To shift existing scholarship in a given field does not simply mean that one interprets it anew, no matter how exciting the interpretation. Genuinely innovative work instead requires that we rethink the very ground on which that scholarship resides and reimagine the methods, sources, and theoretical ideas that have dominated past and current approaches. The work of Guy Beiner has accomplished these feats; it is not so much that he has come upon a new way of writing about history and memory, for he has acknowledged his debt to scholars such as Peter Burke, or the efflorescence of memory studies since the 1990s. But in making connections between so many different forerunners and theoretical approaches, he represents a model for writing carefully and thinking deeply about ways in which past events were remembered or forgotten. Such an approach also enriches the writing of Ireland's past especially, given that so much history writing in the field has tended to be theory-averse.

It was inevitable perhaps that the surge in memory studies would lead scholars to the subject of forgetting. Yet forgetting, as Beiner points out, is not the opposite of or separate from memory. Instead, and as Paul Ricoeur and Aleida Assmann have also pointed out, memory and forgetting can be embedded within each other, just as they exist on a spectrum in which misremembrance, private and under-the-radar memory, muted memory, or purposeful forgetting function dynamically and tension with each other as they respond to constantly shifting historical conditions. In Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster, Beiner explores all these facets of memory and forgetting by using as a case study the afterlife of the 1798 rebellion in Ulster, which constituted one theater in a larger republican and revolutionary uprising against British rule in Ireland. Utilizing an enormous range of sources, including antiquarian accounts, fiction, popular ballads, material culture, folklore, and oral history, Beiner seeks to understand how “social forgetting can be regenerated and transmitted over several generations,” as he traces forgetting (and memory) from before the event up through the twenty-first century (41).

A short review cannot do justice to the enormity of Beiner's undertaking, though a few insightful themes may be highlighted. In an early chapter, Beiner describes how memorializations of events as they unfolded in 1798 were fit to existing “narrative frames” or “understood and remembered in their time through references to memories of previous events” (48). The republican martyr William Orr, executed for rebellion in 1797, provided a kind of pre-memory on which the memorializations of 1798 would be built through newspapers, poems, and even handkerchiefs. Yet Orr's memory was also silenced or muted, given that the holding of seditious memorabilia around him came to be viewed as dangerous in the years that followed. The immediate aftermath of the 1798 violence also witnessed “attempts to encourage oblivion” (89) through a “willful forgetting” (90) or the enactment of a general pardon or imposed “post-conflict amnesia” (106) that sought to bury “bitter memories” (139). Many resisted these efforts to forget, however, or publicly forgot at the same time that they privately remembered. By the same token, they could literally attempt to retrieve memory from oblivion when they sought to locate or rebury the bodies of their relatives that were consigned to unmarked, obscure, or mass graves (163).

Forgetfulness also occurred when Catholics in the era of emancipation, for example, did not wish to invoke the “disquieting” memories of 1798 (170). Ordinary men and women, too, could be wary of sharing with strangers their reminiscences of local heroes, though some travel writers, antiquarians, and ordnance surveyors could occasionally break through this “reticence” to find a counter-memory beneath the officially imposed amnesia (211). Historians for their part could enact a kind of forgetting by presenting 1798 through a hostile partisan lens or airbrushing its more sectarian or uncomfortable aspects. Beiner explores all these facets of misremembrance or disremembrance while moving on in the next chapter to discuss the regeneration of the memory of 1798 in the context of the later nineteenth century's more muscular nationalism, even as disremembrance, for example, continued among Orangemen whose loyalism compelled them to downplay or forget 1798. Modernization in the form of industrialism and relocation could also result in social forgetting, just as novels tended to efface the violence of the year. In all cases, “the unsettling nature of social forgetting defied the characteristic homogenizing tendency of collective memory” (355).

Beiner's discussion of the contentions around the centenary celebrations is especially interesting, as “commemorating was to be met with decommemorating,” the latter coming in the form of the violent loyalist opposition in Ulster (357). Iconoclasm was part of this “decommemoration” even as it reinforced a continued memory in its very effacements, testifying to the power of the memorializing objects in the first place. Indeed, Orangemen sought to deliberately forget 1798, even as “they did not refrain from talking about it” (390). By the twentieth century, memory and forgetting followed “partitioned” lines in the north, as Ulster Protestants “lived in forgetful disavowal of the memories of Ninety-Eight” (468). This would change, however, at the end of the century and after the Good Friday Agreement, as Orangeism sought to engage with the rebellion and “the ambiguous legacy of the past” (571).

“Social forgetting,” Beiner concludes, “is often misdiagnosed as collective amnesia and it takes more rigorous research to uncover the traces of private remembrance behind the scenes” (617). Forgetful Remembrance is a masterly example of how to conduct such research and should be consulted by scholars across disciplines and beyond Ireland. Taking on what he calls a Borgesian approach—though he is really only working from Jorge Luis Borges's great short story “Funes the Memorious”—Beiner presents a book not about oblivion at all, but about the many silences and memorializing evasions in a world that, like the character Funes, is not able to forget. The past, in other words, still haunts—at least when it comes to events such as 1798. By contrast, in the passing of more ordinary times or lives lived obscurely, true oblivion is possible, as all the unfolding, quotidian moments of a day are plunged into the fathomless depths of the river Lethe. But no book, of course, could be written on that.