This book explores the measures taken by the newly re-installed monarchy and its supporters to address the drastic events of the previous two decades. Profoundly preoccupied with – and, indeed, anxious about – the uses and representations of the nation’s recent troubled past, the returning royalist regime heavily relied upon the dissemination, in popular print, of prescribed varieties of remembering and forgetting in order to actively shape the manner in which the Civil Wars, the Regicide, and the Interregnum were to be embedded in the nation’s collective memory.

This study rests on a broad foundation of documentary evidence drawn from hundreds of widely distributed and affordable pamphlets and broadsheets that were intended to shape popular memories, and interpretations, of recent events. It thus makes a substantial original contribution to the fields of early modern memory studies and the history of the English Civil Wars and early Restoration.
Erin Peters is a lecturer in Early Modern History and teaches a range of modules that covers the period c. 1450-1700. With interdisciplinary interests in seventeenth-century cultural history and Memory Studies, Erin’s research focuses on the English Civil Wars and Restoration. Other areas of interest include: Traumatology, Nostalgia, Identity, Print Culture, Disability Studies and Medical Humanities (early modern conceptions and theories of psychological disabilities).

Erin has a Ph.D. in Early Modern English History from the University of Worcester, an M.A. in Cultural Memory from the University of London, and a B.A. in History from Wilfrid Laurier University. She has an article entitled ‘Trauma Narratives of the English Civil War’ forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies and also has a forthcoming book chapter entitled ‘The Disabled Nation: The Discourse of Psychological Disability in the Seventeenth-Century’. Her current research project is a study of representations of Civil War-related psychological trauma and its impact on medical and psychological theories between 1642-1681. Additionally, Erin is in the process of preparing her doctoral thesis for publication as a monograph entitled Commemoration and Oblivion: Royalist Print Culture, 1658-1666. Erin is originally from Toronto, Canada, but has spent time living in South America, Asia, and Europe. In her free time, she enjoys traveling, reading, and spending time with family and friends.