The Colonial Middle Ages
 

This book project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the University of Edinburgh, and supported by the British School at Rome and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in Edinburgh, investigates the exchanges between architecture, religion, and medievalism in the material and ontological fabrication of the Italian Empire. In a world increasingly marked by secularisation and modernisation, the rise of Fascism in Italy was accompanied across the country’s overseas territories from the Horn of Africa to the Mediterranean Basin, sacralisation and medievalisation converged in one of the most extensive programmes of church-building of the 1920s and 1930s. The book traces these developments alongside the parallel expansion of and evolving relationship between the Italian State and the Catholic Church. Crucially, medievalism is recognised as a critical framework through which religion, nationhood, and empire were negotiated.