IN RECENT YEARS, several studies have highlighted the way in which the past has been used down the centuries to construct identities, give cohesion to social groups, and ideologically sustain particular political or cultural stances. These issues have been of equal interest to historians, psychologists, philosophers, and sociologists eager to find the keys that could explain such use of past events (as well as so many other uses of the past) and reveal the complex mechanisms by which we remember (or are forced to remember) certain circumstances while casting others aside. In this way, memory presents itself as a vital cultural structure in human development with both individual and communal aspects, and one that is able to articulate a relationship with that past but also with the present and the future. For the Middle Ages, Carmen Marimón has pointed out:

I am especially interested in the last part of this statement as memory had a dynamic nature and served to create and uphold a new ideological concept, presenting it as a resurgence of the past, or making the past its place of origin. This function is only known to us, of course, to the extent that documents of that “artificial memory of what hap-pened” have survived. In fact, rather than what happened and what was remembered, the most interesting phenomenon in this case is to analyze how those memories were manipulated in order to sustain a totally novel frame of thinking. That manipulation (regarding, again, medieval times) can best be explored in writing and iconography; oral traditions existed, but many of them were lost as they were never transferred to documents. Alfonso the Wise clearly noticed this, saying that “it is writing which adduces all rights of remembrance.” Even so, despite being fixed in writing or iconography, some supposedly arbitrary evocation of the past that is imposed will not necessarily remain unchanged but, rather, it can be subjected to new additions and transformations over time. In other words, it is a memory transformed by a new memory of the events.