IN 1700 A MATHEMATICIAN submitted a paper to the Royal Society in which he attempted to calculate, among other things, the rate at which oral testimony — that is, memory — decayed over long periods of time. It’s a quixotic idea, to be sure, but that such a thing might even be attempted speaks not only to the emergence of an empirical mindset, but to the transformations wrought on how people conceived of themselves, their contemporaries, and their families — and how they remembered the past — by the processes of what we call the Reformation.
Pay no heed, the Apostle Paul wrote, “to fables and endless genealogies”. His advice fell on deaf ears among the people of sixteenth and seventeenth-century England.
