Medieval Memories: Men, Women and the Past, 700-1300

This work is concerned with the memories of medieval people. In the Middle Ages, as now, men and women collected stories about the past and handed them down to posterity. This text explores who was responsible for the preservation of knowledge and how recollections were preserved and passed on. Many memories centre in the aristocratic family or lineage while others are focused on institutions such as monasteries or nunneries. The family and monastic contexts clearly illustrate that remembrance of the past was a task for men and women and that each sex had a specific gendered role. Memory also involves selection of what should and should not be remembered and its corollary, amnesia, therefore, requires scrutiny. Anchored in the present, memory casts a shadow on the future and thus prophecies form an important component of the cult of remembrance. Tombstones, medieval encyclopaedias and legal testimonies figure alongside moral guidebooks, miracle stories and chronicles as material for the gendered perceptions of the medieval past.