I have read Patrick Geary's Phantoms of Remembrance and thoroughly
enjoyed it. It mainly deals with self-conscious selection strategies as
used by a variety of medieval writers, best summed up in his phrase
"creating the past" (intro) He is as much concerned with selective
forgetting as remembering (chap. 1). He examines family memory (chap 2),
archival memory and destruction (chap 3), institutional memory (chap 4),
and political memory (chap 5), but my favorite is "Remembering Pannonian
Dragons" (chap 6) in which he looks at one personal memory and the
shaping of it by the author.
His conclusion (chap 7) is succinct and sums up his premise:
"This study began with the premise that what we think we know about the
early Middle Ages is largely determined by what people of the early
eleventh century wished themselves and their contemporaries to know
about the past. Thus I have attempted to recover some of the
circumstances in which these people went about re-remembering their past
in relationship to their own present. This process, which involved
creating new systems and structures, both social and textual, within
which the past was preserved, necessarily changed the very nature of
what would be preserved through elimination, elaboration, and
reinterpretation." He does argue that the strongest forces shaping this
process were local and ad hoc.
This is a good book both for those interested in the early Middle Ages
and for those interested in the methodology of studying memory, as well
as written records. I happen to like the Pannonian dragon story best
because it is an excellent example of a cultural historical approach,
taking a seemingly obscure and bizarre story and making sense out of it
by looking at the contexts and the available meanings from which the
author (Arnold of Regensburg) chose his interpretation.
This is itself a local, ad hoc review based on my selective memory (and
a glance at the book to refresh it)!
Karen Jolly
--
Dr. Karen Jolly
Associate Professor, History
University of Hawai`i at Manoa
[log in to unmask]
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~kjolly
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