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This article discusses the integration of the memory of the “ricardian” reforms into the social memory of the Benedictine communities in Lower Lotharingia and in North-Eastern France. Whereas writers close to the facts still express a qualified or even disinterested view of the reforms, the actuality of the fact of the reforms, beginning at the end of the XIth Century, had a profound influence on the way the historiography of the period represented the preceding “wave” of reforms. This development should be taken into consideration in any study of monastic life in the Central Middle Ages, if only to understand the impact of these writers on our knowledge of the concrete consequences of the reforms.