In a famous 1946 speech Winston Churchill suggested that the best way for Europe to cope with the bitter legacies of WWII was through a ‘blessed act of oblivion’. While in these memory-conscious days it is hard to imagine a politician in the West to council forgetting, until well into the nineteenth century it was quite common for civil wars to end with an agreement between warring sides to ‘forget’ about the past. But what did peacemakers mean by that? Did such a policy for amnesia ever work? Exploring the aims and practice of oblivion in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, this lecture examined under what conditions oblivion could function as a viable strategy for peacekeeping, and asked why, as a political solution, it was eventually superseded.