The Early Christian Monuments of Ravenna

Although Ravenna has not been a place of much political, social, or commercial importance since the mid-eighth century, the survival in whole or in part of a remarkable number of fifth- and sixth-century buildings, several with rich mosaic decoration, makes it one of the European cities most studied by specialists in Late Antiquity and the early middle ages. Its importance extends from the period when the last Roman emperors in the West made their capital there alongside what had been a Roman naval base, through the period when it was the principal city of the Ostrogothic king Theodoric, to the period when the Byzantine emperor Justinian’s conquests in Italy made it the centre of Byzantine power in the peninsula. The bibliography on Ravenna is enormous, and in English alone it ranges from the incisive and thought-provoking study Sacred Fortress by Otto von Simson (1948), to Deborah Deliyannis’ Ravenna in Late Antiquity (2009). Although it is unfortunate that the author of the book under review here, Mariëtte Verhoeven, does not seem to have been able to consult the latter work, her aims are different from those of Deliyannis. Whereas Deliyannis aimed at a picture of the results of up-to-date archaeological and historical research on Ravenna, Verhoeven’s aim is rather to explore ‘how Ravenna remembered its Early Christian past’ (p. 243), looking especially at the interactions between the monuments themselves and their modification over the centuries on the one hand, and at their treatment in historical writing produced in Ravenna from the time of Agnellus in the ninth century (and earlier) to the modern period on the other. Although the present reviewer has to declare a lack of sympathy for the range of types of memory which the author rehearses before embarking on her discussion proper (pp. 15–17), the approach she proposes is certainly an interesting one, of particular interest to those concerned with the middle ages, because it offers the possibility of understanding how the evidence we have has been shaped across the centuries, both physically and in terms of interpretation. The application of concepts such as ‘cultural memory’ to Ravenna evidently has considerable potential, as it does for a city like Aachen, the importance of which derives largely from the ‘memory’, elaborated and developed across the centuries, of its association with the emperor Charlemagne

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Byzantine architecture · Emperor · Fortress (chess · History of religions · Middle Ages · Period (music · Ravenna · Ancient Mediterranean Archaeology and History · Byzantine Studies and History · Classics · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · History