Divided, sometimes antagonistic, communities in officially unified nations seem to be the rule in Europe. In some cases, they conjure up the most painful memories of actual civil-war events, but usually they constitute the common experience of most Europeans, who lived through different kinds of war, revolutions, counter-revolutions, coups d’état, dictatorships, totalitarian systems, regime changes, territorial losses, ethnic cleansings, and exchanges of population. In spite of major breakthroughs, we find all over Europe that the experiences and humiliations of previous generations have remained mainly unspoken and unelaborated at both individual and community levels. Dangerous as they are, such narratives and undigested traumas necessarily call for well-advised, learned and thoughtful acts of overwriting and reworking. A broadly based, well-founded, historical, multi- and interdisciplinary research project for the comparison of the various modes of trauma management in the different countries and regions of Europe can open up new perspectives and provide essential tools for working out individual and collective traumatic historical experiences. Its main question is how different communities were able to process their collective traumatic historical experiences, and what can be learned from the outcomes of these processes. The project will compare the common and different characteristics of the various regimes of memory and patterns of consolidation.

This article seeks to question academic assertions of a European memory of the Jewish extermination by using the Spanish case. Peculiar links between Spain and the Jewish genocide indicate that a common European story about the Jewish extermination cannot be taken for granted. On the contrary, I propose an alternative model focused on the transmission process and the actors that control it, namely national narratives, anti-Semitic rhetoric and, over the past few decades, ‘Holocaust mass media products’. Such an approach will not only provide useful insights about the perception of the Jewish extermination in countries outside the traditional academic spectrum on Holocaust studies, but will also portray Spain's self-image in a European perspective.

Although part of a wider cultural and political phenomenon in world democracies, the revival movement on memory from traumatic past events has in the case of Spain strong contextual bearings. Drawing on the concept of ‘regimes of memory’, this article discusses two successive patterns of supply and demand of discourse and policies on memory from the end of the 1936–1939 Civil War to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Describing the rhetoric of ‘total victory’ under Franco's dictatorship, and later of ‘collective and shared guilt’ under democracy, it outlines a dialectics between hegemonic and non-hegemonic discourses on collective trauma that helps explain the rise and decline of regimes of memory in general, as well as the current orientation of public debates in Spain towards a new regime of memory based on a claim for ‘instituted remembrance’ of the traumatic past.

Italy is a critical point of reference for studying the strengths and limits of strategies of reconciliation in divided European societies, one that demonstrates the validity of Iván Zoltán Dénes’ introductory comment that the presence of ‘divided, sometimes antagonistic, communities in officially unified nations seems to be the rule in Europe’.

Analysing the images of the self and the enemy of the two main kinds of political language in the post-communist countries of East Central European, this Hungarian case study shows the shift from personal liberty to social protection, from liberal democracy to a mixture of oligarchic and ochlocratic phenomena, from constitutional revolution to a search for forging collective identity, from individual universal human-rights discourse to collectivist, including ethnicist, public speech, and from establishing the constitutional bases of the new democratic political system to different political hysterias. Its ultimate question is how to surpass political hysteria through research into the ways and means of processing collective traumas.

It is sometimes assumed in the Italian historiography that the medieval school of medicine at Salerno continued the medical tradition of ancient Salerno; the ancient Salernitan school, in its turn, would represent a continuation of that of Velia. The existence of such a school has been assumed on the grounds of rather sparse evidence consisting of a passage in the first book of Horace's Epistles and a Latin inscription from the first century AD mentioning a medicus clinicus.

The history of medicine in the Roman world has frequently been viewed from the perspective of the Elder Pliny (ca. AD 70), who described an invasion of incompetent, worthless charlatans from Greece and beyond. This extreme viewpoint was not shared by many of the inhabitants of Italy and the Western provinces, who welcomed these outsiders. This paper looks at the reasons why Greek-speaking doctors migrated westwards, and, through the writings of their most famous representative, Galen of Pergamum (127–216), how they became integrated into a Latin society.

An ‘International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization’ in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, has earned the merit of editing an interesting tract by Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Zakarīyā’ al-Rāzī, in Latin tradition known as Rhazes (854–925 or 935), with the title ‘Doubts on Galen’.1 This sounds programmatic, but it is confined to minor details, and the author confesses that he feels very uneasy when criticizing a man whom he reveres as his most benevolent master in the medical art, but he is compelled to comply with the principle ‘magis amica veritas’ as Galen himself has always done in his time. The edition is intended to be the start of a series with the title ‘Islamic Thought’, and the director of the institute, Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas,2 announces in his foreword its aim ‘to formulate an Islamic philosophy of science’, which he further specifies with the following words: ‘In order to learn from the past and be able to equip ourselves spiritually and intellectually for the future, we must return to the early masters of the religious and intellectual tradition of Islam, which was established upon the sacred foundation of the Holy Qur’an and the Tradition of the Holy Prophet.’ (Ref. 1, p. 3). But here we feel obliged to add that Rhazes was not the right man to inaugurate such a series, as he showed himself in his philosophical writings as an outright apostate who deemed all prophets of the revealed religions to be frauds and had even chosen as his spiritual leader, his imam, none else than Socrates.3

The transmission and acquisition of the wisdom of the ancients throughout the Middle Ages is a fascinating phenomenon in which languages served as the primary vehicles for this journey of classical culture. The main route – but not the only one – was located on the Mediterranean coasts and incorporated Asia, Europe and Africa. It was a multidirectional journey.