History and Its Audiences

The text of this inaugural lecture, delivered in Cambridge on 15 May 2000, focuses on contemporary memory and the writing of history in the eighth and ninth centuries, taking the events of 817 and the contemporary accounts as a case study. It discusses how Frankish writers constructed their past in the early Middle Ages, and considers how and why this period should be part of the construction of our own past in the twenty-first century, both in Britain and in continental Europe. The lecture argues that a sense of the past is essential for the expression of a much more general cultural affiliation and sense of identity.