Guardians Of Millennial Memory

This competition for power over the past needs to be explored for two reasons. First and most obviously, by examining the creation of a past, we can understand better the modes of perception and structures of understanding of the people of the eleventh century and how people used these mental categories to construct their world and to order their lives. But as important, this creation determined not only contemporaries’ understanding of the past but ours as well. Much of what we think we know about the early Middle Ages was determined by the changing problems and concerns of eleventh-century men and women, not by those of the more distant past. Unless we understand the mental and social structures that acted as filters, suppressing or transforming the received past in the eleventh century in terms of presentist needs, we are doomed to misunderstand those earlier centuries.

This selectivity of memory is hardly a novel discovery. Some people in the eleventh century were quite aware of what they were doing. Arnold of Regensburg, a Bavarian monk writing around 1030, expressed it clearly:

“Not only is it proper for the new things to change the old ones, but even, if the old ones are disordered, they should be entirely thrown away, or if, however, they conform to the proper order of things but are of little use, they should be buried with reverence.”

This sentiment encapsulates the dilemma that he and his contemporaries faced as they went about the Herculean task of reproducing their world from the scattered fragments of the past. A society that explicitly found its identity, its norms, and its values in the inheritance from the past, that venerated tradition and drew its religious and political ideologies from precedent, was nevertheless actively engaged in producing that tradition through a complex process of transmission, suppression, and recreation. Individuals and communities copied, abridged, and revised archival records, liturgical texts, literary documents, doing so with reference to physical reminders from previous generations and a fluid oral tradition in order to prescribe how the present should be because of how the past had been. This transformative process necessarily meant that something new would come into being. To a greater or lesser extent, many were aware of this process, some deeply troubled by it, others accepting it with resignation or even relish. This book is concerned less with the past itself or even the end product of this process than it is with the way that men and women around the turn of the millennium determined what was, in Arnold’s terms, “ordinaria” and “inordinata,” what was useful and less useful—that is, with how individuals and groups remembered and forgot. It is also concerned with how that discarded past continued to live in the discordances, inconsistencies, and lacunae of the created past as well as in the dreams, visions, and anxieties of those who suppressed it. For if the past was “buried with reverence,” then like the human dead for whom Arnold and his brothers prayed, it was not to be forgotten altogether but rather transformed, both memorialized and commemorated so that the past might be honored, but in a such a way that it might no longer control the lives of the living.

This concern with rethinking the past is hardly unique to the eleventh century. John Pocock has observed that when traditional relationships between present and past break down, those most affected by this rupture respond by reshaping an understanding of that which unites past and present in terms of some new continuity in order to defend themselves from the effects of this rupture. Such a response may be common to many periods, but in the context of the eleventh century it is particularly worth investigating because the end product of the forgetting, remembering, and reorganizing of the past would be the model for the origins of high medieval society on which subsequent generations of historians, even into our century, would build.

This model emphasized creativity and freedom from the past represented by the “golden age” of the Carolingian world and the “dark age” of the tenth century, the latter characterized by radical discontinuity largely blamed on external forces such as Saracen, Magyar, and Norse raids and invasions. Those living on the other side of this caesura felt themselves separated by a great gulf from this earlier age. Already in the eleventh century those people who undertook to preserve the past in written form, for their contemporaries or their posterity, seemed to know little and understand less of their familial, institutional, cultural, and regional past. To them, theirs was a brave new world for which the past was but a series of disjointed and isolated persons and events. And yet they were deeply concerned with this past, possessed by it almost, and their invented past became the goal and justification of their programs in the present.

What is most interesting however is not primarily the rate of change itself or how such change should be quantified or classified, but why and how generations perceived discontinuity, and how these perceptions continued to influence the patterns of thought for a thousand years. Transformations that took centuries, starting at least in the second half of the ninth century, begin to be perceived in the later tenth and early eleventh centuries as having created a gulf between the two periods, a gulf that was as much psychic as physical. Over the fairly short period of roughly a century, from circa 950 to 1050, the evidence of this continuity had become unintelligible. Although surrounded by the material, social, political, and mental residue of this previous world, eleventh-century people were at a loss to understand the previous systems within which these elements had had coherence. Nevertheless, they sought to make sense of this inherited residue and to use it to form their own individual and corporate sense of identity. In their histories and chronicles, in liturgies, in patterns of landholding and inheritances, in the transmission of names within kindreds, in political and social alliances, they distorted the elements of their past by selecting some and forgetting others. Moreover, they placed them into new structures of meaning, transforming memories into legends and finally into myths—that is, into creative, exemplary, and hence repeatable models of past, present, and future. These myths were comprehensible within the new cultural systems in the process of being born. At the same time, these myths gave meaning, legitimacy, and form to these new systems. 

Another reason that the study of memory in the tenth and eleventh centuries has been underappreciated is perhaps because historians are normally interested primarily in what is remembered, while this period was more concerned with the other vital component of memory-the ability to forget. Nietzsche described memory and its equally important opposite, forgetting, as “that malleable power of a person, a people, a culture, to grow in new directions, to restructure and reconstitute what is past and foreign, to heal wounds, to replace what has been lost, and recast those molds which have been broken.” Precisely this power is most in evidence in the tenth and early eleventh centuries. Without too much exaggeration, one can characterize the decades around the first millennium as an age of forgetting, the mental clearing of the forest, if one will (another image used by Arnold of Regensburg), which made possible the great process of mental creation of the later eleventh and twelfth centuries.

-excerpted from “Phantoms of Remembrance” by Patrick Geary (1994)