Besides discussing previous scholarship on gender and the rhetoric of slavery, the introduction provides a historical overview and historiography of the nineteenth-century international women’s movement, particularly illuminating interpersonal and cultural connections with organised antislavery. The introduction also outlines an understanding of the woman–slave analogy as part of the international women’s movement’s memory culture. It sets up a common-sense conceptual framework that guides the rest of the book, introducing the terms usable past and the (collective) memory work involved in creating it, as well as the umbrella term memories of antislavery, narratives which were circulated transnationally both during the campaign to end slavery and afterwards.

The final chapter considers the legacy of memories of antislavery in first-wave feminism. It looks at the impact of these memories on the rhetoric of ‘sisterhood’ and the role these memories played in what has come to be called ‘imperial feminism’. Finally, it reflects on how feminism affected the historical transmission of the cultural memory of slavery and abolitionism, which is still a potent model of reform today.

Uwe Walter explains how memoria in Rome was rooted in institutions vital to the res publica. Many of these were embedded in an oral context with highly suggestive settings – public speech, the theatre, festival performances, among others. Hence, they had only a limited capacity to store memories and preserve them over time. In similar fashion, buildings and monuments were subject to decay, and with their splendour their memorial force vanished. Historiography was of a different quality. Fabius Pictor attempted to create a unified memory of the res publica, distilled and synthesized from multiple individual and collective repositories of memory across a variety of media – and charged with the authority of the senatorial voice. Two concluding case studies illustrate how Walter envisions the relation between narrative synthesis and the production of meaning: one, the case of L. Marcius Septimus, lower commander during the Punic Wars; and the other the highly politicized episode of ten high-ranking prisoners released after the battle of Cannae by Hannibal on their word of honour that they would raise a ransom in Rome in exchange for their comrades. Each tradition integrated different elements of memory to generate a qualitatively new knowledge of past events.

Modes and purposes of the memorial practices of aristocratic families were formative to Roman readings of the past. The memoria of the gentes was imprinted deeply on the Republic’s history culture, but was subject to the challenges from other formats of remembering the past, historiography in particular. The pompa and laudatio funebris both heralded and magnified a family’s esteem through the display of imagines and the recollection of narratives of exemplary virtue. While these achievements were uncontested among the gens itself, in the public arena they might have been a bone of contention. The memoria of the gentes distorted that of the Republic as a whole, influencing the work of the first historians, the compilation of lists of magistrates and office-holders, and the outlook of public space. Historiography also distanced and indeed distinguished itself from the memoria of the elites. Discourses of decadence widened the gap between the two media. Meanwhile citizens outside Rome were more removed from the mechanisms of aristocratic remembering and could only access a history of Rome in written format. Elite memories ceased to wield their magnetic force, but they also lingered on in historiography.

“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.