Emerging from a period of civil violence and political upheaval, the English in 1660 faced a critical question: what from the troubled past should be retained in memory and what ought to be consigned to oblivion? It is a question that many nations today with painful and tragic histories still struggle to answer. At the turn of the millennium, Canadian journalist Erna Paris travelled to seven of them – Germany, France, Japan, the USA, Chile, Argentina and South Africa – determined to understand how their citizens remembered or did not remember past conflicts, and the impact that remembering and forgetting had on the people who were excluded from official national narratives. She discovered that while the desire to shape what was remembered was universal, the number of ways it could be shaped was ‘surprisingly limited’. The responses ranged from outright lies and blanket denials, through to judicious myth-making, on to benign or deliberate neglect, and finally, to efforts to confront and possibly redeem past wrongs. Paris's conclusion was that the ‘long shadows’ cast by conflict in the past were best managed – never overcome – with remembrance, accountability and justice.

The legal, ethical, academic and popular struggles over remembering and forgetting the great catastrophes of the modern era have generated a large body of literature. Yet there are far fewer studies of how pre-modern polities addressed the problem of a difficult, if not traumatic, past.