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Difficult pasts combines book history, reception history and theories of cultural memory to explore how Reformation-era audiences used medieval literary texts to construct their own national and religious identities. It argues that the medieval romance book became a flexible site of memory for readers after the Protestant Reformation, allowing them to both connect with and distance themselves from the recent ‘difficult past’. Central characters in this study range from canonical authors like Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser to less studied figures, such as printer William Copland, Elizabethan scribe Edward Banister and seventeenth-century poet and romance enthusiast, John Lane. In uniting a wide range of romance readers’ perspectives, Difficult pasts complicates clear ruptures between manuscript and print, Catholic and Protestant, or medieval and Renaissance. It concludes that the romance book offers a new way to understand the simultaneous change and continuity that defines post-Reformation England. Overall, Difficult pasts offers an interdisciplinary framework for better understanding the role of physical books and imaginative forms in grappling with the complexities of representing and engaging with the past.
entails. Materiality, memory and the advent of digital media In the decades following the 1980s new perspectives were added to the discussion of archives from emerging academic disciplines focused on technology and memory production. Cultural memory studies and media archaeology contributed in different ways to the increased scholarly attention given to archives at this time, by stressing that the archive needed to be approached both as a concept or notion and as a concrete material manifestation of storage of data or memory
Geschiedenis, 119:2 (2006), 160–77. 4 Peter Munz, ‘The historical narrative’, in Michael Bentley (ed.), Companion to Historiography (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 851–72. 5 Aleida Assmann, ‘Canon and archive’, in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (eds), Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), pp. 97–107, p. 98; see also Aleida Assmann, ‘Re-framing memory. Between individual and collective forms of constructing the past’, in Karin Tilmans, Frank van Vree and Jay Winter (eds
Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013); and the essays collected in David Matthews and Gordon McMullan (eds), Reading the Medieval in Early Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Jennifer Summit and David Wallace (eds), ‘Medieval/Renaissance: After periodization’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37 (2007). 9 Jan Assmann, ‘Collective memory and cultural identity’, New German Critique 65 (1995), 125–33, p. 129. On cultural memory studies see Astrid Erll
This book analyses the use of the past and the production of heritage through architectural design in the developmental context of Iran. It is the first of its kind to utilize a multidisciplinary approach in probing the complex relationship between architecture, development, and heritage. It uses established theoretical concepts including notions of globalism, nostalgia, tradition, and authenticity to show that development is a major cause of historical transformations in places such as Iran and its effects must be seen in relation to global political and historical exchanges as well as local specificities. Iran is a pertinent example as it has endured radical cultural and political shifts in the past five decades. Scholars of heritage and architecture will find the cross-disciplinary aspects of the book useful. The premise of the book is that transposed into other contexts, development, as a globalizing project originating in the West, instigates renewed forms of historical consciousness and imaginations of the past. This is particularly evident in architecture where, through design processes, the past produces forms of architectural heritage. But such historic consciousness cannot be reduced to political ideology, while politics is always in the background. The book shows this through chapters focusing on theoretical context, international exchanges made in architectural congresses in the 1970s, housing as the vehicle for everyday heritage, and symbolic public architecture intended to reflect monumental time. The book is written in accessible language to benefit academic researchers and graduate students in the fields of heritage, architecture, and Iranian and Middle Eastern studies.
a spectrum of responses to this complex genre by invoking the framework of cultural memory studies. The idea of cultural memory provides a vocabulary for considering how past events are remembered, altered, embellished, forgotten and interpreted across time. As Joshua Davies writes, ‘to think about cultural memory is not to think about the past as history, that is as a record of past events, but to think about how those past events are represented and experienced, understood and imagined’. 63 Tied so closely to
, Politics and Memory in an Age of Uncertainty (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 115–28. 8 Sarah Farmer, ‘Memoirs of French Peasant Life: Progress and Nostalgia in Postwar France,’ French History 25.3 (2011): 362–79. 9 Beyond French borders, too, the aging of Holocaust survivors in the 1980s is cited as a major impetus for the proliferation of oral history and the development of memory studies in the academy. See Astrid Erll, ‘Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction,’ in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünnin (eds), A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010
Archive,’ in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (eds), A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 100. 4 Ibid., 106. 5 Ibid., 99. 20 Introduction: working memory 6 The depiction of the archive as passive storage space is Assmann’s, not my own. Rather, I side with (for instance) Alison Jeffers, Heike Roms, and Rebecca Schneider in conceptualizing the archive as the site of active, performative processes. See Alison Jeffers, ‘Recollecting and Re-Collecting: The Ethical Challenges of Social Archiving in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland,’ in
and Learning in the Museum’ , Educational Philosophy and Theory , 48 : 8 , 778–787 . Bhabha , H.K. ( 2012 ) The Location of Culture ( Abingdon Oxon and New York : Routledge ). Boer , P. ( 2008 ) ‘ Loci Memoriae – Lieux de Mémoire ’, in A. Erll and A. Nünning (eds) , Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook ( Berlin and New York : De Gruyter ), 19–25 . Brown , K.H. ( 2017 ) Quiet Beauty: The Japanese Gardens of North America ( Tokyo, Rutland Vermont and Singapore : Charles E. Tuttle ). Bruneau
Trauma: The Aftermath of World War II in Eleven European Countries (Amsterdam, 2010), passim. 66 P. C. Hooft, Nederlandsche historien (Amsterdam, 1656), pp. 463–4. 67 S. J. Schmidt, ‘Memory and remembrance: a constructivist approach’, in Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning and S. B. Young (eds), Cultural Memory Studies: An 196 • erika kuijpers & judith pollmann • International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (New York, 2008), p. 192; Harald Welzer, ‘Communicative memory’, in ibid., pp. 285–98. 68 Pieter Christiaensz. Bor, Nederlantsche oorloghen, beroerten, ende