Friends of Reading Abbey AGM and Lecture

The dissolution of the monasteries has often been treated as the coda to a history of monastic glory and decline. This talk instead takes the dissolution as a starting point for a different kind of history, uncovering various ways in which this episode profoundly transformed religion, culture, and society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Harriet Lyon is the JH Plumb College Lecturer and Fellow in British History at Christ's College, University of Cambridge. Her book, Memory and the Dissolution of the Monasteries in Early Modern England, is out now with Cambridge University Press.