Raymond Van Dam's most recent book is one of the best among the flurry of publications on Constantine that have appeared in the past decade or so, all timed for the 1700th anniversary of Constantine's reign. Along with his previous offering, The Roman Revolution of Constantine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), Van Dam has offered a new benchmark in the study of Constantine and the “Constantinian Revolution.”

The book is divided into ten chapters. The first and eighth chapters (“Forward: Visions of Constantine” and “Backward and Forward,” respectively) establish the theoretical parameters of Van Dam's study. The principal theoretical insights that inform Van Dam's book come from the constellation of theoretical work often termed “memory studies.” Van Dam takes the event of the Battle at the Milvian Bridge as a “focal point” (15), a mnemonic center of gravity around which variable memories and representations have been constructed at varying historical moments. Van Dam adroitly avoids positioning this approach as diametrically opposed to positivist historiography. Indeed, as Van Dam demonstrates in his forward and conclusion (two chapters that would make excellent introductory readings for seminars in theory and method) the matter of history is memory, as is our own historical writing.

Each subsequent chapter focuses on a specific historical mnemonic of the battle and the events surrounding it. Rather than writing history forward, Van Dam begins in the Western and Byzantine middle ages and concludes with chapters addressing memories surrounding Constantine's predecessor and rival, Maxentius, and, finally the Milvian Bridge itself as a center of mnemonic gravity. As Van Dam makes clear in chapter 8 (“Backward and Forward”), the book's trajectory self-consciously reverses the expected vectors of historical writing. Van Dam draws a useful analogy between archaeological excavation and historical research. Rather than digging back through the archive to write an account that would reconstruct the Battle (and simultaneously occlude the representations and memories that have been “brushed away” in the reconstruction), Van Dam's “reverse narrative” aims to “excavate and disperse,” thereby troubling received historical narratives and our own writing of history. Van Dam's discussion of the theoretical and practical stakes of historical writing (219–223) is extremely clear and accessible; it would make excellent reading for undergraduates and graduate students needing a concise a readable introduction to these issues.

Chapter 3 explores late-ancient ecclesiastical-historical narratives. There is little “new” here in the way of historical “discovery; again, the strength and importance of Van Dam's work lies in the way he draws on his deep expertise in Constantinian scholarship while breaking with traditional narratives to reveal different lines of connection—in this case the complex and agonistic web of meaning-making produced through narrations of the events of Constantine's reign. Here, he shows how pagan historians, like Zosimus, and Christians, like Evagrius Scholasticus, contributed together to “assess[ing] the place of Christianity in late antique society” (34).

A chapter on “Constantine's Memories” follows, and reassesses Eusebius of Caesarea's famous account of Constantine's vision before his engagement with Maxentius. Constantine told and retold his memories of the vision in order to explain his use of a new military standard, the labarum, and its effectiveness in rallying troops and defeating enemies. Eusebius, for his part, re-tooled the Emperor's story as a testimony of religious conversion and commitment. Unearthing the contingency of the Life of Constantine, Van Dam reveals Eusebius's theological spin on what was already an ideologically charged and crafted memory. This approach defers and displaces Eusebius as the historian of Constantine. Perhaps ironically, the fifth chapter “Eusebius' Commentary,” does occupy the physical center of the volume. Van Dam's meticulous “reading backwards” through the strata of Eusebius' writings shows how the bishop successively re-imagined the events of 312, first as the triumph of Constantine and Licinius over the persecutors and, ultimately, as one of a series of Constantine's triumphs culminating in the defeat of the last persecutor, Licinius. These pages offer a particularly accessible account of the various editions of Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History; it places ideological and political flesh on the bones of the important philological work of Barnes, Louth, and Burgess (84n3).

Chapter 6, “Shaping Memories in the West,” examines three Western representations of Constantine's victory: Latin Panegyric 12, delivered in Trier in 313, the writings of Lactantius, and the Arch of Constantine, dedicated by the Roman Senate in 315. Van Dam contextualizes each of these texts' imaginings of Constantine's victory. The panegyric, delivered in Constantine's presence, aimed to encourage the recent victor to extend and continue his military success on the northern frontiers. With the triumphal Arch, the senatorial class sought to articulate its relationship with the new emperor in terms of Republican values. In this telling, Lactantius's story of the Milvian Bridge, which along with Eusebius's account constitutes the dominant narrative of the battle, emerges as an anomaly. It alone of the western texts contextualizes the conflict with Maxentius in terms of the history of Christians and persecution. Chapter 7, “Rome After the Battle,” focuses on the ways in which memories of Rome shaped the ways in which Constantine was remembered in the capital, and in turn considers the effect memorials and memories of Constantine had upon the city. During his visits and sojourns in the capital in the years immediately following his victory, the weight of “Rome,” as tradition and memory, pressed Constantine to present himself in largely Augustan terms—primarily as liberator and restorer of the Republic. But Van Dam shows that Constantine's building projects, particularly his sponsorship of churches and martyria, simultaneously rewrote the “text” of the city (215).

Remembering Constantine shows vividly how form and style shape content and meaning in historical writing. Where so many books front-load “theory” in an introduction and proceed to apply it to produce traditional chronological narratives, Van Dam's book self-consciously embodies its methodology. Moreover, although Van Dam does not explicitly position it as such, this volume functions together with The Roman Revolution of Constantine as a diptych. The earlier volume presents a convincing, linear reconstruction of “change” in Constantine's reign. This volume, in contrast, offers a non-linear account of the different, often conflicting ways in which Constantine has been remembered. The diptych, in effect, destabilizes the drive for any fixed or foreclosed historical narrative. Among the other things this book does, it disciplines a practice of history; as Van Dam puts it, the task of the modern historian is “to combine [the] high standards of meticulous scholarship with the interpretive perspectives of the twenty-first century” (16). The challenge, though, goes deeper than this call for theoretical literacy. To offer a meta-narrative of memory requires the historian to apply rigorous philological and historical analyses while holding multiple and conflicting histories in tension. This is a particularly difficult kind of authoring. It is a challenge that Van Dam's work succeeds at handily. His writing is a model of erudition without pretension that results in an eminently readable narrative that can be enjoyed by experts and educated lay readers alike.