinca (Cluj-Napoca): ‘Accessing the Memory in the Pre-Modern Parish of the Transylvanian Saxons’
Aidan Jones (London): ‘’The simple, pretty little village church’: Queen Victoria’s Isle of Wight Parish Church’
Béla Vilmos Mihalik (Budapest): ‘Memory of the Old Parish: The Case of Hungary’
Session 5: Parish Spaces
Chair: Andrew Foster (Kent)
Jason Frost (Westminster): ‘From Parochial Memory to Physical Memorialisation; How God’s Acre became Contested Space’
Kaye Sowden (Canterbury): ‘An Ancient man of four score and ten: Bearing witness in parish disputes and the recording of happenings’
Concluding remarks