In the Middle Ages, even more so than today, history writing could be an act of political engagement. In an era without formal representation, the ability to persuade audiences of particular views of the past could be a significant weapon for those seeking to gain rhetorical leverage in political disputes. Yet “useful” history could be compiled from existing works as well as written from scratch. Because of the technologies of transmission in the age before printing, texts were essentially unstable: even (...) authoritative works were vulnerable to editing and repackaging by copyists in ways that could fundamentally alter their original meanings. Moreover, because of the organization of manuscript production, historical compilations were more likely to reflect the views of communities rather than individual authors. Modern historians have observed that the Carolingian and Anglo-Norman periods, both of which witnessed a revival of interest in the writing of new history, also saw surges in the production of historical compilations that functioned as responses to high-level political events and contributed to the formation of social identities. (shrink)

Deep brain stimulation has recently been identified as the “new frontier” in the surgical treatment of major depressive disorder. Powerful memories of the lobotomy era, however, pose a rhetorical challenge to clinical researchers who wish to make a case for its therapeutic future. For DBS advocates, establishing the relationship between these two treatments is not just a matter of telling a history; it also requires crafting persuasive arguments for the lineage of DBS that relate the new psychosurgery in some way (...) to the old. Working from a rhetorical perspective, this article identifies and analyzes three strategies employed by DBS advocates to manage the memory of lobotomy, which it terms evolutionary, genealogical, and semantic. In conclusion, this article suggests that a rhetorical perspective might be brought to bear on the frequent calls for dialogue with regard to psychosurgery, which are meaningless without attention to the persuasive dynamics such dialogue entails. (shrink)

"Forgetting" plays an important role in the lives of individuals and communities. Although a few Holocaust scholars have begun to take forgetting more seriously in relation to the task of remembering—in popular parlance as well as in academic discourse on the Holocaust—forgetting is usually perceived as a negative force. In the decades following 1945, the terms remembering and forgetting have often been used antithetically, with the communities of victims insisting on the duty to remember and a society of perpetrators desiring (...) to forget. Thus, the discourse on Holocaust memory has become entrenched on this issue. This essay counters the swift rejection of forgetting and its labeling as a reprehensible act. It calls attention to two issues: first, it offers a critical argument for different forms of forgetting; second, it concludes with suggestions of how deliberate performative practices of forgetting might benefit communities affected by a genocidal past. Is it possible to conceive of forgetting not as the ugly twin of remembering but as its necessary companion? (shrink)

The disappearance of the late-Roman gesta municipalia, or municipal document registers, is one of the milestones along the road in Europe that leads from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages. While they survived, these registers apparently served two constituencies. The late-Roman state used the gesta municipalia to keep track of tax obligations as property changed hands. Citizens for their part validated and secured legal transactions by having the documents generated by their transactions ratified by the civic authorities and copied (...) into the gesta. (shrink)