Curating the past: the retrieval of historical memories and utopian ideals

Utopia is a landscape of the imagination. In this introduction to the volume, Neil gives an overview of the roles played by the reshaping of texts, physical landscapes, and built environments from 300 to 750 CE in altering people’s memory of their common pasts. Neil looks at different definitions of utopia and reviews recent scholarship on memory studies. In framing the chapters to come, she introduces various methods of approach to memory studies dealing with late-antique sources. These range from North Africa, Italy, Spain, and Gaul in the West, to Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece, Palestine, and Syria in the East. Neil argues that we can find similar ideologically motivated discourses of destruction and reconstruction of the past right across the Later Roman Empire, from the initial contact of Graeco-Roman communities with Christians up to the Arab-Byzantine wars of the seventh and eighth centuries.