Phantoms of Remembrance Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium

"...Geary argues...that our very idea of an eleventh-century European dawn rests partly on an optical illusion. A handful of local propagandists, in worldly-wise obedience to dynasties just coming into the ascendant, busied themselves with burying memories of their ancient regimes; and hence bequeathed to us, benighted historians, the illusion of a preceding 'dark age'....With its capacity to extend and fix memories, writing was one weapon in an armoury, some of it magical, in a struggle for survival whose vagaries shaped and often reshaped men's memories of their own past. Modern education blinds us to this mentality. That is its purpose. And this is what gives the good early-medievalist his mission, a mission Patrick Geary fulfills admirably: the mission, that is, of throwing light into the most elusive recesses of not just 'the past', but of processes still going on, in and round us in 1995."Geary, Patrick J. is the author of 'Phantoms of Remembrance Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium', published 1996 under ISBN 9780691026039 and ISBN 0691026033.