Inventing Heritage

Medieval monuments and memorials are never simply remnants of the past. Across the world, they are continually destroyed, restored, reinvented, and mobilized in the service of contemporary politics. Inventing Heritage stages a debate about medievalism and Byzantinism as global political phenomena, examining how cultural heritage becomes a site of conflict, political domination, and public memory.

The essays in this volume critically assess the management, mismanagement, and appropriation of heritage through case studies from the Balkans, Turkey, Spain, the United States, Peru, and Japan. Contributors explore how medieval monuments—old and new, material and narrative, real and (re)imagined—are mobilized to convey political meaning in modern contexts. The essays examine the destruction, protection, and reinvention of a range of cultural sites as well as the ways in which education, historiography, media, and storytelling shape competing claims to the past. Particular attention is given to the Balkans, where the destruction of monuments during the wars of the 1990s and ongoing struggles over cultural landscapes reveal how heritage becomes entangled with economic policies, anti-colonial and national discourses, and global heritage institutions.

Bringing together scholars from multiple disciplines and regions, Inventing Heritage offers a framework for understanding the politics of medieval heritage and the contested meanings of public space. It will appeal to specialists in medieval and Byzantine studies, as well as readers concerned with the global politics of heritage and memory.

In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are Natsuko Akagawa, Jovana Anđelković, Güldem Baykal Büyüksaraç, Roland Betancourt, Neven Budak, Koray Durak, Filip Ejdus, Helen Fortescue-Poole, Rachel Goshgarian, Višnja Kisić, Milena Methodieva, Luis Muro Ynoñán, Elena Paulino Montero, Ana Radaković, Milena Repajić, Marko Šuica, Hakan Tarhan, and Gustav Wollentz.

“Inventing Heritage is a powerful and incisive intervention into how medieval pasts are mobilized in the politics of the present. A motley group of scholars challenges Byzantine studies and medieval studies more broadly to confront their own colonial entanglements and epistemic biases, and to engage critically with reactionary uses of the Middle Ages across Europe and beyond. Timely, unapologetically political, and theoretically sophisticated, this volume demonstrates that decolonizing medieval and Byzantine studies is inseparable from confronting everyday monuments, museums, and media that keep the medieval alive in the service of exclusion—or, alternatively, of radical inclusivity.”—Diana Mishkova, author of Rival Byzantiums: Empire and Identity in Southeastern Europe

“This book is visually rich, challenging, thought-provoking, and militant, mostly in a good way.  It offers torn-from-the-headlines approaches to the timeless and timely approaches to the monumental.  A stimulating take on heritage as a lively medieval past that 'isn't even past.'”—Elena N. Boeck, author of The Bronze Horseman of Justinian in Constantinople: A Cross-Cultural Biography of a Mediterranean Monument

Alexandra Vukovich is Lecturer in Late Medieval History at King’s College London.

Milan Vukašinović is Researcher in Greek and Byzantine Studies at Uppsala University.

Art History & Architecture

           Medieval

           Art Theory & Criticism

History

           Medieval

Medieval and Early Modern Studies

           Medieval Art and Architecture

           Medieval History