![]() ![]() ![]() Such issues are particularly pertinent with regard to a scholar whose sense of the early medieval past is rooted in the array of memories of places and the lived experience of places. 2 A range of work on Anglo-Saxon landscapes, addressing the context of place-names, settlement, and perception has proved particularly fruitful in the last decade or so. 1 The development of the spatial turn has proved a particularly rich field in the study of Anglo-Saxon history and culture: Nicholas Howe showed the ways in which the experiences of place-those of the modern scholar and the medieval sense of place-can collide in a visit to a location, often in a way that forces us to consider how we approach the past. This has been demonstrated in neuroscientific terms over the last four decades by the identification of the role of ‘place cells’ within the hippocampus of the brain linked to the subjective ‘sense of place’, in part linked to the creation of personal memory, while the significance of Lieux de mémoire in French historiography provides an endorsement of what many of us already feel. Those memories which shape us, as so many studies have shown, are shaped by place, and the places themselves are shaped by memory. ![]() That statement may be a truism, but there are few places better than a Festschrift where one can get away with starting a paper in such a manner. We are shaped by our memories and by others’ memories of us. ![]()
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