In Phantoms of Remembrance, Patrick Geary makes important new inroads into the widely discussed topic of historical memory, vividly evoking the everyday lives of eleventh-century people and both their written and nonwritten ways of preserving the past. Through richly detailed descriptions of various acts of remembrance - including the naming of children and the recording of visions - the author unearths a wide range of approaches to preserving the past as it was or formulating the past that an individual or group prefers to imagine. By focusing on a turning point in medieval history, one in which an effort was made to make a cultural break with the previous centuries, Geary offers a dramatic example of specific mental and social structures that filtered the memories communicated by social elites and ordinary individuals alike.

In Phantoms of Remembrance, Patrick Geary makes important new inroads into the widely discussed topic of historical memory, vividly evoking the everyday lives of eleventh-century people and both their written and nonwritten ways of preserving the past. Women praying for their dead, monks creating and re-creating their archives, scribes choosing which royal families of the past to applaud and which to forget: it is from such sources that most of our knowledge of the medieval period comes. Throughout richly detailed descriptions of various acts of remembrance--including the naming of children and the recording of visions--the author unearths a wide range of approaches to preserving the past as it was or formulating the past that an individual or group prefers to imagine.

Essays exploring the importance of archives as artifacts of culture

Dismantling nationalist myths about how the nations of Europe were born, this text contrasts them with the actual history of Europe's transformation between the fourth and ninth centuries - the period of grand migrations that nationalists hold dear.

A stunning horror ghost story anthology featuring stories from bestselling authors Joe Hill, Josh Malerman, Paul Tremblay and M.R. Carey The brightest names in horror showcase a ghastly collection of 18 ghost stories that will have you watching over your shoulder, heart racing at every bump in the night. In "My Life in Politics" by M.R. Carey the spirits of those without a voice refuse to let a politician keep them silent. In "The Adjoining Room" by A.K. Benedict, a woman finds her hotel neighbor trapped and screaming behind a door that doesn't exist. George Mann's "The Restoration" sees a young artist become obsessed with returning a forgotten painting to its former glory, even if it kills her. Laura Purcell's "Cameo" shows that the parting gift of a loved one can have far darker consequences than ever imagined... These unsettling tales from some of the best modern horror writers will send a chill down your spine like someone has walked over your grave... or perhaps just woken up in their own.

Offers a new take on the identities and life histories of medieval people, in their multi-layered and sometimes contradictory dimensions.

Karl Valentin once asked: "How can it be that only as much happens as fits into the newspaper the next day?" He focussed on the problem that information of the past has to be organised, arranged and above all: selected and put into form in order to be perceived as a whole. In this sense, the process of selection must be seen as the fundamental moment – the “Urszene” – of making History. This book shows selection as highly creative act. With the richness of early medieval material it can be demonstrated that creative selection was omnipresent and took place even in unexpected text genres. The book demonstrates the variety how premodern authors dealt with "unimportant", unpleasant or unwanted past. It provides a general overview for regions and text genres in early medieval Europe.