Conference Sessions - Forging Memory: False Documents and Historical Consciousness in the Middle Ages (Leeds IMC - 3 July 2019) (original) (raw)
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Creative Selection between Emending and Forming Medieval Memory, 2021
After more than aq uarter of ac entury,i ti st ime to acknowledge the lasting importance of Patrick Geary's Phantoms of Remembrance.¹ In the context of manyworks on social and cultural memory in the Middle Ages, af ew published before and many after it,i ts tills tands out as an exemplary studyo ft he ways in which the past was subtlyt ransformed to fit the needs of the present.² It reads almosta sf resh as when it was written: avoiding the use of loaded terms,wide-ranginginthe well-chosen examples, and precise in their interpretation. The book, which appeared in 1994, introduced the "creative process of reformingthe relationship between past and present" to earlym edievals tudies.³ Taking as an example forgedM erovingian charters on papyrus,the Chronicle of Novalesa or the memoriesofPannonian dragons by Arnold of St Emmeram in Regensburg, Geary focused on the wayi nw hich memories could be transformed in the context of the manuscript transmission of atext.His observation was that around 1000 manyearlier texts wereselected, copied, reworked or obliterated, and thus, the lasting memoryo ft he earlier period was reshaped. Most significantly, the book moved the subject beyond the black-and-white world of established dichotomies: "First,historians of memory have focused too much, Ithink,on the putative dichotomyb etween individual and collective memory and collective memory and history.S econd, historians and anthropologists have overstressed the distinction between oral and written remembering. Finally, previous studies have focused primarily on the formation of conscious narrative memoryr ather than on the structures by which memorieso fa ll sorts are transmitted and created."⁴ Indeed, the studyofmemory and history has created asurprising number of dichotomies through which humanities and social sciencesscholars have tried to geta better grip on ap henomenon to which manyo ft hem owed their material.A fter the Enlightenment and in the process of professionalization of the historical disciplines, generations of scholars tried to establish the superiority of theird iscipline over naive,n on-academic attemptst ow rite or narrate history.H istorical memory should go through aprogressively-refined set of filters to ensuret hat nothing could pass as
The guilt of the past: medievalist closures and disclosures
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This article reflects playfully on poetic and periodic conceptions of the Middle Ages, with a view to establishing connections (direct as well as analogical) between the inscription of periodic claustrality and the formal structure of verse. As a means of defamiliarising the subjects at hand, the notion of authenticity is deployed in uncommon guises; in particular, the authentic is framed as 'the culpable' (that is, an agent regarded as identical with the perpetrator of past deeds). This legal or juridical sense of the word authentic (which is encoded in its etymology) provides the frame for considering various poetic and narrative techniques by which the Middle Ages have been put 'on trial' and found to be selfsame-or otherwise.
European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire, 2015
Acknowledgements vii The Long Shadow of Ossian. Editors' Preface viii List of Figures xxv Notes on Contributors xxviii part 1 Searching for the Voice of the Nation 1 The Manuscripts of Grünberg and Königinhof: Romantic Lies about the Glorious Past of the Czech Nation 3 Pavlína Rychterová 2 To Authenticate a Manuscript: The Case of Toldy and Hanka, Hermeneutically Reconsidered 31 Péter Dávidházi 3 The Kalevala and the Authenticity Debate 56 Pertti Anttonen 4 János Arany's Csaba Trilogy and Arnold Ipolyi's Hungarian Mythology 81 László Szörényi 5 From the Anonymous Gesta to the Flight of Zalán by Vörösmarty 96 János M. Bak part 2 Inventing a Past 6 Forging the Cuman Law, Forging an Identity 109 Nora Berend 7 Invented Middle Ages in Nineteenth-century Hungary.
This article should be seen as an attempt to put the early medieval chronicles in a more theoretical frame concerning identity formation and creation of historical tradition. The empirical examples are provided by two tenth-century chronicles: Chronicon AEthelweardi by AEthelweard of Wessex, and Res gestae Saxonicae by Widukind of Corvey. As the theoretical frame serve the conclusions and ideas taken from the research on collective memory, discourse analysis, and a more general reasoning about the affinity between knowledge and power. In effect, the article illustrates not only those mechanisms and literary strategies, but also, more broadly, demonstrates the pointlessness of common accusations of medieval historiography's failure in its pursuit of objectivity. Partiality was the raison d'être of medieval chronicles, and, it is argued, our research should focus more on its appearances.
2015
The recent 'discovery' of the oldest known surviving private document produced within the historic county of Radnorshire, a 1318 charter given at Old Radnor to record the sale of lands lying just east of Old Radnor, was a fortuitous event. As an historian of medieval Wales, it is encouraging to be reminded by the periodic discovery of an unknown medieval document in private hands that we may still realize further means by which to better understand our past. And yet, equally, it is discouraging to be reminded by the regular appearance of such documents in auction houses, in antiquities shops and in online market places just how haphazard the continued preservation of these documents is, and how ephemeral are our opportunities to capture their content. This is never truer than it is with respect to one-off documents such as medieval private charters, which often contain the only original record of an event or transaction. The sale of illuminated medieval manuscripts is well known, such as devotional books of hours containing collections of prayers and psalms, which are sadly but regularly disassembled to allow for the maximization of profit through the separate sale of each constituent membrane. Less well recognized is the trade in relatively low-value, un-illuminated and altogether more utilitarian documents produced to record the day to day administration of individuals' private lives and estates, and the loss to the historical discipline and collective cultural heritage experienced when these documents and their unique content are traded beyond public access or even abroad. These documents are of minimal artistic merit by popular reckoning, but of potentially potent historical value as the sole records of events or transactions. They are marketable due to their novelty in allowing one 'to own' a part of the medieval past, often for no more than a few hundred pounds. And their relatively low value and rapid exchange, especially through online marketplaces, renders them invisible to the traditional recording of 'migrations of manuscripts' in academic
Creative Selection between Emending and Forming Medieval Memory, 2021
Foralong time Ih aveb een thinkinga bout and arranging to do somethingw hich, with the assistanceofGod, Inow undertakebecause Idonot think it should be delayed: Iamreviewing my works-whether books,l etters, or treatises-with ak ind of judicial severity,a nd, as it were, with ac ensor'st he pen, Ia mi ndicatingw hat displeases me.¹ OpenAccess. ©2 021P atrick Geary, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative CommonsA ttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.