This collection investigates the wide array of local antiquarian practices that developed across Europe in the early modern era. Breaking new ground, it explores local concepts of antiquity in a period that has been defined as a uniform 'Renaissance'. Contributors take a novel approach to the revival of the antique in different parts of Italy, as well as examining other, less widely studied antiquarian traditions in France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Britain and Poland. They consider how real or fictive ruins, inscriptions and literary works were used to demonstrate a particular idea of local origins, to rewrite history or to vaunt civic pride. In doing so, they tackle such varied subjects as municipal antiquities collections in Southern Italy and France, the antiquarian response to the pagan, Christian and Islamic past on the Iberian Peninsula, and Netherlandish interest in megalithic ruins thought to be traces of a prehistoric race of Giants.

Introduction - Kathleen Christian and Bianca de Divitiis
1 A local Renaissance: Florentine Quattrocento palaces and all'antica styles - Richard Schofield
2 The arch of Trajan in Ancona and civic identity in the Italian Quattrocento from Ciriaco d'Ancona to the death of Matthias Corvinus - Francesco Benelli
3 Roma caput mundi: Rome's local antiquities as symbol and source - Kathleen Christian
4 A local sense of the past: spolia, re-use and all'antica building in southern Italy, 1400-1600 - Bianca de Divitiis
5 The Gaulish past of Milan and the French invasion of Italy - Oren Margolis
6 Reusing and redisplaying antiquities in early modern France - William Stenhouse
7 Local antiquities in Spain: from Tarragona to Córdoba - Fernando Marías
8 Local antiquaries and the expansive sense of the past: a case study from Counter-Reformation Spain - Katrina B. Olds
9 Luís de Camões's The Lusiads and the paradoxes of expansion - João R. Figueiredo
10 Semini and his progeny: the construction of Antwerp's antique past - Edward Wouk
11 Resurrecting Belgica romana: Peter Ernst von Mansfeld's garden of antiquities in Clausen, Luxemburg, 1563-90 - Krista De Jonge
12 On Romans, Batavians and giants: the quest for the true origin of architecture in the Dutch Republic - Konrad Ottenheym
13 The role of ancient remains in the Sarmatian culture of early modern Poland - Barbara Arciszewska
14 Inventing England: English identity and the Scottish 'other', 1586-1625 - Jenna M. Schultz
Index