Medieval Memories

by Elisabeth van Houts

Who, exactly, was responsible for the preservation of knowledge about the past? How did people preserve their recollections and pass them on to the next generation? Did they write them down or did they hand then on orally? The book 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. Many memories centre in the aristocratic family or lineage while others are focussed 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, is discussed. Anchored in the present, memory casts a shadow on the future and thus prophecies form an important component of the cult of remembrance. For the first time in Medieval Memories, tombstones, medieval encyclopaedias and legal testimonies figure alongside moral guidebooks, miracle stories and chronicles as material for the gendered perceptions of the medieval past.

Genres: Medieval

232 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 2000

About the author

Elisabeth Maria Cornelia van Houts (born 1952) is a historian specializing in medieval European history. She is an Honorary Professor of Medieval European History in the Faculty of History and a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Van Houts was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1983. She has published and lectured on Anglo-Norman history, medieval historiography and literature and the history of gender in the Middle Ages. She has been an expert panelist on In Our Time for "The 12th Century Renaissance" and "The Domesday Book".