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


Paperback
- Price:
- $48.00 / £38.00
- ISBN:
- Published:
- May 5, 1996
- Copyright:
- 1994
- Pages:
- 264
- Size:
- 6 x 9.25 in.
- 3 maps. 14 halftones. 4 figs. 3 tables
ebook
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.