One of Rosamond McKitterick's laudable contributions to medieval studies has been the attention she has focused on the importance of manuscript evidence as a fundamental and fruitful source for doing history. Another has been the imagination, creativity, and enthusiasm she has brought to that evidence, most famously in her provocative work on literacy. In this manifesto, McKitterick turns her interest to another topic that has received much attention in the last decade and a half, memory, and joined it to the larger issue of the writing and reading of history in Carolingian times. Here again we see McKitterick daring to get behind the critical editions by going to the manuscripts themselves and thus introducing us to the vibrancy of Carolingian historical culture too often cloaked by the published sources. It is her underlying contention that the particular Carolingian emphasis on chronology, as the means by which Christian, Frankish, Roman, and local histories were united and brought into a synthesis, contributed fundamentally to the development of a European identity.