“The Book of Isaiah and the Neo-Babylonian Period” by Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer investigates the “black hole” in the book that is the Babylonian Exile from three perspectives. First, it analyzes how the Book of Isaiah conceptualizes Babylon. It demonstrates how the Isaianic authors sought to underscore Babylon’s weakness and transitory existence, and aimed to assert that its demise was the result of Yhwh’s supremacy over Babylon’s own deities. Second, it challenges the dating of those texts in Isaiah that are traditionally assigned to the Neo-Babylonian period. References to Babylonian customs and religious traditions, polemic against Babylon, and support of Cyrus should not be used without reflection as dating criteria. Third, it argues that the material in Isa 40–55, traditionally assumed to have been written in Babylon because of its familiarity with Babylonian matters, rather reflects the kind of general knowledge that the people living in the shadow of the Neo-Babylonian Empire would be expected to have.

This chapter uses medieval chronicles and annals to explore how river disasters were understood and remembered, and how people chose to tell stories about rivers. A focus on floods brings up issues of risk and resilience, and how floods were interpreted by medieval people. The chapter also focuses on how rivers are connected to other memorable and historic events and why they were such powerful stories. The chapter then turns to the ways that rivers were incorporated into monastic memory and to stories of foundation, and how holy sites were seen as revealed by God and the saints. The chapter ends with a case study focused on St. Sturm and the monastery of Fulda, with a focus on the role of rivers in the house’s history.

This chapter examines Donal Ryan’s From A Low and Quiet Sea (2018), Melatu Uche Okorie’s This Hostel Life (2018), and Correspondences (2019). These three publications offer insight into the directions being taken by contemporary Irish literature to address the absence of Black and minority ethnic peoples from Irish literature. Despite an ongoing boom in Irish publishing that has seen the global success of many authors, Irish literature continues to demonstrate a preoccupation with notions of Irishness rooted in the Irish literary Revival of the turn of the twentieth century. This essay questions the continuing whiteness of Irish literature through an examination of two recent exceptions in Irish publishing, which, in their inclusion of people of color, challenge comfortable notions of what Irish literature comprises. These texts force readers to confront issues of silencing and traumatic cultural absence for people of color in Ireland, raising important questions about a contemporary Ireland that is often congratulated for its liberal-mindedness.

Introduction to Spartan society and commemoration. A discussion of terms, methods, and themes. An introduction to memory studies. A look at the topography of ancient Sparta.

As popular print ephemera, comics hold a complex and precarious relationship to preservation and duration, which has marked their status as “archivable” (or “non-archivable”) materials. This chapter sketches some of the different ways that institutions, producers, and audiences have coped with this fragility and have defined practices of preservation and collection. The chapter subsequently analyzes comics in libraries and archives, collecting practices by readers and fans, uses of archives in comics production. At each step, it pays particular attention to the importance of materiality, senses, formats, manipulation in the preservation of comics, connecting them to matters of copyright, library policies, and commercial interests. The importance of these parameters is set out against changing notions of archives and archival practice, especially under the impulse of their digital transformation. The broader picture considers the importance of medium specificity in an age of online archival plenitude.

Drawing on sources such as jestbooks, compilations of apophthegms, and treatises of wit, this chapter explores the interaction between memory and the affect of pleasure in the context of the early modern culture of jesting. The genre of the Renaissance jestbook, which owes its emergence to the humanist appetite for jokes, taps into the cultural memory of classical wit and medieval exempla as well as the collective memory of pre-Reformation festive culture. In England jestbooks proliferated as commodities on the print marketplace and were avidly consumed by social aspirants, keen to acquire wit and urbanity. Jestbooks were frequently marketed as vehicles of nostalgia for a "Merry England," a fabricated age of universal amity and concord. The jests themselves, however, often harness the legacy of agonistic wit to celebrate a form of civility in which conflict is transmuted into a contest of wit, evoking the shared pleasure of competitive play.

A cornerstone text of England’s Reformation, John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments is deeply concerned with constructs of cultural memory and the use of that memory to steel the resolve of English Protestants to continue the hard work of reforming the church. First published in 1563 and borrowing from hagiographical traditions, Acts and Monuments attempts to legitimize the English Reformation by placing it in the continuum of early Christian persecutions and martyrdoms, and by further vilifying Catholics at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign following the Marian counter-Reformation. This chapter situates Foxe’s work in the context of cultural memorialization and traumatic historiography – that is, the construction and reiteration of cultural trauma through historic documentation/commemoration.

At the beginning of the second book of Cicero’s De re publica (54–51 BC) we find a remarkable passage: Scipio Aemilianus, one of the dialogue’s interlocutors, cites Cato the Elder’s statement on the superiority of the res publica. Cato attributes the success of the Roman Republic to its gradual evolution thanks to the combined wisdom of many Romans through many generations. Cato rates the Roman constitution much more highly than the ones of Crete, Sparta and Athens because the laws and institutions of these Greek polities have been crafted by only a few, albeit ingenious, persons.

Cultural memory theory is a framework which elucidates the relationship between the past and the present. At its most basic level, it explains why, how, and with what results certain pieces of information are remembered. Despite its origins in historiographical scholarship, however, in recent years cultural memory has been applied with increasing frequency to the study of the Classics, most notably in Gowing’s (2005) and Gallia’s (2012) exploration of memory under the Principate as well as the edited volumes by Galinsky (2014), (2016a), and (2016b). As the organisers of the ‘Roman Cultural Memory’ project, we are glad to count ourselves part of this emerging wave. We held three conferences to promote intersections between memory theory and Classics research, the first in November 2016 at King’s College London, the second in June 2017 at the Université Paris-Est Créteil, and the third in March 2018 at the University of São Paulo.

In 211 BC, the Romans were embroiled in a multi-front war with the great Carthaginian general Hannibal, and despite surviving the disastrous battles of the early years of the war, the Romans continued to face significant setbacks. In the Iberian Peninsula that year, the last-minute defection of Rome’s Celtiberian allies led to the deaths in battle of Publius and Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio, along with many of their soldiers. This was a disastrous blow to Rome’s war with Carthage, since the campaign in Iberia had been the only successful front in recent years.1 It is perhaps surprising, then, that the Romans minted a coin in Iberia that year that was stamped with symbols of Roman victory (Figure 19.1). The coin shows the Roman god Jupiter on the obverse (front) wearing a laurel wreath on his head, and the goddess Victory standing before a Roman trophy on the reverse (back).

Sulla’s dictatorship transformed Rome politically, socially, and physically.1 The changes which he imposed created winners as well as losers; but collectively the experience of his rule was traumatic, combining unprecedented violence directed at individuals with continuing uncertainty around fundamental citizen rights.2 The trauma persisted, in the transformation in the operation of the res publica, the Roman state, which was regularly repeated through the annual political cycle; in the reshaping of the fabric of the city, including Sulla’s self-memorialisation and the elimination of memorials to his chief rival Marius; and in the ongoing marginalisation of the descendants of his victims, not simply deprived of their property which had been transferred to new owners but also deprived of their citizen rights.

When Horace first published the Odes in 23 BCE, in an edition comprising the eighty-eight poems of books 1–3, Ode 3.30 stood as a self-reflexive epilogue in which the poet surveyed his work and announced the achievement of his own goals. Its clear and confident claims to poetic immortality resonate pointedly in form and tone with Horace’s earlier statements. The first two lines of the poem are particularly forceful, and feature one of the collection’s more memorable images and more durable phrases.

In 36 BC, after the battle of Naulochus, Octavian decided to dedicate a temple to Apollo in memory of his victory over Sextus Pompeius and to have it built on the Palatine, on the spot where lightning had struck, which was taken to be a sign.1 The temple, however, would not be erected until 28 BC, after the battle of Actium, and would both commemorate Naulochus and Actium. Apollo was effectively linked to the battle of Actium: after his victory, Octavian restored the temple of Apollo at the entrance of the Ambracian Gulf; he also consecrated a sanctuary to Apollo on the site of his camp at Actium.

Unlike Cicero the orator, philosopher, and celebrated opponent of tyrants, Cicero the poet died a relatively speedy death and left an uncontested legacy. Cicero’s poetic activity earned little mention after his death, and, except for a more holistic assessment from Plutarch, was typically discussed only to be mocked or wished away.1 Regardless of its literary value, I suggest that Cicero understood his poetry as a means to influence and codify memory, and that discussions of his poetry led him to intuit concepts relevant to modern memory studies. To demonstrate this, I turn to Cicero’s De Legibus, a fragmentary dialogue from the late 50s BCE.2 Although the work’s central concerns are legal and political philosophy, it opens with a discussion of a scene from Cicero’s Marius, alongside consideration of Cicero’s potential to write history. Because of this, scholarly treatments that eschew philosophical and legal approaches often examine questions of genre and historical writing.3