In the Ab Urbe Condita, Livy reports that in 363 BC a dictator was appointed to revive the ancient ritual of the Capitoline nail in the midst of a plague (Livy 7.3.1–9). While recounting this historic episode, Livy provides a detailed description of an inscribed law marking this ritual that was located in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline.

The Introduction situates the book within the theoretical parameters of Cultural Memory Studies, Print Culture Studies and British Studies. It provides a short history of Memory Studies, focusing on Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) as well as Aleida Assmann’s, Astrid Erll’s and Ann Rigney’s focus on media and memory. It surveys the complex media ecology of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, arguing that the role that printed texts played in articulating sites of memory changed between 1688 and 1745 as the meaning of print itself changed in relation to oral and manuscript cultures. It compares the media environments of the beginning and end of this period by focusing on the creation and circulation of two documents – the Declaration of William of Orange (1688) and the Particulars of the Victory regarding the Battle of Culloden (1746). The Introduction concludes by suggesting that Michael Rothberg’s concept of noeuds de mémoire (knots of memory) provides a useful model for examining printed works of British national memory in the mid-eighteenth century.

The chapter seeks to problematize what it means to ‘map’ literature in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries through the example of Romantic poet John Clare. The first half of the chapter rereads Clare through one critical and two creative interpretations of his sense of place and space, by John Barrell, Franco Moretti, and Iain Sinclair. Reading Clare in, and through, others generates a multilayered response that highlights the range of spatial forms of interpretation embraced by literary studies whilst also critically interpreting both maps and texts used in those arguments. The second half of the chapter offers a fresh reading-as-mapping of Clare by prioritizing time over space, drawing upon a concept articulated by French historian Pierre Nora, that of lieux de mémoire (sites/realms of memory). Nora’s model of the loss of shared, lived history and its memorialization in fixed sites is applied to Clare to enable a move from a focus on the predominantly spatial to the spatio-temporal. Does the concept of lieux de mémoire only work at a macro level, or can be localized in an individual? This section seeks to come at place through the memory that it embodies.

This introduction discusses the benefits of a mobile approach to the history of sites, archaeology, and heritage formation in colonial and post-colonial Indonesia. Starting at Hindu–Buddhist, Chinese, Islamic, colonial, and prehistoric sites of heritage in Indonesia, the monograph will focus on people’s encounters and knowledge exchange taking place there, across colonial and post-colonial regimes. It follows site-related objects travelling, like the famous Buddhist statues from Borobudur temple, gifted to King Chulalongkorn of Siam, to gauge how and why these objects have transformed in meaning and play a role in parallel processes of heritage formation inside and outside Indonesia. With this site-centred and mobile approach, we can explain the relationships between heritage formation and religion, violence, and regime change over time, and show the concerns of local subjects and elites, of scholars, pilgrims, and tourists, entering colonial and post-colonial Indonesia and moving out of state-centred archaeology and transnational cultural associations, and of global (UNESCO) politics.