On Religion and Memory

This volume takes up the challenge implied in Augustine’s paradox of time: How does one account for the continuity of history and the certitude of memory, if time, in the guise of an indivisible “now,” cuts off any extension of the present? The thinkers and artists the essays address include Augustine, Abelard, Eriugena and Thoreau, Calvin, Shakespeare, De Rance, Stravinsky and Messiaen, Rubens and Woolf.

Babette Hellemans earned her PhD at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and Utrecht University. She is currently Assistant Professor in History at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Hellemans has published on historiographical and intellectual themes such as the anthropology of eschatology in Western medieval culture, including modern theories of temporality, semantics, and images. She is the author of La Bible Moralisée: une oeuvre à part entière. Temporalité, sémiotique et création au XIIIe siècle (Brepols 2010). At present she is completing a monograph, Peter Abelard (1079–1142) and the Varieties of the Self: An Intellectual Biography.