The Destruction and Recovery of Monte Cassino, 529-1964

1. This book questions and challenges the commemorative and institutional narratives that define Monte Cassino, an abbey with important medieval origins and contemporary religious significance. It does so by harmonising the medieval, early modern, and modern sources in order to understand the abbey's experience with destruction and recovery, and its overall impact on shaping heritage and tradition. 2. Examining the abbey's unique 'destruction tradition' over fourteen centuries, this book promises a fresh perspective on Monte Cassino's long history, as well as a compelling new understanding of how historical writing is used in structuring human societies, knowledge, religious values, and identity. 3. This is also a book that challenges Monte Cassino's identity-construction. It examines historical and historiographical discourses for interpreting the abbey's invented tradition, explaining the process by which the past emerges and becomes visible. Between the sixth and twentieth centuries, the Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino (est. 529) experienced a cycle of atrocities which forever transformed its identity. This book examines how such a tumultuous history has been constructed, remembered, and represented from the Middle Ages to the present day. It uses this singular and pivotal case to analyse the historical process of remembering and its impact on modern representations of the past. Exactly how Monte Cassino is remembered is distinctive and diagnostic. The abbey is recognizable today as a beacon of western civilization, culture, and learning precisely because of its 'destruction tradition' over fourteen centuries. The Destruction and Recovery of Monte Cassino, 529.1964 asks how the abbey's fragmented past has been ideologically, politically, and culturally constituted and preserved; how its experience with destruction and suffering . and recovery and rebirth . has become incorporated into a modern narrative of progress and triumph.