How the Past was Used: Historical Cultures, c. 750-2000

Proceedings of the British Academy, volume 207

Available from Oxford University Press

This book explores how societies put the past to use and how, in the process, they represented it: in short, their historical culture. It brings together anthropologists, historians and literary scholars to address all the means by which societies, groups and individuals engaged with the past and expressed their understanding of it.

The utility of the past proved almost as infinitely variable as the modes of its representation. It might be a matter of learning lessons from experience, or about the legitimacy of a cause or regime, or the reputation of an individual. Rival versions and interpretations reflected, but also helped to create and sustain, divergent communities and world views. With so much at stake, manipulations, distortions and myths proliferated. But given also that evidence of past societies was fragmentary, fragile and fraught with difficulties for those who sought to make sense of it, imaginative leaps and creativity necessarily came into the equation. Paradoxically, the very idea that the past was indeed useful was generally bound up with an image of history as inherently truthful. But then notions of truth proved malleable, even within one society, culture or period.

Concerned with what engagements with the past can reveal about the wider intellectual and cultural frameworks within which they took place, the book is of relevance to anyone interested in how societies, communities and individuals acted on their historical consciousness.