Introduction: using the past, interpreting the present, influencing the future

Summary

The past was a very real presence in early medieval societies. It might provide a legitimating template for the current order of things, explaining how things were meant to be thus, or an image of an ideal order, a Golden Age against which the present could be judged. Within a social group, shared beliefs about the past were a source of identity: the image of a common past informed a Wir-Gefühl (a sense of ‘us-ness’), and the defining characteristics of that past identified those who were and were not part of ‘us’ in the present. This volume brings together a series of eleven essays studying different aspects of the past and its functions in European society between the fourth and twelfth centuries AD. Its central themes are the importance of ideas about the past in defining early medieval societies; and the role of the present in moulding these understandings of the past. What were the mechanisms which transmitted ideas about the past? To what extent were these mechanisms manipulated by wielders of cultural and political power? How far could the past be reshaped by the needs of the present? These are some of the questions we hope to answer. We are also concerned with the implications of these questions for our sources for the history of early medieval Europe. If early medieval historical writings were representations of the past made for present purposes, then we clearly need to understand the parameters within which they were shaped.