This recent contribution by Judith Pollmann to the thriving area of early modern memory studies targets a readership (student as well as researcher) engaged primarily in the disciplines of history and cultural studies. It is throughout characterized by an impressive erudition and an extremely accessible writing style. In many ways, one of the most dynamic elements in the study is the introduction itself. Here, the major fields of vision (“moral, political, legal, religious and social reference”) for subsequent inquiries are signaled and the reader is guided through an invaluable account of the critical history of the discipline in recent decades. In a study that principally focuses on early modern nations in Western Europe, Pollmann justly underlines the cultural emphasis in the period upon legitimizing doctrine and practice through memorial (actual or imagined) recourse to the past: “And precisely because the past mattered so much, it was also hotly contested, subject to constant manipulation, reappropriation, and reinvention, and reused in new contexts” (1).
In this introductory discussion, key questions are raised concerning the distinctions between, practice of, and access to forms of public and private memory. In addition, here the lively investigation (which lasts the length of the book itself) into the ways in which memory is constantly in process, responding ever to its changing cultural environments, is initiated. Drawing strategically upon the critical influences of figures such as Halbwachs, Bartlett, Warburg, Nora, Connerton, Fentress, and Wickham in recent debate, the reader is carefully shown how memory studies have been characterized by the cleavage in expectations between scholars concentrating on periods either side of a watershed which seems to occur around 1750–1800, i.e., between perceivedly the premodern and the modern. Pollmann goes on convincingly to problematize prevailing understandings of collective memory, and demonstrates throughout the study as a whole how the national may be seen to compete and coexist with the local in memorial terms in any given culture. Here also the question of the gendered identity of sources in the early modern period is pointed out for the first time: “for personal memories we mainly depend on the memoirs written by the literate, a small and mostly male minority” (14).
The chapters that follow draw upon large questions regarding the ways in which memory shaped early modern identity politics and required (or did not require): a performative dimension (often articulated in terms of storytelling [56]); an entry into literate culture; narratives of personal lived experience and/or observation; an investment in analogy, anachronism and/or nostalgia; invention and/or mythic authority. Indeed, chapter 5, for example, is specifically devoted to exploring the difficulties encountered by successive generations of historians seeking to disengage history from expectations of myth: “it seems that for most of Western history myths and mythical patterns of explanation have had to coexist with other ways of structuring knowledge about the past, and thus with history” (138). Interestingly, Pollmann does not limit her accounts of memory practice in religious terms (notably techniques of commemoration) to Catholic and Protestant faith communities, but also draws striking comparisons with cultures of worship in Jewish communities, for example, in the period. In all these contexts, Pollmann rightly privileges the genres of martyrology and conversion as major vehicles for the fashioning of influential understandings of memory across early modern Europe. More generally, she stresses that we must remain attentive not only to the ecclesiastical inflections of recursive narratives, but also to the ways in which secular (notably, civic) institutions foregrounded certain accounts of the past for their own interests. The final chapters of this publication concentrate upon the ways in which legal acts of oblivion and spectacular acts of violence in Western Europe often constituted key instruments with which to police memorial practice.
On occasion, while drawing parallels between the early modern, the modern, and the contemporary periods, the remit of discussion can sometimes feel overextended as we move swiftly in analogies from one century to the next. There are also some areas of discussion in which repetition and generalized statement might have been further honed to bear more substantial fruit: “Most of us do not have claims to nobility to pursue, but … we need memories to know who we are” (19). In addition, this reader also looked for greater linkage between the important questions raised in the introductory discussion and the accounts of historical examples in subsequent chapters. These are, however, minor points for a study which remains a joy to read throughout and a very welcome challenge in memory studies to the seemingly unassailable privileging of anglophone cultural history.
