Memory in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800, by Judith Pollmann

Abstract

The central insight that lies at the heart of Judith Pollmann’s concise and stimulating book is that because memory is ‘a form of cognition that interacts with social processes’ it ‘also has a history’ (p. 3). By contrast with the attention that scholars of the Middle Ages and the twentieth century have lavished on this topic, early modernists have been surprisingly slow to place it under the microscope. But questions about how, what and why people remembered—and forgot—between 1500 and 1800 are now rising to the top of the agenda. This, then, is a timely think-piece that maps out the terrain of this emerging subfield and sets some points on the compass for future studies. Its principal aim is to initiate a conversation between students of memory before and after 1800 and to engage critically with claims that the age of revolutions catalysed profound changes in the ways in which memory was practised. Reacting to a theoretical literature predicated on the assumption that historical consciousness was radically transformed by nationalism, state-formation and the emergence of new media of communication, Pollmann’s book calls upon historians to take a longer view. It sets aside linear and teleological models of development in favour of recognising the continuity and co-existence of multiple modes of apprehending the past across this caesura. In place of sharp paradigm shifts it posits a more cumulative process of evolution. This is a history of memory that both recognises the dangers of the modernity narratives that have underpinned previous accounts and is energised by them.