Phantoms of Identity in Early Medieval Historiography

Abstract

After more than a quarter of a century, it is time to acknowledge the lasting importance of Patrick Geary’s Phantoms of Remembrance.1 In the context of many works on social and cultural memory in the Middle Ages, a few published before and many after it, it still stands out as an exemplary study of the ways in which the past was subtly transformed to fit the needs of the present.2 It reads almost as fresh as when it was written: avoiding the use of loaded terms, wide-ranging in the well-chosen examples, and precise in their interpretation. The book, which appeared in 1994, introduced the “creative process of reforming the relationship between past and present” to early medieval studies.3 Taking as an example forged Merovingian charters on papyrus, the Chronicle of Novalesa or the memories of Pannonian dragons by Arnold of St Emmeram in Regensburg, Geary focused on the way in which memories could be transformed in the context of the manuscript transmission of a text. His observation was that around 1000 many earlier texts were selected, copied, reworked or obliterated, and thus, the lasting memory of the 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, I think, on the putative dichotomy between individual and collective memory and collective memory and history. Second, historians and anthropologists have overstressed the distinction between oral and written remembering. Finally, previous studies have focused primarily on the formation of conscious narrative memory rather than on the structures by which memories of all sorts are transmitted and created.”4 Indeed, the study of memory and history has created a surprising number of dichotomies through which humanities and social sciences scholars have tried to get a better grip on a phenomenon to which many of them owed their material. After the Enlightenment and in the process of professionalization of the historical disciplines, generations of scholars tried to establish the superiority of their discipline over naive, non-academic attempts to write or narrate history. Historical memory should go through a progressively-refined set of filters to ensure that nothing could pass as