Introduction: The arts of rememberance

Portraits are inherently mnemonic devices. The use of portraiture as a mnemonic device for post-Reformation Roman Catholics has frequently been remarked upon, but the subject remains more sparsely treated for the Tudor, as opposed to early Stuart, era, and for the middling elites rather than courtly figures in both times. Post-Reformation portraits of both Catholics and Protestants did not necessarily differ from each other in content, but they generally addressed more secular concerns than earlier works. In post-Reformation England at least up until the 1620s, those aims had very much more to do with the creation of mnemonic images which might legitimize and define the sitter, and invest his/her life and actions with additional authority, than with more aesthetic objectives. But the instance of portraiture in the service of memory and of martyrdom was not to succeed in that Laudian hey-day.