Negotiating Heritage: Memories of the Middle Ages

A key impulse of cultural transmission is engaging with the past for the benefit of the present. In seventeen essays on subjects that range from Paschasius Radbertus to Orhan Pamuk, the Regularis Concordia to Kurt Weill, and from Augustine to Adorno, Negotiating Heritage examines specific historical case-studies that reveal the appropriation, modification, or repudiation of a legacy. The overall focus of this interdisciplinary volume is memory: medieval conceptions of memory, resonances of the Middle Ages in later periods, and memory as a heuristic methodological device. Through tokens or other vestiges of the past - the physical memorial of a tomb, the ritualized retention of past acts or structures, the reverberations of a doctrinal, literary, musical, or iconographic topos, or the symbolic reminiscences of a past ideal - memory acts as the manifestation of something absent. This anthology studies such tokens in a way that provides a fruitful new perspective for the field of research into memory, and explores the methodological dimension of issues of heritage, genealogy, and tradition. Furthermore, Negotiating Heritage also probes the reception and construction of the Middle Ages in later periods, exploring the shifting territory of the meaning of the medieval itself. In its movement between medievalism and the medieval period, Negotiating Heritage is an important and scholarly contribution to both established and emerging trends in critical thought.