Introduction: Death, Memory and Commemoration in the English Midlands, 1600-1900

ABSTRACT Our special issue makes five new contributions. Firstly, methodological advances including the need to focus on the boundaries between ‘active’ and passive memory and on the theoretical perspectives of the wider discipline of memory studies. Secondly, the importance of ‘telling the dead’, through intricate stories. Thirdly, we capture collectively the importance of ‘legacy’ for the dying and their families, a concept that in the past has been overwhelmingly applied to the propertied classes. Fourthly, our authors focus on the symbolism of remembrance, especially the complex relationships between small symbolic acts or experiences and the construction of enduring memory. Finally, most of our writers deal with the way in which memory and commemoration of the individual had an importance over and above the single person. Our stories reveal much about the particular cultures of death, mourning and memory in the midlands but also more widely on the national stage.