Where is the past? Can memory be located on a map? Such questions may seem rhetorical – variations on the timeworn theme of ubi sunt – yet for centuries people in England and Wales have both sought and found the past in specific locales. They have touched it in the lady chapel and the nave. They have found it under the turnip field, where the plough turns up silver pennies. They have located it under the old oak, and in ‘the pit where the martyrs died’. In such places, memories lie layer upon layer.
This five-year project will explore the ‘history of memory’ in a range of English and Welsh locales from the early medieval period down to the modern era. Focusing on three types of place – Cathedral Tombs and Memorials, Ancient Habitations, and Local Landscapes – we will investigate change and continuity in the ways individuals and communities have imagined, appropriated, and reinvented the past. Drawing on the disciplinary perspectives of literary studies and archaeology, the project will identify and interpret the manifold ‘technologies of remembrance’ – including texts, oral traditions, material objects and customary practices – whereby individuals and groups have depicted, ratified, or contested relationships between the past and the present. PASTPLACE will transcend the boundaries of periodization and discipline to examine patterns of remembrance, re-imagining and forgetting over the longue durée.
The project’s findings will be disseminated in three co-authored volumes, edited by the PI, under the general title The Past in its Place. Exemplifying a fresh and interdisciplinary approach to the history of memory, these studies will, it is hoped, ignite further research both within Britain and overseas. Aspects identifying this project as frontier research include:
- A cross-period approach, historicizing the model of lieux de mémoire in order to investigate change and continuity in perceptions of the past over the longue duree;
- A combination of literary and archaeological perspectives and methodologies, producing a rich and heterogeneous understanding of historical memory as expressed in both textual and material practice;
- A socially inclusive and multicultural approach, reading local customary practices and oral traditions alongside elite perspectives, and Welsh and Cornish localities and texts alongside English ones.
News and Events
Workshop at Buckfast Abbey
The project will be hosting a two-day workshop on current academic approaches to place and memory at Buckfast Abbey, Devon, 17-18 April 2015. Please see the Call for Papers. The full programme will be available on this website shortly.
PASTPLACE at Berlin RSA
The Past in its Place project is sponsoring two panels on Early Modern Anti-Monuments at the conference of the Renaissance Society of America in Berlin, March 26th. For details see the conference programme.
PASTPLACE at Vancouver MLA
The Past in its Place project sponsored a panel at the 2015 conference of the Modern Language Association (Vancouver, 8-11 January). The session title was “Anti-Memorials: Sites of Counter-Memory, Future Memory, and Forgetting.” See here for details of speakers, paper abstracts, time and place.
Speaking with the Dead Exhibitions
Exhibitions stemming from the “Speaking with the Dead” project took place last summer, at Exeter Cathedral (4-13 August) and St Albans Cathedral (26 August – 5 September) and Chester Cathedral (October). Further exhibitions will be announced in due course.
