Purdue University Purdue e-Pubs Department of History Faculty Publications Department of History 1995 The loB ody Assizes: Whig Martyrdom and Memory after the Glorious Revolution Melinda S. Zook Purdue University,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/histpubs Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation “The loodyB Assizes: Whig Martyrdom and Memory after the Glorious Revolution,” Albion, 27 (Fall 1995): 373-96. This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact
[email protected] for additional information. "TheBloody Assizes:"Whig Martyrdomand Memory after the GloriousRevolution* Melinda Zook Revolutionariesof modem times often imagine themselves not only as creators of a new future, but also as constructorsof a new past. They seek to reinterpret events, rewrite texts, desacralize old idols and icons, and institute new heroes, heroines and martyrsfor the cause newly victorious.They hope to recast popular memory to justify the new order.Historians might easily associate such attempts to reconstructhistory and manipulatememory with the violent context of the FrenchRevolution. Recent work in Frenchcultural history has providedscholars with a fuller awareness of the functions of revolutionary propaganda,from iconographyto ritual.'Investigations into festival, street literature,rhetoric, read- ing, audience, and memory have given the revolutionaryexperience in France a cultural history that England's still lacks.2 England's Glorious Revolution particularly lacks such a cultural history. Traditionally, 1688/89 has been portrayedas a rather tame event over which little blood was spilt for little actual change.3Yet, among contemporariesof the Earlier versions of this essay were given at the North American Conference on British Studies in Montreal,October 1993, and at the American Society for Legal History in WashingtonDC., October 1994.