History in fragments: Montecassino’s politics of memory

Most of what we know about the history of the Lombard principalities of southern Italy was preserved by the monks of Montecassino. Their perception of past and present from the ninth to the early eleventh century can be studied in three manuscripts that contain a variety of short texts with abundant corrections and marginal notes – a construction kit for the social memory of a monastic community that was never turned into a coherent narrative. Through examining these sometimes disparate fragments, we get a rare glimpse at the practices of writing in an early medieval monastery, and can begin to understand which texts mattered and why.