Memories of the Self: The “Autobiography” of Charles IV in Search of Medieval Memories (original) (raw)

Popular Autobiography in Early Modern Europe: many questions, a few answers

Memoria Y Civilizacion Anuario De Historia, 2002

This article deals with diverse aspects of what may be called a "second autobiographical revolution" -the rise of autobiography to the status of most favored source among historians. This new situation of privilege is due in large measure to the tendency to attribute to these sources the all too little discussed condition of "witness". Following some remarks on the work of Marc Bloch, a historian who devoted distinctive attention to the question of witness, it examines the specific case of artisans who wrote autobiographical texts during the early modern era. To that end it summarizes several strategies for the study of these documents, particularly those contextual approaches aimed at reconstructing the wide range of motivations of artisan autobiographers.

Emotional memory and medieval autobiography: King James I of Aragon (r. 1213–76)'s Llibre dels fets

This study examines the role that emotional memories – memories connected to or describing emotions – played in the recollection of events, while also becoming powerful rhetorical and didactic tools in the process of history-writing. Emotional memories, which were shaped through both oral and written transmission, helped to situate images from the past within wider personal and historical frameworks. King James I of Aragon (r. 1213–76)’s Llibre dels fets, regarded as the first secular chronicle-autobiography attributed to a Christian King in medieval Western Europe, is a thoughtprovoking example of this. The differences between emotional values and emotional experiences emerge clearly in the narrative of James I’s life and military deeds, throwing light on a thirteenthcentury belief that although emotional reactions belonged to the biological sphere, they originated from – and therefore could be managed by – culturally driven models of behaviour. Following this line of thought, this study also scrutinizes anger and its management, as they were at the core of most medieval “emotional regimes” promoted by contemporary rulers. Preserving memory, including memories of emotions, was conceived as an ethical mission attributed to the King, as well as to those in charge of writing history. These ideas influenced both historiographical and autobiographical writings, and are therefore key to understand the rationale behind the structural, narrative and thematic choices of both authors and commissioners. Emotions have been an important locus for subjectivity in Medieval Studies and the analysis of sources such as King James I of Aragon’s chivalrous autobiography through this lens will certainly open new and interdisciplinary lines of enquiry.

the history and evolution of the genre of autobiography: a critical study

Galaxy International Multidisciplinary Research Journal, 2013

Though the term autobiography was coined in the eighteenth century, the genre had been practiced from the hay-day of Greek literature. There have been conflicting theories regarding the origin of this form of writing, with some attributing it to the Christian era whilst others claiming this form of writing to be present ever since the light of civilization. Since then the trends in the writing of autobiography have changed over the centuries. The initial focus on the 'bios' of the autobiographer has since the nineteenth century shifted to the 'graphia' in the text. The modern trends in autobiography differ greatly from that of the beginning of the genre. And the paper proposes to delve into the intricacies of the beginning, growth, and the development of the genre.

Memoirs, Memory, and Historical Experience

Science in Context, 1994

The ArgumentAgainst the idea that modern historiography developed in the eighteenth century as a completely new way of looking at the past, this paper argues that modern historical science borrowed its sense of experience from seventeenth-century memoirs. However, seventeenth-century rnemorialists made very different as sumptions than modern historians about the relations between time, memory, and history. One consequence of their introduction of lived subjectivity into the depiction of the past was a debate in early eighteenth-century France about the relations between history and fiction, some arguing that fiction is a better way of grasping the subjective truth of the past. These debates about the relations between history and memory and between history and fiction have resurfaced recently. The historical moods that are one context for paradigm shifts share common motifs, such as a sense of defeat, of distance between the present and the immediate past, and a need for consolation...

Historicizing Life-Writing and Egodocuments in Early Modern Europe

Ceride: Journal of Ego-Document Studies, 2023

A book review of Historicizing Life-Writing and Egodocuments in Early Modern Europe, edited by James R. Farr of Purdue University and Guido Ruggiero of Miami University. The book aims to historicize two anthropocentric genres, "Life-Writing" and "Ego-Documents," in the context of Early Modern Europe. It is a promising work for those who are interested in Early Modern European history and ego-documents.

Autobiography’s Back Story: Personal Memory and European History

It was not a consequence of brain damage that once caused me temporarily to lose my memory. I suspect now it was the traumatic experience of my family history, my European parents and the way in which I had sought to slide over the broader facts of history, simply by rote learning them without understanding anything of that history. My father’s father had been chief archivist at the Registry for Births, Deaths and Marriages in Haarlem, Holland during the 1930s. He took a particular interest in his own family genealogy and kept accurate records of all those ancestors that had preceded him. He was obsessed with factual memory. At the same time he confused family boundaries by taking his older daughter as his wife, for which he was eventually imprisoned in 1945, the charges brought against him by his then nineteen-year-old daughter. Less than twenty years later on the other side of the world in Australia, my own father behaved similarly with my older sister.

Phantoms of Identity in Early Medieval Historiography

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