Phantoms of remembrance
Subtitle: memory and oblivion at the end of the first millennium
By: Patrick J. Geary.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1994
Place of publication: Princeton, N.J
Language: eng
Number of pages: 248
Subjects: History -- Philosophy.; History -- Methodology.; Memory.
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [219]-239) and index.