Phantoms of Remembrance

Download or read book Phantoms of Remembrance written by Patrick J. Geary and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1996-05-05 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. Through 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. By focusing on a turning point in medieval history, one in which an effort was made to make a cultural break with the previous centuries, Geary offers a dramatic example of specific mental and social structures that filtered the memories communicated by social elites and ordinary individuals alike.