Event: Contested identities in the antiquarian imagination: Reflections on the intellectual milieu of Abela's Descrittione di Malta
Date: 26 January 2024
Time: 18:30
Venue: Reading Hall, National Library of Malta, Valletta
Speaker: Dr Reuben Grima
This is the third lecture in the National Library of Malta Public Lectures Series 2023-2024, ‘Knowledge in the Making: Towards an Intellectual History of Early Modern Malta’. The series is organised in collaboration with the UM Department of Philosophy.
Giovanni Francesco Abela and his monumental Descrittione di Malta are at once familiar and enigmatic. This lecture considers some of the networks of knowledge and power that Abela formed part of during the first half of the 17th century. This milieu shaped the worldviews of antiquarians in this period, and in turn influenced more widely-held and enduring attitudes to the past. Taking the frontispiece of the Descrittione as a point of departure, the lecture will explore how antiquarians deployed the past in the construction and contestation of identities. This work builds on archival research undertaken in 2022 on the theme of Inventing the Past, during tenure of the Shortland-Jones Fellowship at the British School in Rome.
Dr Reuben Grima is a senior lecturer in the Department of Conservation and Built Heritage at the University of Malta. He read for his PhD in archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL, while holding a Commonwealth Scholarship. From 2003 to 2011, he served as Heritage Malta’s Senior Curator responsible for Malta’s prehistoric World Heritage Sites. His research interests include cultural landscapes, the history of archaeology, and public engagement with the past.
The National Library Public Lecture Series 2023-2024 is a collaboration between the National Library and the UM Department of Philosophy. The series is coordinated by Maroma Camilleri, Prof. Jean-Paul De Lucca and Mevrick Spiteri.
Free entrance. No booking required.
For more information, please send an email.