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

"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

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.