Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium

by Patrick J. Geary

Overview

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. Women praying for their dead, monks creating and re-creating their archives, scribes choosing which royal families of the past to applaud and which to forget: it is from such sources that most of our knowledge of the medieval period comes. Throughout 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781400843541
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/13/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	264
File size:	16 MB
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About the Author

Patrick J. Geary is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction	3
1	Remembering and Forgetting in the Eleventh Century	23
2	Men, Women, and Family Memory	48
3	Archival Memory and the Destruction of the Past	81
4	Unrolling Institutional Memories	115
5	Political Memory and the Restructuring of the Past	134
6	Remembering Pannonian Dragons	158
7	Conclusions	177
Notes	183
Select Bibliography	219
Index	241

What People are Saying About This

Thomas Head

A strikingly original study of the ways in which men and women of the eleventh century recorded, interpreted, and used their memories of the past. . . . [Geary] has made a significant contribution to our understanding of [this] period but to the wider discipline of medieval studies.
— Thomas Head, Washington University, St. Louis

From the Publisher

"A strikingly original study of the ways in which men and women of the eleventh century recorded, interpreted, and used their memories of the past. . . . [Geary] has made a significant contribution to our understanding of [this] period but to the wider discipline of medieval studies."—Thomas Head, Washington University, St. Louis

Editorial Reviews

"Moving from general to particular, the author uses three case-studies to depict local patterns of memory.... Geary states his thesis with clarity ... [and] throw[s] light into the most elusive recesses of not just 'the past,' but of processes still going on, in and around us, in 1995."—-Alexander Murray, The Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher

"[A] fascinating, deeply learned, and meticulous study.... This thoughtful book ... raises important questions pertinent to all periods."

Virginia Quarterly Review

Moving from general to particular, the author uses three case-studies to depict local patterns of memory.... Geary states his thesis with clarity ... [and] throw[s] light into the most elusive recesses of not just 'the past,' but of processes still going on, in and around us, in 1995.

The Times Literary Supplement - Alexander Murray

Moving from general to particular, the author uses three case-studies to depict local patterns of memory.... Geary states his thesis with clarity ... [and] throw[s] light into the most elusive recesses of not just 'the past,' but of processes still going on, in and around us, in 1995.
— Alexander Murray

The Times Literary Supplement