Liturgy, as the formal rite of Catholic devotion, underwrote every stage of the ideology, practice and history of crusading, the first large-scale lay religious movement and the greatest collective devotional endeavour of the Middle Ages. It was the chief means of sacralising warfare and thus making war holy. And it was also understood to be an essential aspect of fighting and a means of victory, and thus was one of the weapons of crusading strategy and warfare. As churchmen repeatedly explained, just as the Israelites won against the Amalekites only so long as Moses raised his hands in prayer (Exodus 17:9–13), so Christians must pray to God for forgiveness and aid if the crusaders were to gain victory in battle. In 1217, in organising liturgical services in support of the Fifth Crusade, Pope Honorius III explained that Christians must fight ‘visible enemies with invisible weapons, that is, prayers’ if they were to win. Liturgical prayer and supplication undergirded much of crusading, and between 1095 and c. 1500 liturgy became a central and ingrained feature of crusade culture in the Latin West.

This chapter examines the placing of COVID-19 grief through ethnographic vignettes from three distinct contexts: the prolonged search by one woman in Guayaquil, Ecuador, to find and bury her mother’s body; the ritualized micro-eulogies and use of public health data that characterized Kentucky’s state response to the pandemic; and the community efforts to create a national commemorative space in Washington, DC, for lives lost to COVID in the absence of state recognition. Drawing on philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of the ethical imperative to care for the deceased, we show how individual acts of mourning – what we call “micro-eulogies” – confront the silences and erasures surrounding COVID-19 death. These quotidian practices of naming, honoring, and remembering the dead emerge alongside and against narratives of revisionism and calls to “move on.” In attending to the specificity of these three places – geographic, sociopolitical, symbolic – and the movement of individual and collective grief between the private and the public, the chapter explores what it means for the experience of COVID-19 loss to be located. It argues that localizing pandemic grief is an act of refusal, one that demands a collective reckoning and response.

This chapter approaches the anthropology of death through the example of the lasting sociopolitical and material effects of what the Vietnamese know as the “American War” and the US as the “Vietnam War.” Specifically, we examine the conjoined legacies of missing war dead and the chronic ecological-physiological systems of damage so firmly fixed in the two countries’ often clashing but unavoidably tethered narratives of reparation and normalization. Death in this case tells two stories: one about formerly warring states and how they use the dead – namely, their respective and mutually exclusive sets of missing combatant dead – to advance postwar geopolitical interests on the global stage, and a second, about the necropolitical “drift” of toxins, mutations, and irreparably harmed bodies and psyches that unfolds in the shadow of state-centered narratives. Juxtaposing ethnographic insights from our respective fieldwork, we illustrate how destruction endures, vivifying the past – not just figuratively through postwar geopolitical narratives and memories of the absent but also within the physical bodies of the survivors and the tainted ecologies that surface in war’s wake.

War has a complex relationship to creativity and the arts. War is a mythic and hallowed subject of art, where it is often depicted in sacred terms as the testing ground of foundational leaders and the cauldron from which societies emerge. Yet based as it is in killing and destruction, war damages both society and creative faculties. War ends lives, destroys cultural treasures, disrupts artistic careers, and wreaks havoc on social networks through which artists develop and share work. War’s violence inflicts physical and psychological disabilities that limit creative expression. Those negative impacts can, paradoxically, spur creativity: war experience pushes artists to invent new forms of expression and has led to whole artistic movements (such as Surrealism). War also leads to creative interventions in fields like medicine, technology, and communication. War also changes how societies conceptualize creativity itself. “Creativity” emerged as a social scientific concept during World War II and became an important area of Cold War investigation, one cultivated to impart competitive edge. Creativity research will continue to deepen our understanding of how humans make and survive war.

A wealth of primary sources documents Vasari’s meticulous planning for his posthumous commemoration, his death, and his heirs’ execution of his final wishes. This final chapter explores Vasari’s death and the fate of his earthly remains, as well as the unique place his high altar for the Pieve occupies within the tradition of funerary monuments and chapels made by and for early modern Italian artists and architects. As the largest and principal altar of one of Arezzo’s most prestigious churches and the site of Vasari’s burial, it is nothing less than the most personal work of his long and prolific artistic career. Its alienation in the nineteenth century from the church for which it was made and nearly all of the other works with which Vasari intended it to be seen, however, has long obscured its significance.

This chapter focuses on the collaborative and participatory methodologies of the Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador research initiative, an international, cross-sector partnership of survivors, scholars, artists, lawyers, museums, architects, community organisers, civil society organisations, and mental health professionals who are committed to documenting the history of the Salvadoran Civil War (1979–1992), accompanying bottom-up commemoration and healing processes, and preventing future violence. Using Experiences and Memories of Arcatao (2024) as a case study, this chapter explores the collaborative documentation of victim names and the co-creation of local community history books as an alternative form of justice that meets the recommendations of the United Nations Commission on the Truth for El Salvador in a context of enduring impunity. The authors emphasise the long tradition of local community organizing and popular education in Chalatenango, as well as the role of international solidarity actors who contribute significant resources and technical support.

The first set of chapters operates at the level of patrons and their communities—imperial and local—to grapple with architectural rebuilding as a mechanism through which shared pasts, presents, and futures were articulated and substantiated. Chapter 1 examines architectural rebuilding as an ideological virtue. In particular, it looks to evidence from Roman and late antique histories, coins, and inscribed statue bases to chart the place and shape of architectural rebuilding (in comparison with and juxtaposition to new construction projects) within the broader commemorative landscape of honor and virtue in cities across the Mediterranean.

The suite of chapters comprising Part II homes in on monumental building inscriptions as central means through which individual buildings shaped perceptions of their own architectural histories and of temporal change more broadly. The first of these, Chapter 4, investigates assemblages of epigraphic records of architectural interventions that accumulated on buildings over their long ancient lives. The chapter’s analysis of these encrusted epigraphic environments charts a range of strategies that benefactors adopted in setting up their own commemorative texts vis à vis those of earlier patrons and considers the effects of those decisions on the inscriptions’ reception by contemporary audiences.

Chapter 1, the introductory chapter, outlines the development of psychotraumatology or traumatic stress studies, in which the author was also partly involved. It traces how it came about that the author Brave Heart and others have been presenting concepts on historical trauma since the early 2000s. An operationalized definition with two basic criteria and five consecutive criteria is presented. The following eight contexts from all parts of the world are presented and their selection justified. The first four are typical configurations of historical trauma because they fulfil all the criteria without exception. The last four historical traumas fulfil only some of the criteria, but are each particularly revealing, for example when it comes to the minimization of the victim narrative for political reasons. The method of the coupled scoping review for the book is explained and the target groups of readership are described.

If rights are at stake in the health of the body, it is now increasingly second nature to think they are in the aftermath of violence conflict or immense wrongdoing. Memory of violence is one way rights politics have been made meaningful. Bonny Ibhawoh observes that memory – including a right to memory – has been a focal point of rights mobilizations around the world. At the same time as recasting collective understanding of the past is itself an object of contemporary politics, competition over memory – including who is entitled to narrative privileging and why – has followed suit.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

This chapter situates contemporary Russian war memory in its twentieth-century historical context, exploring how and why the war victory gained such prominence and drawing out certain continuities and discontinuities across the Soviet/post-Soviet divide. Given the immense scale of Soviet wartime losses and the unusually heavy-handed instrumentalization of history under Putin, the Second World War was bound to play a prominent role in Russian memory culture. Yet, as the chapter will show, the precise character of Russian war memory and its utility for the Kremlin derive overwhelmingly from decades of Soviet-era commemorative practices. The chapter does not attempt to rectify distortions of historical truth but rather to elucidate the mechanisms by which states repurpose the past in the service of the present. Soviet war memory, as elsewhere, was the product of internal debate and deliberation as the leadership wrestled with what were often pan-European issues of representation. The chapter therefore approaches the myth and memory of the Great Patriotic War as a particular manifestation of a universal impulse to ‘make sense’ of war in the modern world.

The second applied context in which I explore the implications of my view of moral heroism is in public practices of honoring and commemoration. Moral heroism is far from the only thing we honor and commemorate, but it is a common ground on which to think honoring and commemorating are appropriate or even called for. Yet what we understand ourselves to be honoring, the purposes for which we commemorate, as well as how we set about these activities are all subject to important revisions if my view of moral heroism is accepted. In particular, my view supports a broad shift away from honoring moral heroes and toward honoring moral achievements instead: it favors achievement admiration over characterological admiration. Engaging with the recently exploding literature concerning moral reservations about commemorations including statues, monuments, and the like, I distill two focal concerns about commemorations: They unjustly marginalize, and they mark inappropriate moral aspirations. I then show how the revisions supported by my view of moral heroism are both helpful in attenuating ongoing controversies surrounding practices of commemoration and productive in advancing the aims of honoring and commemorating moral excellence.

Diverse Americans have appropriated the Revolution to justify wideranging causes and visions of the American nation. Over the two centuries following the Revolution, Americans’ memories of the founding tended to conform to one of two broad patterns. The first, “monumentalism,” seeks to create a single, unified civic culture around an understanding of the Revolution that is associated with the state, conservatism, tradition, and cultural homogeneity. The second, or the “fulfillment narrative,” argues that the Revolution was motivated by certain ideals (freedom, equality, self-determination) that are worth pursuing but have not yet been achieved. Despite their differences, monumentalism and the fulfillment narrative share the assumption that the legacy of the American Revolution is fundamentally positive. But, on occasion, some Americans have instead questioned or outright rejected the American Revolution’s legacy, and such dissenting memories can highlight perspectives that are obscured by a near-universal embrace of the Revolution.

In her chapter, Heather Laird examines twenty-first century commemorations, such as the bicentennial of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and the centennial of the Easter Rising of 1916. From the time of the peak era of Revival to the present, a vision of Ireland has emerged that values tradition but that also reckons with the failures of tradition to govern modern lives. The statues and exhibitions that arose in preparation for these celebrations are the visible signs of the very future envisioned in 1798 and 1916. Laird’s examination of twenty-first century commemorations of the Dublin Lockout of 1913 and the commemoration of it in 2013 suggests that revivalism resists this idea of cultural salvage and actively serves a world to come. She discusses two 2013 commemoration projects, Living the Lockout and the 1913 Lockout Tapestry, latter-day manifestations of a persistent revivalist impulse to make the past productive of the future.