Phantoms of Remembrance:
Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium
Patrick J. Geary

Paper | 1996 | $31.95 / £21.95
264 pp. | 6 x 9 | 3 maps. 14 halftones. 4 figs. 3 tables

Shopping Cart | Reviews | Table of Contents

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.

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

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

Endorsement:

"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

Table of Contents

Other Princeton books by Patrick J. Geary:

• Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages. (Revised edition with new preface).
• The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe.
• Women at the Beginning: Origin Myths from the Amazons to the Virgin Mary.

Subject Areas:

• Archaeology and Ancient History
• Religion
• Sociology

Hardcover published in 1995

Shopping Cart:

For customers in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Asia, and Australia
Paper: $31.95 ISBN13: 978-0-691-02603-9

For customers in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and India
Paper: £21.95 ISBN13: 978-0-691-02603-9

Prices subject to change without notice

File created: 11/4/2009

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