Phantoms of Remembrance

In Phantoms of Remembrance, Patrick Geary makes important new inroads into the widely discussed topic of historical memory, vividly evoking the everyday lives of eleventh-century people and both their written and nonwritten ways of preserving the past. Through richly detailed descriptions of various acts of remembrance - including the naming of children and the recording of visions - the author unearths a wide range of approaches to preserving the past as it was or formulating the past that an individual or group prefers to imagine. By focusing on a turning point in medieval history, one in which an effort was made to make a cultural break with the previous centuries, Geary offers a dramatic example of specific mental and social structures that filtered the memories communicated by social elites and ordinary individuals alike.

First sentence: THE NEW PAST forged in the eleventh century by Rodulfus Glaber, Arnold of Regensburg, and their contemporaries, with its emphasis on radical discontinuity, is an enduring creation: its central outlines, accepted and elaborated upon by subsequent medieval generations, have been largely accepted by modern historians.

Year

1994

Language

English

Publisher

Princeton Univ Pr

Editions

2

Pages

264

ISBN

9780691034225

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