Irregular Histories: Forgetting Ourselves

Any Literate Person who visited London's St. Paul's Cathedral in the middle of the fourteenth century was confronted by the presence of history in the everyday. The sign in St. Paul's discloses at least two ways in which rhythm structures history. It serves to reiterate the importance of historical events. The histories of the body people engage in are the records of lost affections, of, as Plotinus says, a mourning for the impossibility of true possession: “No one could be content to take his pleasure thus in an emotion over a thing not possessed any more than over a child not there”. Forgetting appears in a number of forms in medieval historiography. Its inevitability is inscribed in the history of the medieval world itself. A history that is written beyond the Middle Ages would not take memory into account.