Book Review: Leith Davis, Mediating Cultural Memory in Britain and Ireland. From the 1688 Revolution to the 1745 Jacobite Rising (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

Reviewed by:
Ian Higgins

Davis, Leith. Mediating Cultural Memory in Britain and Ireland: From the 1688 Revolution to the 1745 Jacobite Rising. Cambridge, 2022. pp. x + 307. $99.00.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

This interdisciplinary study is situated primarily within the field of Cultural Memory Studies. Its principal focus is on the medium of print within the "media ecology" of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and the creation and shaping of cultural memory in England, Scotland and Ireland. Chapters examine five selected historical episodes or "sites of memory" (the terminology is derived from Pierre Nora): the Revolution of 1688–89; the War of the Two Kings in Ireland 1688–91; the Scottish colonial enterprise in Darien (1695–1700); and the 1715 and 1745 Jacobite Risings. The book essentially describes how an Anglo-centric Whig version of the Revolution of 1688–89 and its aftermath in England, Scotland and Ireland was mediated to become the hegemonic cultural memory of the period from 1688 to 1745: a story of the inevitable triumph of a Protestant Hanoverian imperial Britain ruled from London and promoting civil rights and religious and press freedoms. The book gives attention to an impressive range of printed and other materials: declarations and official documents, newspapers, pamphlets, periodicals, letters, accounts of trials, scaffold speeches, songs, maps, prints, portraits, medals, poems, plays, and novels. Sermons are given only a passing mention, which is odd, since preached and printed sermons were the mass media of this period, reaching literate and nonliterate alike from the pulpit and the press. Indeed, it was in the sermons, particularly of Whig Church-of-England clerics and Dissenting Protestant preachers during Queen Anne's reign in the early eighteenth century that the term "Glorious Revolution" was given popular currency and impressed upon the public memory.