The dissolution of St. Paul’s charnel: remembering and forgetting the collective dead in late medieval and early modern England

Abstract

ABSTRACT Memorials of the lay dead in late medieval English churchyards were constructed from perishable materials, with the exhumation and reuse of burial plots suggesting that a timely forgetting of the individual was an accepted part of the commemorative process. From the 13th century onward, remains exhumed from old graves were increasingly redeposited in specific structures known as charnel houses. The collective redeposition of disarticulated skeletal remains in charnels anonymised the deceased, generating mortuary spaces which foregrounded communal rather than individual memory. In this paper, charnelling and its relation to memory in late medieval England is theorised and explored. Following this, early modern developments are investigated, employing the charnel of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, as a central case study. As the country’s largest late medieval charnel, its extreme treatment following the Dissolution of the Monasteries renders it a potent example of how religious reform affected mortuary practice during the period. Through the violent ejection of its contained remains and the structure’s secular repurposing as a print shop, treatments of the ancestral dead were employed to enact and manifest ideological change. This produced changes in London’s mortuary landscape which in turn memorialised the reformatory process itself.