The Pastiche Past. Society, Heritage, and Place in the Premodern Period
The book project radically reframes our understanding of the reuse of ancient material culture in the post-classical world. It argues that both ancient and medieval-Byzantine artifacts were valued for their embodiment of the Roman past by Muslims and Christians alike. To this end, it focuses on the relationship between material culture and identity and between heritage and geographical place.
In the premodern period, artifacts were linked to their place of production, both in the East and the West. Material culture was believed to belong to those who lived on or ruled over the areas where the objects were found, regardless of that group’s religion, language, or ethnicity. Yet, after the Ottoman conquest of the former Byzantine Empire, Christian thinkers began to contest the new rulers’ ownership of the region’s ancient and medieval Roman heritage. This shift is closely tied to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. That conquest marks the end of the firm link between heritage and geography in the European mind, ushering in a new paradigm in which heritage became more mobile and its relationship to place more fluid.
Armin Bergmeier specializes in material cultural heritage from the medieval Eastern Mediterranean. Since 2016, he has taught art history at Leipzig University (Germany) and has been appointed full professor for art history and material culture at Passau University in early 2026. His work explores changes and transformations across time and space and the relationship between material culture and intellectual history. He emphasizes issues of connectivity and transculturality. Other research themes include the art and art historiography in the former East Germany.
He has been a Fulbright Fellow at Columbia University in New York, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, and a senior fellow at the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations in Istanbul. He has held further fellowships at the Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani in Venice and at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence.
His research was published among others in Speculum, Gesta, the Journal of Late Antiquity, and the Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz and the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. His first book focused on the cultural history of divine visions in the late antique Mediterranean and two recent of his (co-)edited volumes addresse the issues of Time and Presence in Art (2022) and The Spoliated Past: Heritage, Antiquarianism, and Byzantine Material Culture across Time and Space (2025).
This talk explores the potential of critical heritage studies to question ownership and the relationship between identity and material culture in the premodern Mediterranean as well as alternative ways of conceiving of heritage linked to place and geography.