Phantoms of Remembrance. Creative Selection in Medieval Religious Life (original) (raw)

Creative Selection between Emending and Forming Medieval Memory

An analytical investigation like this presents the historian with two main challenges. On the one hand, religious life is avery heterogeneous research field that is trulydifficult to address in all its facets,a nd indeed full of phantoms of remembrance. On the other hand, 'memory' possesses an ol ess multidimensional nature, and has receivedp articulara ttention in recent decades. Thel iterature on medieval 'memory' has become almostimpossibletohandle.¹ Today, it is awell-known fact that people-consciouslyornot-create theirpast again and again. The ongoing transformation of knowledge by changing, adding,omitting or 'simply' forgetting facts is questioned by nobody. It is alsoc lear that such phenomena are embedded in manifold cultural circumstances more or less shaped by crisis, concurrence and reforms in politics, economya nd belief. Sometimes they are just shaped by coincidence. In light of these twochallenges, there are twomain approachesfor my studyon monastic phantoms of remembrance. The first option is to underpin those wellknown phenomena of historiographyb ya dding some paradigmatic cases tudies: Robert of Molesme († 1111), for instance, who left his Benedictine monastery in 1098 and founded Cîteaux, the motherhouse of the Cistercian Order,was nearlyf orgotten in the Order historiographyu ntil the end of the 12 th century.S ince the Benedictine tradition of the Cistercians had to be re-emphasized and Bernard of Clairvaux († 1153) had become ar ather European saint no more exclusivet ot he Cistercians, however,R obert was 'discovered' again.² Bruno of Cologne († 1101), the foundero f the Carthusian Order,o ffers as imilar,b ut even more significant example. He was promoted intensively in the 16 th century.The monks of Cologne werer ight to recog