Manchester University Press Visions and Ruins: Cultural Memory and the Untimely Middle Ages (Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture)

This book is a study of cultural memory both in and of the British Middle Ages. Working with materials drawn from across the medieval period, alongside modern translations, reworkings and appropriations, it examines how images of the past have been created, adapted and shared. The book interrogates how cultural memory both formed and was formed by social identities. It explores the ways in which ideas about the past intersected with ideas about the present and future. At the same time, it looks at how the presence of the Middle Ages has been felt, understood and perpetuated in modernity, and the cultural possibilities and transformations this has generated. The Middle Ages encountered here is a complex assemblage: a period of history, a cultural category, a way of being and doing, but also of forgetting. Above all, it is a site of cultural potential, a means of imagining both the future and the past. Visions and ruins will be of interest to students and teachers in the fields of medieval and medievalism studies, memory studies, historiography and monument studies.