Phantoms of Remembrance
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...
Description
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.