The last decade has seen a bumper crop of scholarly work on memory studies, with a remarkably bountiful harvest of books concerning the English Renaissance and Reformation—most notably, Lina Perkins Wilder's Shakespeare's Memory Theatre (2010), Andrew Hiscock's Reading Memory in Early Modern Literature (2011), Jonathan Baldo's Memory in Shakespeare's Histories (2011), and Isabel Karremann's The Drama of Memory (2015); also, The Memory Arts in Renaissance England: A Critical Anthology (2016) and the essays collected in The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Memory (2016). Shaping Remembrance contributes productively to the conversations promulgated by these and other related works owing to Patricia Phillippy's sustained critical approach, which deftly intertwines religion, materiality, and gender.

The impetus and rationale for this hybrid treatment of the arts of remembrance derives from the book's overarching thesis, linking these six seemingly disparate chapters and focusing on material and textual remains of living webs of connection in which the creators and creations mutually are involved. This calls for an implicit recasting of the word monument, as was undertaken by Bart van Es in Spenser's Forms of History (2002)—incidentally, not mentioned in Shaping Remembrance—to show how the monument was torn between two different kinds of truth, that of moral instruction and physical evidence. Phillippy, therefore, is at pains in chapter 1 to remove monuments from a limited antiquarian purview and parochial interest, and to locate them instead “in provocative relations with early modern texts, from masques, poems, and plays to religious and devotional writings” (9). This is accomplished through a reimagining of monuments as being involved with other commemorative works, and these include writings by canonical authors and well as other voices that, for a variety of reasons, have been isolated from the mainstream and now are brought to the fore.

Phillippy's study is interdisciplinary in the most salutary sense of the term, considering, as it does, sacred as well as secular aspects of remembrance, influencing artifacts, texts, and the individuals who created and experienced them. Taking its start in the parish church, Shaping Remembrance nimbly moves within and then beyond that sacred space to explore the dynamic networks in which men and women (although, as a welcomed feature of the monograph, mainly women) experienced loss and recollection. Whether situated in churches or circulating in more flexible, mobile works—with special reference to a wide range of manuscripts and early printed texts (the bibliography contains three pages of manuscript sources and seven of primary), jewels and rosaries, personal bequests and antique rarities—this book makes a case for the extent to which monuments thus reimagined were a ubiquitous feature in post-Reformation England, both epistemologically and mnemotechnically. Apropos of the latter, perhaps the most engaging aspect of this book is the examination of a distinctly feminine art of memory, which Phillippy demonstrates by moving from a set of material artifacts concerned with the preservation and further circulation of dynastic identity to a series of compelling close readings of Shakespeare's tragicomedies and Milton's Comus.

Especially representative in this regard is chapter 3, “Innogen's Needle: Remembrance and Romance in Cymbeline,” concluding the first part of the book, which concerns “the processes by which the body politic appropriates sacramental, feminine textualities to craft the memory and matter of Britain” (63). Many long-standing verbal quibbles and thematic cruxes of this play satisfactorily are resolved (and the same applies to Pericles in chapter 5 and The Winter's Tale in chapter 6) through Phillippy's interpretative strategy informed by the tripartite critical lens of religion, materiality, and gender: “Cymbeline plays out the petrifying violence of idolatry and iconoclasm and resurrects the female subject in a productive, regenerative incorporation of the sacrament that is also the text” (124). This third chapter, although closely tied conceptually to the preceding two involving the Montagu Archive, could stand on its own in a volume of seminal essays on Shakespeare's romances, so convincingly does Phillippy analyze the constituent elements of wonder encoded in the play. What catharsis is to tragedy, wonder is to tragicomedy; Phillippy's painstaking research and close readings unlock the play's cabinet of wonders, “a woman's wondrous work of a different order” (125), for scholars of early modern literature, devotional culture, drama, and, above all, memory.