This chapter uses insights from the field of cultural memory studies to argue for a greater recognition of (1) the role of mediation in the production of historical experience, (2) the ways in which the desire for “experience” may end up yielding a narrow view of the past, and (3) the role of creative writers and aesthetic experience in providing a critical reframing of such reified pasts. This argument is illustrated by an analysis of the reiterated mediations of the Battle of Waterloo and how these are critically reimagined by W.G. Sebald in his work Rings of Saturn (1995).