ACCORDING TO CICERO, in the second book of the De inventione:

Memory is thus inherent to prudence, an essential virtue for people in the Middle Ages. Accordingly, in the prologue to his Estoria de España, Alfonso X of Castile wrote:

And adds:

The words “remembrance” (remembrança), “oblivion” (olvido), “recall” (menbrar) are inseparable from the work of Alfonso X, the Wise King, an example of wisdom and prudence. Past events must be remembered, and for that history must be written. This concern of the Wise King had been shared, two centuries earlier, by the Toledan Saíd al Andalusí when, in his work on Las categorías de las naciones, he defined the sciences that distinguished the cultivated nations, not from the uncultivated ones, but from each other. Language, history, and religious law were the foundations of what might be called a “national identity” and perhaps, although anachronistically, a culture.

Memory is undoubtedly a feature that characterizes human life and is inseparable from civilization. The primary meaning of “memoria” is a “Facultad psíquica (or “Potencia del alma” in the 1970 edition) por medio de la cual se retiene y recuerda el pasado,” according to the Diccionario de la Lengua Española of the Real Academia Española.

MANY SCHOLARS, OF whom Adeline Rucquoi is one of the most prominent, have recommended eradicating the term “legitimation” from any discussion of monarchical institutions in the Iberian Peninsula, a conclusion to which I concur after my studies on Spanish royal symbols and insignia in material, documentary, and iconographic sources. Successors to the throne of Aragon were authorized by the right of primogeniture; so, a successor's investiture as King of Aragon was based on this principle alone. The case of James or Jaume I “the Conqueror” is illustrative because although he never took part in any coronation ceremony, in 1213 he was named King of Aragon immediately after the death of his father Peter the Great, King of Aragon, Count of Barcelona, and Lord of Montpellier.3 Nevertheless, I use this problematic term extensively throughout this chapter because the fact that James I was denied a formal coronation led him to create a series of other techniques designed to legitimize his rule. One of the strongest and most illuminating arguments in favour of this hypothesis was put forward by Bonifacio Palacios, who stated that James I invoked the “right of conquest” to justify his sovereignty over newly conquered lands. However, as we will see, James I also employed other legitimizing narratives, such as the supposed assistance that he received from St. George during his conquest of the kingdoms of Mallorca and Valencia, because, of course, the idealized image of the monarch was not limited to the military sphere alone, but had to portray other virtues such as religious legitimacy.

This chapter shows how and to what extent these legitimizing techniques, motivated by the lack of a Church-sanctioned coronation, were reflected in the iconography of Iberian kings of the Middle Ages, in particular James I (the Conqueror) and Peter the Ceremonious, and how they were used to seal into memory a set of arguments. It also determines why Peter the Ceremonious, who had to assert his potestas over the increasingly powerful estates, was so active in disseminating these techniques through texts and images and thereby fixing them in the memory of his subjects. As has been stated elsewhere, Hispanic medieval culture was, in itself, a memorial culture that sought to foster solemn recollection in which art played an indispensable role.

THIS CHAPTER REPRESENTS preliminary research into a little recognized topic that is fundamental for the history of the city of Venice. During the nineteenth century Venice underwent changes that transformed it from a historic city to a tourist city. Commentators have always been interested in Venetian changes but have paid little or no attention to the process of revision of the medieval origins of the city by intellectuals and building experts. This century-long process involved and cut across all levels of Venetian society, to the extent that it is difficult to pinpoint without getting lost in prosopographies and isolated events. But the revision and recovery of the past left its mark on the city and rendered it the Venice we know today, characterized by ongoing changes. For the sake of brevity, I will only outline a few exemplary, though not exhaustive, guidelines for the interpretation of a larger phenomenon, to be discussed elsewhere.

A City under Construction

The events taking place in Venice in the long nineteenth century are diverse and complex. Urban and architectural changes are mostly known thanks to Giandomenico Romanelli's research. Unfortunately, we still do not have a full overview of all the cultural elements that would enable a full understanding of this period.

As with other Italian cities, Venice fell under successive political entities, from the Napoleonic through the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the Kingdom of Italy in 1866, and had to interact with all of them. Let us recall the key dates: the Austrians acquired Venice in 1797 and ruled until 1806; from then until 1814 Venice was under French rule; the city was then annexed to the Austrian Empire and remained part of it until 1866, with a small break in 1848–1849 with the Revolution led by Daniele Manin. Finally, in 1866, Venice became Italian. For this whole century Venice was under construction. The Napoleonic repression brought about a very significant reduction in and dispersal of monuments and works of art in the city. But this led to the need for constant works to rehabilitate and restore the city to a usable condition. Such restoration works were carried out on buildings considered most important from the perspective of cultural history, but also on private buildings on the personal initiative of some significant figures of the cultural life of that period.

MY FOCUS IN this paper is two-fold: the uses of memory, and the problems of the relationship between memory and written records of memory in the early middle ages. Particular memories can also be exploited to reinforce an identity or even an ideology. We are all used to everyday journalism and spin as well as the supposed distinction between official and popular versions of history. All these raise the questions of collective and individual manifestations and uses of memory. One question to explore therefore is how helpful modern experience and categorizations may be in interpreting the distant past. I shall use case studies of historical narratives and epitaphs inscribed on stone from the early Middle Ages (ca. 500 to ca. 900) to highlight both the kind of material with which an early medieval historian works, and its implications for historical knowledge and interpretation more generally.

Flodoard of Reims and the Gate of Mars

Crucial issues about the uses of memory and the relation between memory and written, especially narrative, records of memory, can be demonstrated with two comments made by the tenth-century Frankish historian Flodoard. In his Annales, begun ca. 920, Flodoard casually mentions the Gate of Mars to make it serve as a reference point to locate the nearby church of St. Hilary where a blind man had miraculously had his sight restored. In Flodoard's History of Reims written ca. 950, however, the gate assumed greater significance. In this text Flodoard traced the history of the see of Reims from Sixtus, the first bishop of Reims, allegedly sent by St. Peter to northern Gaul. He further augmented the antiquity of the city and its secular Roman associations by discussing the city's foundation. He rejected the vulgata opinio that the city had been founded by Remus, brother of Romulus, as unlikely, and drew on his knowledge of Livy's “History of Rome” (Ab urbe condita) to support his judgement.

One thing that may have prompted the vulgata opinio was the relief sculpture of the twins Romulus and Remus being suckled by the wolf, the quintessential symbol of the city of Rome, on the underside of the arch.

Introduction

This was the opening to the trailer for the documentary Carles Bosch presented in 2010 after spending two years with his camera following Pasqual Maragall, the ex-mayor of Barcelona and president of the Generalitat de Catalunya (the Government of Catalonia), who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2007.

The loss of short-term memory revealed by this simple test was an indication of a more general mental deterioration and finally, the loss of one's own identity.

It is striking that at a time and in a society where the training of memory has been reduced to a vestige of what happened in an often criticized educational past and where all kinds of technological devices lead to the effective disembodiment of its intended functions, it is precisely the progressive loss of individual memory that marks the ago-nizing step from being to not-being. It seems that, faced with the process of dissolution of the “I,” we can only wait and hope for a new and improbable “magic bullet” to be offered by advances in neuroscience, while care networks, remunerated or not, struggle to offer basic care to patients who are ever more dependent.

We might expect that in another historical time and in a society like the late-medieval, where memory was essential in cultural life and one of the highest values for a human being,3 its change or loss would also be the subject of social concern and interest by physicians. However, the assumption that changes to basic functions of our organism must necessarily be understood in any time and place as problems that medicine must solve is a misleading premise that can easily lead to error, as medical anthropology and the history of medicine have frequently shown.4 So, to tackle the theme of this chapter, the first question should be whether, in late-medieval Latin society, memory and its loss were considered an issue to be conceptualized and dealt with by academic medicine. We will see that surviving university sources, both the texts read and those produced in the medieval universities, invite us to respond affirmatively.

ALTHOUGH THE MIDDLE Ages are long gone, the memory of the Middle Ages is still used by academics and politicians. Some academics use their interpretation of the Middle Ages to theorize about the current social and spatial order. Initially the Middle Ages were used as the Dark Ages from which man has liberated himself. In particular, modernization theory regarded the Middle Ages as the archetype of the unchanging traditional society from which man has struggled to free himself. After the liberation from these traditional shackles human development could “take-off” and progress through the different stages of modernization. This linear development model of the modernization theory was popular after the Second World War, but was challenged by the current period of economic and political problems which started at the end of the twentieth century.

This chapter starts by discussing some aspects of these economic and political crises which challenge the nation-state. Attention then moves to the ideas of Immanuel Wallerstein and Saskia Sassen, who use the Middle Ages to better understand the current transformations of the societal and spatial order. We then focus on how the legitimation of the political order centred on the nation-state is challenged through the undermining of national identities due to globalization and individualization. We end this chapter by discussing how new spatial identities are stabilized through positioning them between the future and the past. This shows how the memory of the Middle Ages is used to strengthen the legitimation of the political systems in these globalising and individualising times.

The Current Crisis of the Nation-State in the Mirror of the Middle Ages

Since the 1970s, increased global competitive pressures have eroded the centralized welfare state. Neo-liberal solutions were introduced to deregulate the economy and improve the competitiveness of companies on the world market. Decentralization of political power was one instrument used to confront the challenges of globalization. The transfer of social and economic responsibilities reduced the financial and regulatory burdens on the central state. The regional level was also assumed to be better suited to provide companies with tailor-made conditions helping them to compete on the world market.

In the Middle Ages, funerary art was used by the upper social groups as a form of immortalization in the earthly world. The main concern was to be forever present in the memory of the living so they could intercede for the soul of the deceased.

According to the ways Christianity was expressed in the Late Middle Ages, success in the afterlife required several rituals, such as masses, so the departed could ascend more rapidly to Eternal Salvation. To ensure this happened, long before death, testaments served to predetermine how the ante-mortem procedures, burial, and post-mortem rituals should take place and, in exchange, the Church would receive a significant part of the testator's possessions. The testaments related to items of funerary art reveal the anguish caused by the idea of disappearance over time.

A testament, or will, is an official document that was often written long before death, due to the omnipresence of death in medieval daily life. It would describe not only practical matters related to the disposition of possessions, but also lay down the manner in which the deceased wanted to be remembered, trying to prolong their memory for as long as possible. In these documents, certain formulae concern the fate of the soul (pro commendatio anima) and the structure of prayers, not only daily but also on special occasions. This is the case for the so-called Dies natalis, the day of rebirth to an eternal life, which is why this expression is used; calling it a birthday even though it referred to the day of death.

Unlike in the ancient world, prayers were for the dead and not to the dead. This practice featured so heavily in medieval attitudes towards death that funeral scenes on tombs often depicted mourners. The recumbent effigy—representing the image of the deceased person—and the sarcophagus or chest as a whole were to form a monumentum comprising the principal roles the person played while living and reflecting the idea of a deep believer with boundless faith.

Wills Demanding Rituals

Let us analyze attitudes towards death, the Liturgy of the Dead, testamentary documents, and funerary art simultaneously.

After nearly three decades of peaceful coexistence within the specific area of Sardinia, around the mid-fourteenth century, the relationship between the king of Aragon, as sovereign of the kingdom of Sardinia and Corsica, and the Giudice of Arborea began to change.

At that moment, Giudice Marianus IV was at a crossroads: to remain a faithful vassal of the king of Aragon and to reconcile himself to a reduced role in the island; or to respond to a policy of increasing political and institutional centralization by King Peter the Ceremonious, clearly evident in the annexation of the Kingdom of Mallorca to his Crown a few years earlier. By then, the formative period of the Kingdom of Sardinia and Corsica was over, and the Aragonese monarch was keen to consolidate its rule on the island, where the Giudicato of Arborea extended over a significant part of the island Regnum that was in effect divided in two. A divided Sardinia but with an increasingly dominant Arborea, one of the four post-Byzantine-era polities of the island, made the now-hereditary judge as head of each giudicato a threat to countries like Aragon. Moreover, a recent rebellion by Aragonese nobles, defeated in Épila, meant that Peter the Ceremonious was even more wary of the situation in Sardinia.

This Sardinian crisis was part of a broader international context. Indeed, the island was at the heart of a conflict between the Crown of Aragon and the Republic of Genoa for supremacy in the western Mediterranean, particularly following the Battle of the Bosphorus (the Byzantine–Genoese War (1348–1349) when the two powers had clashed.

According to Aragonese sources, the problems between the Giudice of Arborea, the Governor-General of the Kingdom of Sardinia and Corsica, and royal officials had begun de facto in 1351. Marianus IV had openly broken with the Aragonese because of attitudes shown by the governor. The latter, consequently, begun to drum up charges from several witnesses who knew facts or deeds attributable to the judge. Some allegations concerned Marianus IV's request to the Roman Pontiff to enfeoff him with the Regnum Sardiniae et Corsicae in 1351. No other source confirms such an attempt by the judge to be invested with the Regnum.

MY FOCUS HERE lies at the crossover or, rather, the convergence of charter analysis and cultural history. What I plan to show is how cultural history, in this case historiography—etiological narrative rooted in a quest for origins—is immersed in charter writing and the memory it perpetuates. However, notarial writing and the construction of historical discourse are two very different areas which, although they are not radically opposed, affect fields of epistemology and memory that have no real connection with one another.

For this reason, it is essential to agree on the terms used and the nature of the material they designate, providing them with a precise meaning linked to the purpose of their usage. Far from attempting to discover an essential connection, resulting from scriptural homology, between documentary writing and the creation of historical discourse, I wish to identify and analyze a relationship which initially had nothing to do with fate or necessity. This unusual position is the substance of my approach: a causality of coincidence, a genesis woven in pure temporality, which undoubtedly represents an original feature of Catalan history. On one hand, we have a purely material, utilitarian, and accounting phenomenon, merely legal and, in all cases strictly individual. This was the precursor of notarial writing at a time of private deeds: in other words, the transcription and written preservation of the transactions and rituals of everyday life (donations, purchases and sales, notices of pleas, records of the consecration of churches, and so on). The important point here was to ensure they were memorized by providing an immediate, simultaneous transcription of the contracted commitment, for which the written document gave legal significance. I would like to place this in diachronic symbiosis, on the other hand, with a strictly cultural phenomenon involving memory: the writing of history with a desire for intelligibility and a true reconstruction of the past. The two phenomena are, by nature, dif-ferent if not contradictory. One is an operation of record in the context of a practice of preserving memory for the future and the other is an operation of returning to the past.

TOMBS AND BURIALS in medieval religious buildings could appropriate these spaces for the memory of the dead and their families. This chapter aims to identify an internal topography of the cathedral of Mallorca using a unique document created to organize the religious services for the eternal care and memory of the dead there.

Introduction

Until now, research on the medieval cathedral of Mallorca has focused on its construction, especially the work of Joan Domenge using fabric records of the fourteenth century, and others on later stages in its building. A broad consensus exists on the cathedral and the structures of the main mosque, which were taken over by Christians after the reconquest of Mallorca, and became a Gothic cathedral in the early fourteenth century. From an initially austere structure the cathedral of Mallorca took on its current form with three naves, part of a major promotional campaign by the crown involving prestigious architectural structures across its territory, both insular and continental, trying to legitimize a kingdom that could hardly be considered independent of the Crown of Aragon.

To date we have few studies on funerary documentation or the socio-economic reasons prestigious families began to choose the Mallorcan cathedral as a place of eternal rest, instead of the prestigious cloisters or chapels of the nearby Franciscan and Dominican friaries. Fortunately, the cathedral archive conserves a number of wills that allow us to analyze how the deceased buried in the building managed their commemoration.

From the early fourteenth century different areas of the cathedral began to form a hierarchical funerary complex where celebrations dedicated to the memory of the deceased were carried out: countless anniversary masses, absolutions associated with these masses, or the ritual of sharing bread at the grave. The records of the anniversaries are detailed and identify the place where each tomb is located, so we can see how the thousands of burials were distributed around the cloister or the chapels of the cathedral by social origin or the size of their perpetual rents, turning the building into a monumental stone necrologium and mirror of Mallorcan medieval society.

A few privileged individuals secured their memories with ornate monumental tombs, linking a definite lineage to a particular liturgical space.

IN 1468 JOHN II (1398–1479), monarch of the Crown of Aragon, went through cataracts surgery. The king experienced the normal nervousness before the operation and, thus, he felt compelled to ask for a little bit of divine help. It is said that John II prayed to St. Engracia, a young girl martyred in 254 in Zaragoza, to intercede on his behalf. Luckily, the surgical procedure was successful. As a way to thank the saint, the king promised to transform the old parish dedicated to her in the city into a monastery of the order of St. Jerome. Nevertheless, John II died before he could turn his project into a reality and it was his son and heir, Ferdinand II (1452–1516), who inaugurated the Hieronymite monastery of Santa Engracia in Zaragoza in 1493.

The members of the Trastamara royal family were devoted supporters and promoters of the Order of St. Jerome. Their sponsorship meant the foundation of the very first Hieronymite monastery in the Kingdom of Aragon, which was located—as we have just seen—in Zaragoza. But not everyone in the city was happy about it. Many of its inhabitants disliked the project, particularly those who dwelt near that church, although they had nothing against the monks. Consequently, the parishioners of St. Engracia wrote a letter of complaint, in which they argued that their devotion was focused on that particular church (the document explained that the parishioners “have their devotions [there] and their parents and relatives buried there”). They also begged the king to preserve the parochial status of St. Engracia. Ferdinand II accepted their petition and, subsequently, asked the Pope for a bull that allowed the new monastery church to act as a local parish.

What was at stake here was the access of the parishioners to the tombs of their deceased relatives. In many cases, they had paid for those burial places and sepulchres, or at least had restored them, and they also had kept and decorated them. This was how the parishioners honoured and took care of their ancestors.

IN RECENT YEARS, several studies have highlighted the way in which the past has been used down the centuries to construct identities, give cohesion to social groups, and ideologically sustain particular political or cultural stances. These issues have been of equal interest to historians, psychologists, philosophers, and sociologists eager to find the keys that could explain such use of past events (as well as so many other uses of the past) and reveal the complex mechanisms by which we remember (or are forced to remember) certain circumstances while casting others aside. In this way, memory presents itself as a vital cultural structure in human development with both individual and communal aspects, and one that is able to articulate a relationship with that past but also with the present and the future. For the Middle Ages, Carmen Marimón has pointed out:

I am especially interested in the last part of this statement as memory had a dynamic nature and served to create and uphold a new ideological concept, presenting it as a resurgence of the past, or making the past its place of origin. This function is only known to us, of course, to the extent that documents of that “artificial memory of what hap-pened” have survived. In fact, rather than what happened and what was remembered, the most interesting phenomenon in this case is to analyze how those memories were manipulated in order to sustain a totally novel frame of thinking. That manipulation (regarding, again, medieval times) can best be explored in writing and iconography; oral traditions existed, but many of them were lost as they were never transferred to documents. Alfonso the Wise clearly noticed this, saying that “it is writing which adduces all rights of remembrance.” Even so, despite being fixed in writing or iconography, some supposedly arbitrary evocation of the past that is imposed will not necessarily remain unchanged but, rather, it can be subjected to new additions and transformations over time. In other words, it is a memory transformed by a new memory of the events.

IWISH TO address in this chapter the disadvantages for historians of the cult of anniversaries in Europe today. In 1989 I wrote Celebrations: The Cult of Anniversaries in Europe and the United States Today, which was reprinted in June 2011. A French translation appeared in 1992. Let me begin by summarizing some of my earlier views about cultural celebrations. They help to explain why I have been invited here to present my critique of how the cult of anniversaries distorts historians’ prioritizing. There is no need to remind you that historical commemorations like that of Charles V in the millennial year 2000, of Frédéric Chopin in 2010, and of both Franz Liszt and Gustav Mahler in 2011 flourished more than ever. What has been called the “cult of anniversaries” con-sists of an expectation that the years of birth and/or death of cultural luminaries must be celebrated through events and publications financed out of the cultural budgets of nations, regions, cities, and private foundations. The same applies to fiftieth and hundredth anniversaries of political and military events, as in 2011 with the American Civil War that began in 1861. The readiness of European institutions to invest large sums in commemorations of cultural, as distinct from political, anniversaries astonishes North Americans like me. We Americans treat such occasions with mild interest or even indifference, and our commemorations of cultural heroes—even major ones like Abraham Lincoln, who was born just over two hundred years ago in 1809—are far more modest than those in Europe. Contrasts in the intensity of exploitation of historical anniversaries have become a major point of difference between Europe and North America.

In Celebrations: The Cult of Anniversaries in Europe and the United States Today, I explored reasons for differences between European and American habits of commemoration. I connected Europe's acceleration in numbers and panache of anniversary festivals to the phenomenon of secularization. The decline in religious modes of remembering has, I then argued, left a vacuum which is increasingly filled by festivals whose timing is dictated solely by the calendar. At first glance, the willingness of cultural programmers to rely so heavily on the calendar of anniversaries seems timid and arbitrary. But a closer look shows that the Great Calendar of birth and death dates provides pre-dictability, stability, and consensus.

THE NOTION OF memory is inseparable from its vectors. Memory is an individual experience evoking the workings of the subject's psychology and intellect,1 but it is powered by products of society: specific knowledge and signs and collective or individual experiences dependent on the media making individuals aware of them. We are going to investigate in this comparative research only a part of this, the part concerning the national community or rather, to guard ourselves against any kind of teleological anachronism, political society. There are very many media involved, of course, but one stands out from all the others and that is language, whether spoken or written, either because of the deep structures it reveals or the specific connotations it presents. Not that language is, a priori, the carrier of a national identity: here, too, we must beware of anachronisms. But our sources allow us to know the intended recipient of a written message and therefore have an idea of the strategy of the person giving it, although on the other hand it gives us only indirect knowledge of the recipient of the message itself and the reactions to it.

However, the problem of languages introduces a very important difference between France and England and, in turn, affects the historiography of these two kingdoms through which we will try to follow the emergence and structuring of national histories and memories. Naturally, neither language, whether written or spoken, nor history, are the only vectors through which national memory is constructed, but they play an important role in it. Language is, above all, important as a strong indicator of the existence of a socially diverse readership. Until the end of the Middle Ages, Latin remained the language of the clergy, although it was known and used by a growing number of lay people, notably those who had learned and practised law, but the writing and large-scale circulation of works in the vernacular implies that an increasingly large audience was available to read them. From this point of view, a difference must be made between poetic and prose works. The former can eventually be considered as evidence of literature whose circulation was oral rather than written. It is therefore necessary to begin with a very rapid overview of the linguistic conditions of historiographical production in the two kingdoms.

THE PRESENCE OF the Crown of Aragon in Sardinia has left a cultural legacy in the memory and identity of Sardinian culture which is still very visible today. This chapter explores this impact across seven centuries.

Identity is shaped by contrasts and disagreements, and it tends to emerge where different groups face each other, often in some context of competitiveness. This occurred in Sardinia, from the arrival of the Catalan-Aragonese in 1323 and through their influence across the island for the next five centuries. Catalan-Aragonese heritage and its historical memory in Sardinia lasted into the contemporary period. Institutionally such heritage includes the exact or almost exact continued use of fiscal and political institutions and offices, such as the viceroy, governors, parliament, and royal chancery. The Catalan-Aragonese governmental structure lasted until 1847, when the so-called Savoyard administrative system was introduced as a result of the fusione or “Perfect Fusion” between the mainland states of Savoy–Piedmont and the hereto distinct Sardinia, long after the House of Savoy took control of the island in 1720.

This half-millennium allows an in-depth study of Catalan cultural influence in Sardinia from the Middle Ages to today, through a comparative analysis of elements of identity existing in the Catalan territories that are similarly found in Sardinia. The Catalan-Aragonese presence in Sardinia and its memory today are considered here mainly from a historical and institutional point of view—although the influences on the arts, language, and traditions are also briefly analyzed. Specifically, we focus on issues of identity among the urban oligarchies in the major Sardinian royal towns and cities, together with offices they held and their family relationships with and as clients of the monarchy and other social elites; parliaments prove to be an invaluable framework for examples.

The characteristics of these urban oligarchies and their willingness to create a Catalan identity in Sardinia are examined in the years immediately following the Catalan-Aragonese conquest. We show how the identity they forged then continues to be felt today, in many respects, its influence seen in Sardinian institutions and culture.

Catalan Influence on Sardinian Identity, Memory, and Cultural Heritage

National identity is a collective feeling based on the sense of belonging to the same nation, and of sharing numerous characteristics that make it different from other nations.