The Mythologized Past: Memory and Politics in Medieval Gotland

‘The Mythologized Past: Memory in Medieval and Early Modern Gotland’ asks how a relatively small, increasingly heterogeneous, insular community shapes its identity over time. It focuses on two key episodes in the history of medieval Gotland and how they are represented in the island’s history over time, from the thirteenth century through the seventeenth, focusing especially on Gotland’s conversion to Christianity and the mid fourteenth-century bubonic pandemic. By reference to various objects of memory, the essay explores and explains how Gotland’s ‘men of memory’ gave their versions of history, with their many references to the memorial landscape of the island, its churches, places, prominent families, and so on. Secondly, it discusses a different kind of memory, the empty set, that is, when there is, by accident or planning, no memory. An important example of this sort of empty set from Gotland comes from an incident connected to the great fourteenth-century pandemic, known as the Black Death (or digerdöden).