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

Description

Makes important inroads into the widely discussed topic of historical memory, evoking the everyday lives of eleventh-century people and both their written and nonwritten ways of preserving the past. This title unearths a range of approaches to preserving the past as it was or formulating the past that an individual or group prefers to imagine.

Patrick J. Geary is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton).

"Moving from general to particular, the author uses three case-studies to depict local patterns of memory... Geary states his thesis with clarity ... 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