The title of Gustavs Strenga’s Remembering the Dead: Collective Memory and Commemoration in Late Medieval Livonia summarizes its central aim to “bring together the two [phenomena] of medieval commemoration and collective memory using the tools and theoretical concepts developed by those who have researched memory in different time periods and cultures” (18). The author positions his study of medieval culture(s) of memoria within the theoretical frameworks of collective and cultural memory (Maurice Halbwachs, Jan Assmann, Pierre Nora, Otto Gerhard Oexle, among others). He argues that the convention of focusing on commemoration of the dead as a principally spiritual or liturgical phenomenon in Livonia’s historiography diminishes its power as a social practice, especially in the creation and reinforcement of group identities. The book touches on how this memorial culturetook shape in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but focuses on tracing its contours in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, largely because this is what Livonia’s scant documentary record allows.
While Strenga demonstrates a strong command of the theoretical literature that frames the book, however, he seems to overestimate how much convincing his medievalist audience will really need that outwardly spiritual commemorative practices were, in fact, invested with significant social and political capital. This misjudgment is a central weakness of Remembering the Dead. The book sacrifices its most fascinating details and compelling insights to a vague and uncontroversial argument. Behind this overarching argument, however, Strenga assembles tantalizing vignettes of late medieval Livonia’s urban, religious, and political culture that will interest both Baltic specialists and those further afield. (For those in the latter group: medieval “Livonia” approximately corresponds to modern-day Latvia and Estonia. Starting in the late twelfth century, missions and conquests subjected the region to Christian lords whose conflicts with one another made for a distinctively stormy political climate. Its towns, especially Riga and Reval, became key gateways for the exchange of goods between Russia and Western Europe via Hanseatic merchant networks.)
Strenga organizes the book as “a series of case studies, which illustrate specific phenomena of memory and commemoration within Livonian social groups and institutions” (19). An introduction lays out the book’s theoretical underpinnings in memory studies and provides a valuable primer on Livonia’s history from about 1200 on. Each of the subsequent seven chapters examines the region’s culture of memoria from a different perspective. The first two chapters focus on the two major ecclesiastical powers that vied with each other for political hegemony: the church of Riga (led by perennially feisty archbishops) and the Teutonic Order. Chapter One (“Remembering Origins”) establishes the significance that both powers attributed to legitimizing their origins in the region through the commemoration of founding members. The church, on the one hand, devoted special attention to the memory of Livonia’s first three bishops, including their burial in the chancel of Riga Cathedral. The Teutonic Order’s commemorative culture, on the other hand, centered around the naming of leaders and brothers who had died in battle fighting against the indigenous pagan population. Strenga draws on the Order’s necrologies and chronicles to show how historiography and liturgy entwined. Chapter Two (“Commemoration of a Group and Its Leaders”) continues along much the same lines, illustrating how memorial practices reflected the relations between various political and social groups, with special attention to the church and Teutonic Order’s respective efforts to project continuity in their successions of leaders. Perhaps most importantly, both institutions instrumentalized memorial practices to regularly renew their bonds with the citizens over whose towns they wished to assert dominance. Chapter Three (“Networks of Memory--Livonia and Beyond”) builds on this theme by presenting a number of case studies that each illustrate how memorial practices could bond together groups that might otherwise have little or nothing in common. This chapter’s density of detail tends to overwhelm its finer analytical points, but some examples do shine through. Strenga highlights the unusual confraternal link that formed between Riga’s Beer Carters guild (a group that assumes special importance later on in the book) and the nuns of a Cistercian convent in the late fifteenth century. Although the chapter does not explicitly frame it as such, links like this demonstrate how memorial acts oiled the intricately arranged assortment of gears that drove civic life.
Chapter Four (“Conflict and Memory”) returns to a primary theme of the first two chapters: namely, the ways that Riga’s archbishops and the Teutonic Order strategically wielded memorial culture as a weapon in a centuries-long political conflict that often broke out in violence. This chapter stood out as the book’s most cohesive, featuring some of its finest analytical work. On the basis of just a handful of interlineal notations of a liturgical manuscript (the “Riga Missal”), Strenga adroitly illustrates how Riga’s archbishops constructed a memorial culture that both haloed their predecessors with martyrs’ crowns and villainized their Teutonic rivals. The repetitive, ritualized, and public nature of liturgical commemorationworked to engrain a narrative that memorialized the injustices suffered by the church’s leaders at the hands of the Order, especially as political prisoners. Furthermore, Strenga demonstrates the capacity of memoria to carry out such conflict over the long term. Even as the Teutonic Order asserted its lordship in Riga, it struggled to have just one of its leaders entombed in the cathedral’s chancel, established in Chapter One as the epicenter of archiepiscopal memory.
Chapters Five and Six shift away from Livonia’s ecclesiastical lords to the merchants and artisans of Riga and Reval. While Chapter Five (“Memoria and Urban Elites”) focuses on the merchant elite and Chapter Six (“Memoria and the Non-Elites”) moves down the social ladder, in reality the chapters tread largely the same ground as studies of interrelated guild groups. Strenga explains the guild structures of Livonia’s towns as professional and social associations that shared some commonalities with those of other Hanseatic trade hubs, but had their own peculiarities. He draws special attention to the social disparities resulting from Livonia’s colonial legacy: the category of “non-elite” blurred with that of “non-German” by the fifteenth century. But this is a book about memoria, and each chapter explores the maze of different groups’ commemorative practices and the interconnections they fostered. For example, Chapter Six devotes considerable attention to two transport worker’s guilds, the Porters and the Beer Carters. Strenga notes the importance of transport labor in a merchant town, but explains that despite their names, it was the guilds’ occupational and social inclusivity that made them such prominent civic groups. The Beer Carters in particular encompassed a wide array of both male and female laborers. (It is symptomatic of the book’s structural frustrations that this crucial information would have been helpful to appreciate the Beer Carters’ connection to the elite Cistercian nuns described in Chapter Three.)
Strenga’s argument in these two chapters concerns the role of memorial practices in constructing and reaffirming group identities, but their real value lies in the rich texture they give to Livonia’s urban culture. It is easy to get lost in the details here, and I found Strenga’s use of material culture effective in bringing tangible cohesion to certain segments--an altarpiece commissioned to solidify the group identity of the “Black Heads,” an especially transient association of young, unmarried merchants; the silver chalice donated by a member of the same brotherhood to the organization in exchange for eternal commemoration; the humbler dishes and cloths donated by non-elites to their guilds for use in communal meals (the aptly named drunke). I found myself thinking of ways I would like to draw from this colorful material to teach undergraduates about the role of guilds and confraternities in the civic and spiritual life of late medieval cities--especially, as we seek to teach more “globally,” in comparison with Riga and Reval’s more familiar Mediterranean cousins. It is also worth mentioning that while some other chapters lean heavily on existing scholarship, Strenga’s skill in working with archival material shines through here. The seventh and final chapter (“Reformation and Memoria”) essentially documents how much of this culture quickly fell away. Although Strenga asserts that “the Reformation was not the end of memoria” (252), the chapter left me with an unshakeable impression of loss. In one sense, this was material. The Black Heads, for example, whose altarpiece depicted their serene devotion in Chapter Five, emerged as especially active altar-smashing iconoclasts. In another sense, it was social. As the excision of liturgical rituals frayed the bonds between groups, the distance between elites and non-elites grew measurably.
At its most compelling, Remembering the Dead explores the ways that commemorative practices formed strong bonds between groups even as they reinforced individual groups’ identities, often in opposition to one another. The book’s strengths lie in the exposition of this theme through evidence extracted from late medieval Livonia’s archival and material remains. Strenga demonstrates a clear command of this material, including a prodigious bibliography in German, English, Latvian, and Polish. But the book itself sits awkwardly within an analytical framework intent on forcing its contents into a rather dull theoretical argument about collective memory that feels disconnected from its livelier material. The fragmentation of a structure organized around case studies (sometimes isolated, sometimes not) furthers the difficulty of accessing and engaging with the world that Strenga invites us into. As a result, this book does not ultimately cohere into a memorable whole, even if the fascinating bits of social and cultural history that it samples are well worth exploring.