The Resources of the Past in Early Medieval Europe [Hardcover]

This volume examines the use of the textual resources of the past to shape cultural memory in early medieval Europe.New texts and original manuscript material are presented in a range of case studies to establish the crucial role played by the textual resources of the past in actually forming, and not merely reflecting, the cultural memory and identities of political and religious communities in early medieval Europe.New texts and original manuscript material are presented in a range of case studies to establish the crucial role played by the textual resources of the past in actually forming, and not merely reflecting, the cultural memory and identities of political and religious communities in early medieval Europe.This volume analyses the importance of history, the textual resources of the past and the integration of Christian and imperial Rome into the cultural memory of early medieval Europe within the wider question of identity formation. The case studies in this book shed new light on the process of codification and modification of cultural heritage in the light of the transmission of texts and the extant manuscript evidence from the early middle ages. The authors demonstrate how particular texts and their early medieval manuscript representatives in Italy, Francia, Saxony and Bavaria not only reflect ethnic, social and cultural identities but themselves contributed to the creation of identities, gave meaning to social practice, and were often intended to inspire, guide, change, or prevent action, directly or indirectly. These texts are shown to be part of a cultural effort to shape the present by restructuring the past.Introduction: cultural memory and the resources of the past Walter Pohl and Ian Wood; Part I. Learning Empire: 1. Creating cultural resources for Carolingian rule: historians of the Christian empire Walter Pohl; 2. Cassiodorus's Historia tripartita before the earliest extant manuscripts Desir?e Scholten; 3. Politics and penance: transformationslc¶