Unquestioned

I always intended Book Two to be an unofficial sequel to Book One, in the sense that Book One raised questions for me--about religion and historical narrative, about historical fictions that didn't behave "properly"--that it didn't have space to answer.  But a couple of days ago,  I realized that the two books responded to the same phenomenon: nineteenth-century claims that "X does not exist" or "we've forgotten all about X."  Book One pointed out that the Victorians kept complaining that "there is no history of women" or "there ought to be a history of women, but nobody's writing it" or even "women's history is exceptionally important, so why isn't anyone writing it?"...even as histories of women kept popping up in volume form, in periodicals, in lectures at the local athenaeum, and so forth.  Now, I'm writing about authors who insisted that their peers had completely, totally, and utterly forgotten the Reformation, even as the Victorian presses were pouring out novels, histories, plays, poems, periodicals, sermons, and tracts on every possible manifestation of that  subject.  In one sense, my authors are correct: as Kenneth Stewart notes in passing, by the 19th c. various Reformers and Reformation topics had gone completely out of print (206).  Similarly, most early Victorian readers, devout or otherwise, would have known the Book of Martyrs only in abridgements.   But  it's fascinating to read an author in the 1870s complaining that "nobody ever thinks about the Reformers any more," even though by that point there was more popular and scholarly material on the topic than would fit...well, than would fit into my bookcases.   The Victorians managed to turn this "commonsense" claim about forgetfulness to all sorts of interesting polemical uses, though...