Past and Present in Hope Emily Allen\u27s Essay Relics

This article sheds light on the American medievalist Hope Emily Allen, specifically the period when she was writing the essay Relics. Allen Hope Allen probably began work on the essay after she returned to Oneida from Britain in 1912. In the subsequent period, familial obligations, health, and the advent of the First WorId War kept her away from the European libraries on which her work depended, and she turned to material already in hand, or to essays based upon her Oneida home. It was in this period too that, as an antiquary bred in the bone , she began to record stories current among the Oneida Indians, some of whom she had known well since childhood. Of the essays she took up during this period, Relics was her most important effort, combining as it did both her interest in her home and in the past. She lavished upon it all that memory, imagination, and learning could provide, and the resulting essay was as much a personal and philosophical statement as a description of the past history and present memories of upstate New York