This chapter contains the translated and annotated textof Regino of Prüm’s Chronicle.

This chapter seeks to draw on elements of scholarship in focusing attention on certain aspects of the dynamics and politics of social memory in modern national settings. Events may also take on significance from patterns of expectation that are rooted in the memory of earlier episodes. Commemorations of specific events seldom confine themselves to revisiting the detail of the events themselves. Public commemorative activities are not the only cultural vehicles that influence the formation of a sense of the collective past in human societies. The historical connections and emphases that are articulated in public culture are generally easier to uncover than those that may be at work in the minds of ordinary members of society. Contestations over the appropriate narrative framing of episodes are only one of the things that can make the remembering of events or experiences socially problematic.

This introduction presents an overview of Bishop Thietmar of Merseburg and Ottonian Germany, including its government and society, the office of the emperor and the imperial church. Bishop Thietmar's Chronicon provides a personal testament, comparable to the medieval expressions of individuality as the autobiography of Guibert of Nogent. Piety and influence aside, Thietmar remained an imperial bishop and was intensely aware of the influence of kingship and politics on the church, his diocese, and his own career. He was especially concerned with the impact of royal power on the episcopate. The emperorship and the 'imperial church', the papacy, relations with Slavs, Italians, and with their Saxon homeland, these figured among the chief reference points for Ottonian kings and have continued to do so for modern historians who study the Ottonian Reich.

In this chapter, contribution of the pre-war paramilitary bodies to the creation of the Irish New Army divisions is considered, and the appointment, experience and training of officers are discussed. This is followed by a consideration of the composition of the other ranks of these divisions, and how they differed from pre-war recruits and adapted to military discipline. The training, equipping and billeting of these units are investigated, and the political pressures on unit names and divisional symbols are examined. The disciplinary problems faced by these divisions while based in the United Kingdom, and the efforts made by the military authorities and civilian bodies to improve morale are also discussed in the chapter. The study emphasises the extent to which Ulster Unionists had rallied to the Empire in her hour of need, the clear implication being that the British government now owed them a debt of honour by maintaining the integrity of Northern Ireland.

This chapter concentrates on recorded instances of crime and disorder and so does much to confirm the reputation of the late medieval period for unparalleled violence and lawlessness. Descriptions of crime and disorder can afford a valuable perspective on reality and although the cases recorded are telescoped chronologically and provide only a brief snapshot, they do reveal something of the nature of criminal activity amongst different classes of society. The examples included in this chapter provide illustrations of all the serious crimes and also, in various contexts, the lesser offence of trespass. Inevitably many of the examples focus on high-profile crimes of violence amongst the upper strata of society.

This chapter focuses on Soldados de Salamina/Soldiers of Salamina, an adaptation of Javier Cercas's best-selling novel, which in both content and form calls into question the possibility of accessing the past along the lines suggested by Jenkins, Rosenstone and White. It suggests that Soldados de Salamina questions the possibility of constructing totalising narratives about the past, promoting in their place a more subjective approach to representations of the past. The film entry centres on Lola Cercas, a journalist and writer who attempts to uncover the details of the execution of approximately fifty Nationalist prisoners and the escape of one of their group, the real-life writer and fascist ideologue Rafael Sánchez Mazas.

The Life of Raimondo, called 'the Palmer' (Palmario), was written by Master Rufino, a canon of the church of the Twelve Apostles adjacent to the hospital which Raimondo himself had founded in Piacenza. Although Rufino seems to have been personally acquainted with Raimondo only late in the saint's life, he claims to have drawn on the testimony of not only Raimondo's only surviving son, Gerardo, but the whole community of those who had known and worked with him. The result, as published in Acta sanctorum in 1729, has accordingly been accepted as authentic and trustworthy both by Vauchez and by Luigi Canetti in his study of the cult of the saints at Piacenza. As was the custom of Acta sanctorum, Peter Bosch divided his retranslation into long chapters, but he listed the chapter divisions which he found in the Italian translation, which were probably those of the original Latin Life.

This chapter summarises the preceding discussions and presents some concluding thoughts from the authors. Earls Colne was situated within one of the most commercially developed areas of late medieval England. It was on the fringes of London, which in turn implies a regionally specific historical experience. The arrival of a resident landlord in a village was a common experience in the century after 1540. Where this occurred, personal supervision replaced power structures that had relied on monastic, aristocratic or crown stewards. In Earls Colne, this change disturbed a situation in which the village had sometimes taken liberties over its rights or lapsed into self-government. The Harlakendens remained a presence in the village for most of the following century, but the landlord interest in Earls Colne did not develop beyond the limits established then. Earls Colne never had a great nineteenth-century house or park, or model arable farms staffed by day labourers, nor was it incorporated into a great estate. It remained a parish of variegated holdings, with landowners both large and small, because it failed to follow the developmental paths taken by some of the other English villages that have been the subject of exhaustive historical study.

This chapter highlights the fact that morale is a force that comes from within, and which makes a soldier carry out his duty, but can be influenced by external factors such as regimental loyalty, efficient administration, good leadership and patriotism. It considers a number of methodological issues that are of relevance in developing the study of British Expeditionary Force units. The differences between discipline in Irish and other British regiments are considered, and comparisons between civil and military law are made. Irish soldiers can much more meaningfully be compared with their counterparts in the Scottish highland regiments than with French colonial or Austro-Hungarian troops. Finally, the chapter discusses an issue surrounding discipline and morale that can be meaningfully considered in a thematic form, namely the attempts made to maintain high morale in the Irish regiments during the Great War.

The rather brief anonymous Life of the Sienese Andrea Gallerani was to all appearances composed with a local and immediate audience in view. The fanciful tale which immediately follows has Andrea swept up into the sky on a cloud and should have served to maintain interest. In March 1274 Bishop Bernardo of Siena granted the indulgence for visitors to the tomb on the Monday after Palm Sunday, the first landmark in Andrea's cult. A confraternity in the name of the Crucified Christ, the Virgin and the Blessed Andrea, which met in the oratory below the Preachers' dormitory, was founded in 1344 and continued to flourish. Andrea had the distinction of being commemorated in an early example of Sienese panel painting, a small altarpiece of about 1280 from San Domenico, now in the Sienese Pinacoteca.

The anonymous Life of Zita of Lucca was first published in Acta sanctorum in 1673. Daniel Papebroch prepared the text from a manuscript from the ancient Tuscan monastery of Camaldoli, which he admitted to be 'much in need of correction'. He implied that he had collated it with another in the possession of the Fatinelli family of Lucca. Early in the year 1286, eight years after Zita's death, a dispute erupted between the canons of San Frediano and the Lucchese Franciscans, which rumbled on until the canons reluctantly accepted defeat in 1291. On 27 April 1286, Zita's feast-day, a miracle was recorded by a notary at San Frediano. The record seems to survive only in the two extant English manuscripts of the Life; none of the Italian copies includes it.

Whilst impersonal economic forces shaped the land market, it was also the sum of hundreds if not thousands of individual decisions by property owners as to how best to use their land, whether to acquire more or sell what they already had, whether to bequeath all to a single heir or distribute land amongst several children or kin. The logic underpinning these individual decisions is largely lost to us, but by looking at the behaviour of individual copyholders, we can hope to establish something of the rationale underpinning the choices made by these people. This chapter concentrates on three aspects of the land market. It examines the acquisition and sale of land by individuals; the creation of larger holdings and its reverse, the division of holdings; and the use of land to endow children and dependent family members.

Psychologists working on memory have developed a number of conceptual distinctions. This chapter presents the general discussion of memory as a reconstructive mental activity. It also presents the discussion of issues of selfhood and narrativity. For oral historians such as Alastair Thomson, the analysis of the mutually constitutive interactions between constructed selfhood and personal memory is a central scholarly objective. The chapter then considers the memory's social and cultural aspects. It focuses on the cognitivist, the subjectivist and the socio-cultural approaches. The cognitivist approach views memory essentially as a vital part of the mental equipment that individuals use to register and process information about the world around them. The approach is individualizing, in the sense that it tends to treat individuals as self-sufficient mnemonic agents, but it is not especially preoccupied with the inner psychic dynamics of selfhood and subjectivity.