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This book considers a range of antiquarian practices – history-writing, archaeological investigations, works of art, architecture and literature – that emerged in early modern Europe. Challenging the idea of a single 'Renaissance', it assembles essays on local antiquities in Spain, Portugal, France, Britain, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland.

Introduction – Kathleen Christian and Bianca de Divitiis
1 A local Renaissance: Florentine Quattrocento palaces and <i>all’antica</i> styles – Richard Schofield
2 The arch of Trajan in Ancona and civic identity in the Italian Quattrocento from Ciriaco d’Ancona to the death of Matthias Corvinus – Francesco Benelli
3 <i>Roma caput mundi</i>: Rome’s local antiquities as symbol and source – Kathleen Christian
4 A local sense of the past: spolia, re-use and <i>all’antica</i> building in southern Italy, 1400–1600 – Bianca de Divitiis
5 The Gaulish past of Milan and the French invasion of Italy – Oren Margolis
6 Reusing and redisplaying antiquities in early modern France – William Stenhouse
7 Local antiquities in Spain: from Tarragona to Córdoba – Fernando Marías
8 Local antiquaries and the expansive sense of the past: a case study from Counter-Reformation Spain – Katrina B. Olds
9 Luís de Camões’s <i>The Lusiads</i> and the paradoxes of expansion – João R. Figueiredo
10 Semini and his progeny: the construction of Antwerp’s antique past – Edward Wouk
11 Resurrecting Belgica romana: Peter Ernst von Mansfeld’s garden of antiquities in Clausen, Luxemburg, 1563–90 – Krista De Jonge
12 On Romans, Batavians and giants: the quest for the true origin of architecture in the Dutch Republic – Konrad Ottenheym
13 The role of ancient remains in the Sarmatian culture of early modern Poland – Barbara Arciszewska
14 Inventing England: English identity and the Scottish ‘other’, 1586–1625 – Jenna M. Schultz
Index

Kathleen Christian is Senior Lecturer in Art History at The Open University
Bianca de Divitiis is Associate Professor in the History of Modern Art at the University of Naples Federico II

This book brings together essays on the array of local antiquarian practices that developed across Europe in the early modern era. Adopting an interdisciplinary and comparative method, it investigates how individuals, communities and regions invented their own ancient pasts according to concerns they faced in the present.

Throughout the period, a wide range of 'antiquities' – real or fictive, Roman or pre-Roman, misidentified or deliberately forged – emerged in archaeological investigations, new works of art and architecture, collections, history-writing and literature. Taking a novel approach to the revival of the antique, contributions to the volume examine how ruins, inscriptions and literary works were used to provide evidence of a particular idea of local origins, rewrite history or vaunt civic pride. Topics of investigation include municipal antiquities collections in southern Italy and southern France, the antiquarian response to the pagan, Christian and Islamic past on the Iberian Peninsula, and Netherlandish interest in megalithic ruins thought to be traces of a prehistoric race of giants.

This book is the first to explore local concepts of antiquity across Europe in a period that has been defined as a uniform 'Renaissance'. It will be of interest to students and scholars of early modern art history, architectural history, literary studies and history, as well as classics and the reception of antiquity.