Although scholarship in general and historical scholarship in particular claim to be universal and international in their scope and methodology, national traditions, methods, and foci have developed in many fields, including medieval history. These national patterns have done little to encourage mutual cooperation and understanding: On the contrary, they often have been a real hindrance. Such obstacles, already observable in the nineteenth century, were made even more insurmountable by European political developments in the twentieth century. Two world wars, with their attendant alliances and oppositions, have made their contributions to deepening divisions and to complicating understanding and collaboration. These divisions have been particularly operative in American and German scholarship on medieval Europe.

A century ago, medieval historical studies in America were dominated by themes and methodologies developed in Germany. This influence was part of the more general influence exercised by German universities on American scholarship. Regardless of field, American historians looked to Germany for training, for inspiration, and for models of historical interpretation. For a variety of reasons, the investigation of which would take us far beyond the topic of this book, these close contacts dissolved in the course of the twentieth century.1 World War I and its wave of anti- German sentiment in North America was certainly a major factor. So, too, was the general reaction in medieval German historiography against the integration of the social sciences into historical discourse, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s.

In a recent book, I attempted to examine the means by which European communities transmitted and redefined their remembered pasts in the tenth and eleventh centuries. I argued that the period of roughly 950 to 1050 saw a great amount of “creative forgetting” as individuals and communities, both lay and secular, readjusted their sense of a relationship to the past, creating a new and more useful memory through a process of transmission, adaptation, and suppression. In that study I concentrated primarily on written traditions and examined how a wide spectrum of texts were restructured and transformed in the process of creating a useful past.

A number of scholars have criticized my work, and rightly so, for not having explored in more detail the specific issues of orality in the context of remembering. The position I took in the book was that, in the period I studied, the relationship between orality and literacy was a complex one. The rememberers moved between the two worlds with great facility: Oral tradition might be called on to validate or interpret written tradition, and written tradition might incorporate much that had been oral. Thus, I saw orality and literacy so deeply intertwined that I did not believe it necessary to devote a separate discussion to oral transmission of the past. I still think that this is essentially correct, but I recognize that I could have provided more concentrated attention to the issues of explicitly oral transmission within what Ursula Schaefer and others term vocality, taking into account the work of Hanna Vollrath, Horst Wenzel, and others who have examined the parameters of orality in medieval society.