Publication details

Fragmented Memory. Omission, Selection, and Loss in Ancient and Medieval Literature and History

Authors

BODNARUK Mariana BRUNO Nicoletta FILOSA Martina MARINELLI Giulia DORANDI Tiziano PELUCCHI Marco GRIMALDI Alessandra BASILE Gastón Javier D’ANGELO Marzia SANTOMAURO Silvia TROTTA Filippo GENNARI SANTORI Chiara CRISTINI Marco MOLES Francesco POLIGNANO Elisa Antonella TAXIDIS Georgios MANCUSO Sabrina

Year of publication 2022
Type Monograph
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Arts

Citation
Description Chance, in addition to the unavoidable ambiguity caused by time, is one of the main guilty parties in the transmission of ancient texts – or lack thereof. However, the same cannot be said for what concerns the mechanisms of selection and loss of historical and literary memory, where the voluntary awareness of obscuring is often part of a precise aim, thus leading the cultural memory of a literate society to become fragmented. The present volume explores the devices and criteria of selection and loss in Ancient and Medieval texts and the subsequent fragmentation of such literature, but it also addresses the questions of the damnatio memoriae, of literary strategies such as reticence and omission, as well as of known texts deemed lost but re-found thanks to state-of-the-art methods in digitization. The many and diverse nuances of the concepts of omission, selection, and loss throughout Ancient and Medieval literature and history are illustrated through a number of case studies in the four sections of this volume, each examining a different facet of the topic: ‘Mechanisms and criteria of textual loss and selection’, ‘Lost texts re-discovered’, ‘Voluntary omissions and desire for oblivion’, and ‘Re-working the known’.

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