Conference Report: Cultural Memory of the Resources of the Past, 400-1000 AD

Conference Report:Cultural Memory of the Resources of the Past, 400-1000 AD. 21-22  February 2013. Rome, The British School at Rome This conference at the British School at Rome represents the culmination of a three-year HERA project by the Universities of Cambridge, Leeds, Utrecht and Vienna 2010-2013, generously funded by the ESF. The project has explored the eclectic uses of the resources of the past in the post-Roman successor states of western Europe in the early middle ages. It had two principal aims: 1. to determine the role played by the resources of the past in forming the identities of the communities of early medieval western Europe; 2. to identify the process by which the new discourses, ethnic identities and social models of early medieval Europe have come to form an essential part of modern European national and transnational identities. Our work has increasingly exposed the importance of Rome, Roman history, and the integration of Christian and imperial Rome into the cultural memory of early medieval Europe. The e xtant manuscript material from the early Middle Ages has constituted a major resource to shed new light on the process of codification and modification of the cultural heritage, and for the study of cultural dynamics in general. Speakers included Mayke de Jong (Utrecht), Clemens Gantner (Vienna), Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge), Sven Meeder (Nijmegen), Walter Pohl (Vienna) and Ian Wood (Leeds). http://cmrp.oeaw.ac.at/events.htm http://cmrp.oeaw.ac.at/PDF/programm_cmrp_rom_web.pdf