Ancient and Medieval Memories

Ancient and Medieval Memories PDF

Author: Janet Coleman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1992-01-30

Total Pages: 670

ISBN-13: 0521411440

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This book is an analysis of thinking, remembering and reminiscing according to ancient authors, and their medieval readers. The author argues that behind the various medieval methods in interpreting texts of the past lie two apparently incompatible theories of human knowledge and remembering, as well as two differing attitudes to matter and intellect. The book comprises a series of studies which take ancient texts as evidence of the past, and show how medieval readers and writers understood them. The studies confirm that medieval and renaissance interpretations and uses of the past differ greatly from modern interpretation and yet betray many startling continuities between modern and ancient and medieval theories.

Medieval Memories

Medieval Memories PDF

Author: Elisabeth Van-Houts

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-09-13

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1317878833

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Who, exactly, was responsible for the preservation of knowledge about the past? How did people preserve their recollections and pass them on to the next generation? Did they write them down or did they hand then on orally? The book is concerned with the memories of medieval people. In the Middle Ages, as now, men and women collected stories about the past and handed them down to posterity. Many memories centre in the aristocratic family or lineage while others are focussed on institutions such as monasteries or nunneries. The family and monastic contexts clearly illustrate that remembrance of the past was a task for men and women and that each sex had a specific gendered role. Memory also involves selection of what should and should not be remembered and its corollary, amnesia, therefore, is discussed. Anchored in the present, memory casts a shadow on the future and thus prophecies form an important component of the cult of remembrance. For the first time in Medieval Memories, tombstones, medieval encyclopaedias and legal testimonies figure alongside moral guidebooks, miracle stories and chronicles as material for the gendered perceptions of the medieval past.

Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture

Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture PDF

Author: Dr Elma Brenner

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2013-04-28

Total Pages: 556

ISBN-13: 1409463435

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In medieval society and culture, memory occupied a unique position. It was central to intellectual life and the medieval understanding of the human mind. Commemoration of the dead was also a fundamental Christian activity. Above all, the past - and the memory of it - occupied a central position in medieval thinking, from ideas concerning the family unit to those shaping political institutions. Focusing on France but incorporating studies from further afield, this collection of essays marks an important new contribution to the study of medieval memory and commemoration. Arranged thematically, each part highlights how memory cannot be studied in isolation, but instead intersects with many other areas of medieval scholarship, including art history, historiography, intellectual history, and the study of religious culture. Key themes in the study of memory are explored, such as collective memory, the links between memory and identity, the fallibility of memory, and the linking of memory to the future, as an anticipation of what is to come.

The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages

The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages PDF

Author: Lucie Doležalová

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2009-11-17

Total Pages: 524

ISBN-13: 9047441605

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Based on case studies from across Europe including its ‘peripheries,’ this book offers an interdisciplinary perspective on the notion of memory in the Middle Ages concentrating on contructing memory both as individual competence and as part of a society’s identity.

Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe, 900-1200

Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe, 900-1200 PDF

Author: Elisabeth Van Houts

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-07-27

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1349275158

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Remembering the past in the Middle Ages is a subject that is usually perceived as a study of chronicles and annals written by monks in monasteries. Following in the footsteps of early Christian historians such as Eusebius and St Augustine, the medieval chroniclers are thought of as men isolated in their monastic institutions, writing about the world around them. As the sole members of their society versed in literacy, they had a monopoly on the knowledge of the past as preserved in learned histories, which they themselves updated and continued. A self-perpetuating cycle of monks writing chronicles, which were read, updated and continued by the next generation, so the argument goes, remained the vehicle for a narrative tradition of historical writing for the rest of the Middle Ages. Elisabeth van Houts forcefully challenges this view and emphasises the collaboration between men and women in the memorial tradition of the Middle Ages through both narrative sources (chronicles, saints' lives and miracles) and material culture (objects such as jewellery, memorial stones and sacred vessels). Men may have dominated the pages of literature from the period, but they would not have had half the stories to write about if women had not told them: thus the remembrance of the past was a human experience shared equally between men and women.

Fragmented Memory

Fragmented Memory PDF

Author: Nicoletta Bruno

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2022-02-21

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 3110742098

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Chance, in addition to the unavoidable ambiguity caused by time, is one of the main guilty parties in the transmission of ancient texts – or lack thereof. However, the same cannot be said for what concerns the mechanisms of selection and loss of historical and literary memory, where the voluntary awareness of obscuring is often part of a precise aim, thus leading the cultural memory of a literate society to become fragmented. The present volume explores the devices and criteria of selection and loss in Ancient and Medieval texts and the subsequent fragmentation of such literature, but it also addresses the questions of the damnatio memoriae, of literary strategies such as reticence and omission, as well as of known texts deemed lost but re-found thanks to state-of-the-art methods in digitization. The many and diverse nuances of the concepts of omission, selection, and loss throughout Ancient and Medieval literature and history are illustrated through a number of case studies in the four sections of this volume, each examining a different facet of the topic: ‘Mechanisms and criteria of textual loss and selection’, ‘Lost texts re-discovered’, ‘Voluntary omissions and desire for oblivion’, and ‘Re-working the known’.

The Medieval Craft of Memory

The Medieval Craft of Memory PDF

Author: Mary Carruthers

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780812218817

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"A volume that will interest a wide spectrum of readers."—Patrick Geary, University of California, Los Angeles

Medieval Concepts of the Past

Medieval Concepts of the Past PDF

Author: Gerd Althoff

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-01-31

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 9780521780667

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An analysis of medieval ritual, history, and memory in Germany and the United States.

Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture

Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture PDF

Author: Elma Brenner

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-22

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 1317097718

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In medieval society and culture, memory occupied a unique position. It was central to intellectual life and the medieval understanding of the human mind. Commemoration of the dead was also a fundamental Christian activity. Above all, the past - and the memory of it - occupied a central position in medieval thinking, from ideas concerning the family unit to those shaping political institutions. Focusing on France but incorporating studies from further afield, this collection of essays marks an important new contribution to the study of medieval memory and commemoration. Arranged thematically, each part highlights how memory cannot be studied in isolation, but instead intersects with many other areas of medieval scholarship, including art history, historiography, intellectual history, and the study of religious culture. Key themes in the study of memory are explored, such as collective memory, the links between memory and identity, the fallibility of memory, and the linking of memory to the future, as an anticipation of what is to come.