Search Results

This chapter explores Russia’s attempts to come to terms with its Stalinist past in an endeavour to build a civil society based on the rule of law. It begins by examining the nature of Stalinist repression and the legacy of Soviet terror. It goes on to focus on halted official efforts at truth telling, and persistent unofficial efforts, led by the organization Memorial, at remembering and commemorating; this provides insight into the issues that daunted the quest for moral recovery. The chapter then looks at post-Soviet efforts to come to terms with the Stalinist past, and finally it assesses the impact of the discussion of past injustices, or the politics of memory, on Russia’s subsequent process of democratization. The information presented and the conclusions drawn are necessarily based on a number of scattered sources, including memoirs, interviews and official archives; Russia’s experience is unique, and difficult to compare with other post-authoritarian political systems, especially as democracy has not taken substantial hold, and, since the transition is so new, questions of accountability are only beginning to be addressed.

The arts of memory and of biography have always been closely related. For instance, the memoir, which is an act of remembrance, has a double sense: it looks at the past and to the future, selecting from the stream of memories to form an enduring record called memorial by which events and people can be remembered in the years to come. In Restoration England, memoirs and memorials were popular forms when the word ‘biography’ first appeared. During this period there was an intense interest in the chronicling of the lives of those who contributed much to political and religious events. This commemoration of lives, which gained momentum in Restoration England, was an ancient enterprise. Biographies were regarded as durable monuments wherein the idea of remembrance took an important place. This attributed significance made those endowed with powerful memories venerated people. This chapter discusses the remarkable memorialists of the period. It looks at the career of Reverend Dr. Thomas Fuller as a biographer and as an author of many historical works. Fuller exhibited a photographic memory and an inclination to the memorization of long passages. In addition to this technique, he also adopted a rule that assisted memory; he employed the methodical distribution of facts into discrete locations. As for his biographical methods, Fuller considered two factors: the sense of pragmatism, and the sense of piety.

This chapter comments on the author’s interaction with his subject, culminating in the discomfort some of Tanxu’s followers came to feel about the interpretation of their teacher’s life, and in particular how that interpretation could jeopardize current initiatives to revive or expand some of Tanxu’s former temples in China

Whereas many lollards never questioned a works‐oriented approach to the doctrine of salvation, dissenting views on the Eucharist reveal more substantial divergences from orthodoxy. The Mass was at the heart of late medieval religious practice, and it was Wyclif's decision to reject the doctrine of transubstantiation that led in 1381 to his exile from Oxford. Scholars have long known that Wyclif believed that Christ is spiritually present in the consecrated elements, and it has been held that, in the hands of later dissenters, his theology of remanence slowly evolved into a figurative interpretation of the sacrament. Instead, Wycliffite tracts and court records reveal that figurative and remanence theologies were both current in the early fifteenth century, and the patterns of their dissemination reveal the roles that family and civic ties played in the formation of heterodox beliefs. Figurative theologies of the Eucharist were especially prevalent among the communities of Coventry and Lichfield, Salisbury, and Winchester dioceses, and it was in these regions of England that texts articulating such views circulated most widely.

This chapter examines commemoration across the Anglosphere of the centenary of the First World War, which has drawn attention to the critical ordering and articulation of shared transnational collective memories and historical narratives. Tensions between national and transnational manifestations of war commemoration reveal the legacies of the British Empire, revealing the intersections between post-imperial and post-colonial constructions of history and memory across the Anglosphere and Commonwealth. The chapter argues that although Anglospheric war commemoration is located in remembrance of past conflicts, it is intimately connected with the present and future, thus meaning its context and meaning are prone to periodic reinvention in response to contemporary geopolitical circumstances. Commemoration of the First World War across the Anglosphere highlights the layered, hybridised, porous, and contested boundaries of the so-called ‘CANZUK’ union of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK, the ‘core’ Anglosphere which includes the United States, a less well defined Anglosphere, and the Commonwealth. It concludes that a ‘politics of war commemoration’ both binds and divides the Anglosphere and other parts of the former British Empire, highlighting the contentious and contested nature of transnational historical narratives and memory cultures informing diverse national commemorations of the First World War centenary.

This introductory chapter surveys recent and current trends in the study of memory and commemoration, and also outlines the themes explored in the rest of the book: the forms of monuments, and the contexts in which monuments were located; the role of ritual; tensions between public and private commemorations; and the relationship between memory and forgetting.

The chapter focuses on the commemoration of the individual in ancient and modern cultures. It argues that the attitude to individual commemoration adopted by the War Graves Commission in the First World War in Britain can be linked to the commemorative practices of ancient Greece, emphasising the importance of the part played by Sir Frederic Kenyon. The chapter draws on examples of commemoration from classical Athens, twentieth-century Britain and the Soviet Union in order to explore the different roles that the commemoration of the individual has played in ancient and modern forms of war commemoration.

This chapter examines why this period saw the establishment of so many memorials in honour of particular writers, together with societies designed to promote the study of their work and to advance their reputations. It begins by considering how and why Rupert Brooke was elevated to iconic status during the Great War; then Victorian and Edwardian centenary commemorations of Robert Burns and Shakespeare are analysed, along with anniversaries relating to a host of other writers such as Byron, Keats, and Shelley, Dr Johnson, Christopher Marlowe, John Milton, Robert Browning, and Thackeray. Edmund Gosse and Robertson Nicoll were protagonists in several of these movements, which were seized on by publishers to market special editions and collected works; but there were many differences of opinion over how best to commemorate this or that writer, and these are pinpointed and explained.

This chapter scrutinizes Late Roman childhood and the expectations placed on children by their nearest relatives. As source material letters and homilies of the late fourth-and early fifth-century ce ecclesiastical writers are used. Three aspects of the connection between children and familial memory are examined: children as carriers of the name and family traditions, children as tokens for memory by their very existence, and children as guarantors of after-death commemoration through patrimony and burial arrangements. As a result, the traditional practices of the non-Christianized (elite) families of the earlier Roman Empire appear to have been largely maintained: memory, carried on by one's progeny, was still a central way of understanding one's immortality after death, even among the Christians.

This concluding chapter emphasises how changing attitudes towards the dead represented a revolution of sensibilities, and led to the creation of new patterns of church life; new forms of public and civic commemoration; new uses of ritual space; new possibilities for cultural expression. Against the suggestion of some literary critics and post-revisionist historians — that the space left by the demise of purgatory was readily filled with functional substitutes — it argues that purgatory's disappearance represented a cultural change of profound significance. Yet the Reformation did not lead to a compete ‘separation’ of the living and the dead, and substantial continuities remained. The book concludes with the paradoxical reflection that the religious and cultural problem represented by the dead could be both a force for radical change, and for cautious conservatism, and that the necessity of dealing with the dead was a profound influence on the complex character of the English Reformation as a whole.

This chapter is about commemorations as a central ritual of community in Puerto Rican Chicago. At wakes, for example, there were lively debates about what had been a life of success or a life of failure, and, hence, the experience of the community itself. There were also many celebrations of continuing lives, weddings, baby showers, and birthday parties. It examines how commemorations, the sharing and making of memories, influence the social dimensions of identity. Contests over identity, power, and recognition, mobilize memory, as both place and practice, to establish legitimacy and to affirm claims to belonging. Commemorations show that, even in death, there is social life and that, even as identity is a matter of becoming, so it is deeply historical.