“Who Fears to Speak of ‘98?” So goes the opening line of the most popular poetic production commemorating the rebellion of the United Irishmen in 1798, which alludes to the reticence surrounding this republican rebellion in Ireland’s northern province of Ulster and provides the subject matter of Guy Beiner’s latest tour de force. Having previously explicated the folk history and memory of the 1798 rebellion in the west of Ireland (Remembering the Year of the French, 2007), Beiner’s recent researches have taken him north where efforts to forget the events of 1798 have produced an altered form of memory. In Ulster, memories of the rebellion have proven discomfiting with the interests of both nationalists and unionists at various points in time, providing fertile ground for the study of “social forgetting”—the process “whereby communities seemingly suppress public remembrance of historical episodes that do not correspond to present interests, and yet tenaciously find subtle ways to remember these discomfiting memories.”

Social forgetting appears to have resulted in an “ironic transformation of historical memory” whereby unionist Presbyterians obscure the central role played by Presbyterians in the rebellion and Catholic nationalists co-opt memories of the rebellion despite many of their ancestors having declared loyalty to the British monarchy. Rather than reduce such transformations of social memory to “collective amnesia,” Beiner implores historians to heed sources neglected by “official history” wherein supposed voids in memory often emerge as coded forms of remembrance. Due in part to the relatively high literacy rate in nineteenth-century Ulster, a rich vernacular historical record of the rebellion was preserved by interested locals and visitors to the area. Weaving together this diverse array of sources, which includes oral history, legend, song, popular print, and material culture, with the historian’s more conventional archival sources, Beiner produces a scintillating “vernacular historiography” of the 1798 rebellion. While closely resembling “folk history,” vernacular historiography is intended by the author to avoid the reification of an arbitrary divide between oral and literary sources as well as recognising that vernacular history is reconstructed through time to meet present needs.

In Forgetful Remembrance Beiner has produced a masterful “archaeology of social forgetting” spanning more than two centuries. Remembrance and forgetting are shown to predate the 1798 rebellion itself, as Beiner illuminates how historical events are remembered in accordance with familiar scripts or “prememory.” In the centuries following the rebellion, memories of 1798 have been subjected to public commemoration, de-commemoration, and re-commemoration, all of which are permeated by social forgetting. This study brings into question the very possibility of forgetting given that efforts to wilfully forget the 1798 rebellion have had the knock-on effect of producing forms of unofficial remembrance. In the concluding chapter, the author exemplifies the importance of vernacular historiography and considerations of social forgetting in dealing with the troublesome pasts of a host of societies.

Forgetful Remembrance was awarded the Wayland D. Hand Prize from the History and Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society, making Beiner the first person to receive this prestigious award twice. This is deserved recognition for a scholar who has brought the fields of folklore and history into closer alignment, combining in his research a respect for conventional folklore sources with an interest in how the past is evoked for present purposes. Readers will find, for instance, that the interdisciplinary movement of memory studies, of which Beiner is a pre-eminent exponent, touches on many of the cornerstones of our discipline, including genre, intertextuality, and tradition; and that concepts such as a social forgetting correspond with observations made by ethnographers of communication and performance scholars. In fact, I suggest that the author’s goal to uncover the mechanics of social forgetting would have benefited greatly from the insights of Erving Goffman—particularly his concepts of front and back stage—as well as Richard Bauman’s Story, Performance, and Event. Forgetful Remembrance is after all, in Bauman’s terms, a study of the relationship between narrated and narrative events over the course of two centuries.

Despite these absences, and perhaps partly owing to them, Forgetful Remembrance will be of considerable interest to folklorists in demonstrating our field’s potential contribution to the transdisciplinary movement of memory studies. Most pertinently, Beiner has provided a unique vantage point and insight into some of the longstanding preoccupations of our field, specifically, remembering and forgetting, change and continuity, tradition and creativity.

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[Review length: 719 words • Review posted on April 8, 2021]