Classical Heritage and European Identities

Classical Heritage and European Identities examines how the heritages of classical antiquity have been used to construct European identities, and especially the concept of citizenship, in Denmark from the eighteenth century to the present day. It implements a critical historiographical perspective in line with recent work on the “reception” of classical antiquity that has stressed the dialectic relationship between past, present and future.

Arguing that the continuous employment and appropriation of lassical heritages in the Danish context constitutes an interesting case of an imagined geography that is simultaneously based on both national and European identities, the book shows how Denmark’s imagined geography is naturalized through very distinctive uses of classical heritages within the educational and heritage sectors.

Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Author Biography

Lærke Maria Andersen Funder is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of History and Classical Studies, Aarhus University. Her research concentrates on the reception of antiquity, material culture and collections.

Troels Myrup Kristensen is Associate Professor of Classical Archaeology at Aarhus University and leads CoHERE’s WP5. He works on ancient pilgrimage, visual culture and cultural heritage.

Vinnie Nørskov is Associate Professor of Classical Archaeology and Director of the Museum of Ancient Art and Archaeology at Aarhus University. Her research focuses on the uses of the classical past, the reception of classical antiquity, and the history of classical scholarship.