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14  Chapter 1 Corporate Memories of Reform Medieval monastic identities were shaped, maintained, and transformed through carefully steered processes of remembrance .1 By selecting and arranging both individual and shared experiences of the past and preserving them in a retrievable form, monks and nuns were able to ground a contemporary understanding of their collective identity in a legitimizing past.2 This ability did not translate itself into a constant, typologically unchanging stream of texts, but throughout the centuries expressed itself in many forms,and with variable intensity. In Phantoms of Remembrance, Patrick Geary argues that the central Middle Ages in particular were a period of intense transitions for monastic groups throughout western Europe, and that anxieties over their effect on the collective identity and societal situation of such communities caused a surge of interest in strategies and practices of commemoration.3 As the typology of written and other forms of commemoration was continuously amplified,so was the complexity of the social, 1. Of particular interest are Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory; and Geary, Phantoms. 2. As exemplified in a series of articles published in Mémoire des origines (2003); and Écrire son histoire, ed. Bouter (2005). 3. Geary, Phantoms, 25. See, for instance, Coates, “Perceptions”; and Foot, “Remembering.” CORPORATE MEMORIES OF REFORM 15 spiritual, and other meanings they conveyed.4 Even the most cursory glance at the evidence reveals how such efforts were the result neither of an objective attempt to rescue endangered memories nor of a spontaneous evolution toward an intuitive collective memory.5 Instead, monastic groups created social memories by meticulously sifting through what Geary labels “messy memories,” visual, oral, and written remnants of a past that was quickly becoming alien to them.6 Such sifting entailed not only retaining but also rejecting a fair amount of memorial evidence.7 Former generations of historians have mostly considered this part of the process in negative terms,designating it as the factor of human agency in the loss of information that would have given us a better understanding of the development of monastic groups and of medieval society in general. Others have emphasized its function as an instrument in the shaping of an intelligible narrative of the past. Over the last decade or so, scholars have added a third perspective,which involves looking at the stratification and selection of memories as capacities of the human mind that are as important to psychological and social systems as the act of remembering itself. Astrid Erll, for one, argues that “social forgetting” (socialesVergessen), or the rejection of certain memories in order to make others intelligible and to allow for the construction of a coherent narrative of the past,is a condition for any form of collective remembrance.8 As such,the study of social forgetting does not take as its primary subject the disappearance of objective facts and sources or their rejection for compositional reasons,but the actual fact that their rejection was instrumental in the creation of a vision of the past that strove for dominance in the contemporary shaping of a collective identity.9 As it turns out, the notion of social forgetting is relevant to the study of how monastic groups of the eleventh and twelfth centuries remembered the tenth- and eleventh-century institutional past, especially in relation 4. Much of the mise-en-scène of remembrance lies beyond our grasp,as it is difficult to convey— or sometimes even to imagine—the impact physical and intellectual settings,hierarchies,and so forth had on the circulation of memories in the cloister; see Cubitt, “Monastic Memory,” 255–58. 5. Among the vast number of studies on this subject, see Schreiner, “Verschriftlichung”; IognaPrat , “Lieux de mémoire”; and Vanderputten, “‘Literate Memory.’” 6. Geary, Phantoms, 26–27; Vanderputten, “‘Literate Memory,’” 65–76. 7. Sennis, “Omnia.” 8. Erll, Kollektives Gedächtnis, 7–8, 54; also Esposito, SozialesVergessen. 9. I also refer to Connerton, How Modernity Forgets, esp. 40–98, where it is argued that processes of forgetting tend to erase the labor invested in the constructing of objects and places associated with a collective memory. In this case, the continued existence of a monastic community is remembered, but the process by which past generations managed to sustain that existence is forgotten. 16 CHAPTER 1 to the phenomenon of reform.10 In this chapter I will investigate this by looking at how, at the turn of the twelfth century, Simon, chronicler of Saint-Bertin, radically shaped the memory of more than a century of...

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