RT Article
T1 Relics, writing, and memory in the English Counter Reformation: Thomas Maxfield and his afterlives
JF British Catholic history
VO 34
IS 1
SP 77
OP 105
A1 Walsham, Alexandra 1966-
LA English
YR 2018
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1588408965
AB This article explores the multiple and competing afterlives of the Jacobean martyr, Thomas Maxfield, who was executed at Tyburn in July 1616. It traces the evolution of his cult between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries by exploring the migration of his relics alongside the movements of the written and printed texts recounting his life and death. It investigates the domestic and international politics in which these textual and material remains circulated and illuminates the making and metamorphosis of social memory in the English Counter Reformation. It sheds fresh light on how Maxfield's relics served both to bind this imagined community together and to divide and fragment it. Highlighting the interweaving of devotion and scholarship, antiquarianism and piety, it also argues that relic collecting must be recognised as part of the wider contemporary enterprises of religious record-keeping and writing sacred history.
K1 Archives
K1 Counter Reformation
K1 Martyrs
K1 Memory
K1 Relics
K1 Writing
DO 10.1017/bch.2018.3