The battlefield war memorial

Commemoration and the battlefield site from the Middle Ages to the modern era

Bibliographic Data

ID12914565
AuthorsIan Atherton (0000-0001-8908-1123, Keele University, corresponding author), Philip Morgan (Keele University)
Year2011
Volume4
Issue3
Pages289-304
Publication date2011-12-08
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of War and Culture Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1752-6272 • E-ISSN: 1752-6280
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1386/jwcs.4.3.289_1
OpenAlexW1984792779
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited18

A battlefield memorial is designed to preserve a memory of the act of conquest or, in the rare cases of memorials erected by the defeated, a memory of resistance, as well as the more straightforward commemoration of the dead. Where the memory of the landscapes of war persists there must be a commitment to preservation and a continuing, if not necessarily continuous, ritual. Thus each battlefield is not only commemorated or forgotten by contemporaries; it also has an evolving life history. Medieval battlefields were often commemorated by the erection of chapels and other permanent memorials, but after the Reformation they were seen as accidental landscapes which remained unmarked and were gradually reabsorbed into the agrarian pattern. From the eighteenth century battlefields were rediscovered, first by antiquarians, who revived the practice of memorialization, and then by contemporaries who began again to preserve and memorialize the battlefields of the modern world

Accidental · Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Battlefield · CONQUEST · First world war · Gunpowder · Memorialization · Political science · Resistance (ecology · Classics · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Law · Religious Tourism and Spaces · Travel Writing and Literature

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