This book is an introduction into the way in which Europeans on the Continent and in the British Isles practised memory in the three centuries between 1500 and 1800. In early modern Europe the past served as a main frame of moral, political, legal, religious, and social reference for people of all walks of life. Because it mattered so much, it was also hotly contested, and subject to constant reinvention. Building on both existing studies and new primary research, the first aim of this book is to account for the omnipresence, importance, and changing uses of the past among early modern Europeans. Its second aim is to situate early modern memory more clearly in the memory studies field, and to show how relevant a better knowledge of early modern memory is to students and scholars who study memory practices in modern societies. Many scholars have argued that the age of revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century completely transformed the way in which Europeans experienced the past and came to think about the future. This book demonstrates that while some memory practices had indeed profoundly changed by 1800, this was not because of revolutionary rupture. Changes were gradual and did not put an end to traditional ways of thinking about the past; rather, old and new ways came to exist side by side, and, to a surprising extent, continue to do so to our own day.
What did it take for a pre-modern memory to live on and become legendary? This chapter shows that for legends to emerge, persist, and to make it beyond its local world, they needed not only mythical characteristics but also the flavour of authenticity provided by the practice of memory. Three case studies show how this could be achieved. The transmission of tales was definitely affected by the appearance of new media, new figures of authority, and new notions about evidence. Yet the application of new criteria for historical evidence from the seventeenth century did not necessarily result in the decline of legends. By declaring such stories mythical and by using the existence of memory practices as evidence of their long-standing mythical significance as well as their historical kernel, scholars soon found reasons to go on taking them seriously as an object of study and of historical enquiry.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.