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. This book 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.

<div>Canon law is an unavoidable theme for medieval historians. It intersects with every aspect of medieval life and society, and at one point or another, every medievalist works on the law. In this book, Kriston Rennie looks at the early medieval origins and development of canon law though a social history framework, with a view to making sense of a rich and complex legal system and culture, and an equally rich scholarly tradition.</div><div>It was in the early Middle Ages that the ancient traditions, norms, customs, and rationale of the Church were shaped into legislative procedure. The structures and rationale behind the law’s formulation – its fundamental purpose, reason for existence and proliferation, and methods of creation and collection – explain how the medieval Church and society was influenced and controlled. They also, as this short book argues, explain how it ultimately functioned.</div>