The epilogue explores how later Greeks understood the notable Mycenaean remains from the regions under study and probes why, during the post-Bronze Age, Tiryns was much celebrated while Mycenae’s reputation was deliberately suppressed.

The Conclusion draws together the book’s various thematic strands: the perceived primacy of the ‘reason’, the right of its possessors to rule, the exculpatory effect of a frenzy diagnosis, and the high cost paid by those who received one. It returns to the larger question posed at the outset: whether the organ of the brain and the faculties of the mind were seen as constitutive of ‘personhood’ in pre-1700s England. The responses to frenzy which we have encountered in this book suggests that they were. The operations of the mental faculties known as ‘reason’, ‘will’, and ‘memory’ (or simply the ‘wits’) were located in (and often colloquially identified with) the brain. The functionality and continuity of these faculties was integral to the maintenance of legal, social, and spiritual personhood. Yet what troubled frenzy’s witnesses the most, the Conclusion argues, was the way it disrupted its sufferers’ predictable ways of being in the world – the values they had once held dear, the ways they had once looked and spoken. It was a disease which had the power to change friends, neighbours, and loved ones beyond recognition.

This chapter considers the role of memory and archaizing traits at Mycenae during the LH IIIA2-IIIB period. Particular attention is paid to poros ashlar masonry, the monumentalization of Grave Circle A, and a visual tie between the Lion Gate relief and the carved shaft grave stelae.

Mongolia hovers on the edge of early English drama: While no playtexts survive from the Elizabethan period featuring their history, there are consistent allusion to the peoples of the Tatary tribes unified under Chinggis Khan in English theatrical documents from 1536 onward. This chapter takes as a key case one of the eight surviving backstage-plots of the period to consider the stage life of Chinggis Khan inaugurated by the lost “Tamar Cham” plays. The two plays proved highly successful in the Elizabethan era and continued to haunt the paratextual record of early English performance into the late eighteenth century. The chapter explicates the financial data of the “Tamar Cham” plays in a repertorial context invested in Mediterranean tyrants to situate two newly discovered medieval source documents that together suggest a particular nostalgia in a fantasy if global unity.

The study of memory resilience and cognitive aging remains in its early stages. Nevertheless, growing evidence suggests that a lifetime of literacy engagement and continued reading in older age confer significant cognitive benefits. High literacy levels are associated with increased cognitive reserve; which may offer a buffer against age-related memory decline. Once forgetfulness begins to interfere with daily functioning, this additional reserve may help avid readers maintain cognitive performance. In people at elevated risk for age-related memory disorders, such reserve may even delay or mitigate the onset of full-blown dementia.

This chapter explores the implications of a post-transition context and an ongoing violent confrontation for the memory regime, looking at Kenya as our case study. Despite a power-sharing agreement and a concluded transitional justice process following election-related violence in the country (2008–2012), today Kenya is again characterised by public amnesia with regard to the most recent violence committed in the context of a ‘War on Terror’. The chapter shows how memory is securitised, with amnesia presented as resilience and memory as vulnerability in the context of the confrontation. Spaces of violence are reconstructed and fortified, and people invited to reinhabit them as a way to fight terror. The chapter takes a close look at the rectification of the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, showing the different ways in which labours of memory erasure have paradoxical effects, acting as triggers of memory, archives of memory discourse, and even markers of insecurity.

This chapter investigates international commissions of inquiry (ICOI) as forms of memory intervention and attempts to breach public amnesia on violence, and how these interact with long-term conflict. The chapter specifically considers UN-sanctioned commissions and mapping exercises in Burundi and Rwanda in the 1990s. It shows that there are at least two ways in which international investigative reports have historically become participants in local conflict dynamics. The chapter shows that, first, by qualifying violence and conflict in particular ways, ICOIs can generate symbolic capital unequally benefiting the different sides to the conflict, and as such they participate in constructing hierarchies of blame and victimhood. Second, through the simultaneity of exposure (‘finding out’) and lack of official recognition, ICOIs can contribute to broader dynamics of impunity and public secrecy, with the risk of producing partial, socially disengaged and politically disempowered forms of revelation. The chapter urges us to construct investigative instruments that are better equipped to account for and address some of these unwanted effects.

This chapter reflects on the core contributions of the book to the study of memory, transitional justice and peacebuilding. First, it highlights conceptual contributions in rethinking the nature of public amnesia as an active form of labour. Following this, it notes the rich empirical findings on the diversity of ways in which the negation of and disengagement with the past operate, and the diverse ways in which this imprints into materiality, affecting sites of violence and those who encounter them. The chapter also highlights contributions to a dynamic understanding of amnesia and the comparative politics of transition, noting how diverse regimes of memory form based on the type of transition, and how these change over time. Finally, the chapter closes by highlighting the contributions to our understanding of the intersection between public amnesia and peacebuilding.

The introductory chapter lays out the core research questions and maps out persistent gaps in knowledge, particularly when it comes to: (1) comparative work on memory and public amnesia; (2) a dynamic understanding of how war-to-peace transitions shape memory regimes differently and over time; and (3) a regional approach to memory/amnesia. In other words, are there different ‘paths to forgetting’? And do memory regimes evolve in line with the changing nature of political regimes? To this effect, three cases are chosen for an in-depth exploration: a context of victor’s peace exemplified by Rwanda; a power-sharing deal exemplified here by Burundi; and finally a non-transition/ongoing confrontation exemplified by Kenya and the War on Terror in East Africa. From a comparative perspective, the book explores three distinct cases of both violence and transition: a genocide coupled with civil war and rebel victory in Rwanda, civil war and power-sharing in Burundi, and a transnational confrontation with a non-state actor in the context in Kenya. The chapter then outlines its methodology and offers a chapter-by-chapter overview of the book.

This chapter investigates the implications of rebel victory for the memory regime, looking at a case study of Rwanda. The chapter finds that victor’s justice extends to the realms of memory and shapes a distinct militant memocracy regime – an active shaping and policing of boundaries of memory, and the suppression of competing narratives, memory acts and memory spaces. Victor’s memory leaves a complex material imprint, defined by both intense memorialisation and multilayered erasures. The chapter also introduces the concepts of transnational rectification and memory erasure.

This chapter investigates the implications of a power-sharing deal for the memory regime, looking at the case study of Burundi. In Burundi, we witness a ‘clash of paradigms’ whereby power-sharing undermines meaningful attempts at transitional justice. The chapter shows that this translates to the realm of memory, producing a coalition of oblivion, and that this results in variegated forms of memory displacement and erasure. The chapter looks at three sites of violence in Burundi to explore the everyday struggles with rectification, the undignified treatment of remains, and threatened memory erasure. It also demonstrates that the memory regime changes alongside and in line with the changing political regime, and shows how an increase in the power of the dominant political party shifted the memory regime towards selective recognition.