Recent Scholarship on Memory and History

Abstract

FEW TOPICS IN RECENT YEARS have elicited as much interest among historians as the relationship between memory and history. It emerged on the historiographical scene via the history of collective mentalities to which so many historians were attracted in the 1960s and 1970s. All manner of memory topics fell within its purview-from the inertial tug of tradition, to the constancy of personal introspection, to the accelerating speed with which collective memories are evoked and obliterated in today's electronic culture. A new awareness about the revolutions in the technologies of communication across the ages has led historians back to memory's sources in the mythological imagination of cultures of primary orality. Prodigious feats of memories were commonplace there.' Crossing the threshold of literacy in antiquity made humans self-conscious about the traits of memory, and so raised doubts in their minds about their hold on the past. It served as the setting in which the art of memory was invented-a spatial framework of places and images that reinforce our natural powers of recollection. Is not gaining access to the internet today reminiscent of entering the memory palaces of Renaissance rhetoricians, in which we are free to wander from imaginary place to place, each adorned with brilliant images? Web sites are our places of memory, and their mnemonic schemes the currency of our efforts to explore deeper realms of knowledge. We go to them at the click of a mouse, and each click leads us deeper into their inner sanctums.2