Fellow, SCAS.
Researcher, Institute of Archaeological Sciences, Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main

Hybrid event.
Zoom Webinar: https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/65802739142 External link.

ABSTRACT:
This talk traces how medieval Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities in the Western Mediterranean engaged with the remains of classical antiquity. Taking Palermo as its point of departure, a city shaped by successive Punic, Roman, Byzantine, Islamic, and western Christian rule, I ask what it meant to encounter, reuse, and interpret ruins long before the modern category of heritage existed. By drawing on Arabic geographical writing, Latin pilgrimage guides, and Jewish travel accounts, alongside material evidence from cities such as Kairouan, Córdoba, Tunis/Carthage, as well as Rome itself, the talk argues that an antiquarian mode of thinking was already operating within all three traditions in the Middle Ages. Locating the origins of historical consciousness in Renaissance Europe thus fundamentally distorts the broader picture. Porphyry sarcophagi, reused columns, and other architectural remains—along with their various interlocutors (historians, travelers, and court figures) who mediated antiquity to their contemporaries—all emerge as evidence that the ancient past was never a passive inheritance but an actively constructed, contested, and politically charged resource across the medieval Mediterranean.