Abstract:
Concomitant with the horizontal expansion of EU territory through physical and political
enlargement is a genealogy narrative, which emphasizes the ostensible roots of
Europeanness in classical antiquity and Christianity. In the face of this sanitized
genealogy, which lies at the heart of the European constitutional project, a range of
alternative and more inclusive narratives circulate in contemporary European popular
fiction. This paper focuses on a series of fantasy novels by the Italian author Valerio
Evangelisti, featuring Inquisitor Eymerich as hero-investigator. In his highly popular
novels, Evangelisti seeks to uncover layers of shared historical memory untainted with
post-Enlightenment rhetoric. The central architectural tropes of Evangelisti’s imaginary
world are those of a castle and a convent, epitomizing the temporal and sacral power in
European history. Each isolated from its outside environment and built on layer upon
layer of subterranean chambers and corridors, the castle and the convent conceal a past
quite different from the one championed in the official European genealogy. Memories of
pagan worship and Islamic or Judaic learning – banished from the official rhetoric –
continue to thrive, dark and threatening, in the subterranean strata of Evangelisti’s
European edifice. Evangelisti thus provides an incisive critique of the official European
story of origin, which threatens to suppress any alternative visions of European history or
unorthodox avenues for European identity formation.
