The early modern age, conceived in this volume as a period spanning from 1450 to 1700, was an epoch of dramatic cultural and social developments. It witnessed major cultural encounters that produced what is currently labeled the first globalization, and intensified the worldwide circulation of a variety of cultural artifacts—as well as of people, knowledge, and ideas. Taking all these developments into account, it seems inevitable that many human groups in a variety of changing historical circumstances should have produced and practiced, over that period, distinctive forms of memory which it would not be fruitful to amalgamate into one unifying category. Rather than attempting that, the essays in this volume aim to explore a stimulating selection of a wide range of experiences of remembering and forgetting in early modern Europe.
