"Once Mistress of the World :" Rome, St. Peter, and female devotion in the early Middle Ages

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Autumn Dolan
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Rank ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
Papal Authority ◽  
The City

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] I reassess the reception of Rome in the early medieval west from the historiographical background of women's history. Women's conception of Rome as a cult center, an intervening ally, and a devotional adviser between 300-900 CE proved crucial in a coming-of-age period for the papacy, whose spiritual authority had begun to resonate from the Mediterranean northward as the vicar of St. Peter. My consideration of women through the lens of Petrine devotion and Roman networks stands out from previous studies that cite papal legitimacy and Roman influence in the political and rhetorical debates among the pope, bishops, and rulers. Through examinations of women's devotional practices involving Rome, it is possible to see the significance of the city and its representatives in the devotional lives of western Christians along with women's vital part in maintaining and extending papal authority and Roman cults in the first millennium. This study draws from hagiographical, epistolary, and literary sources in addition to the use of material evidence such as inscriptions, devotional objects, and architecture. None of these sources are new to early medievalists, but when read for the Roman affiliations within female devotion, they bring us to expand our impressions of Rome's reception in the west and redefine our expectations of women's religious practices. In order to capture the breadth of early medieval women's associations with Rome, this study takes a broad geographic and social approach. The geographic focus for this study spans from Rome to include Francia and Anglo-Saxon England in order to emphasize the extent of Rome's appeal, and also to demonstrate women's involvement in the widespread travel networks that culminated at the city. Although elite women dominate sources for early medieval women, it is nevertheless possible to tease out from evaluations of cult worship the devotional trends of popular religion, and with them the deeds of the poor or middling ranks in society. This broad examination of devotion in terms of geography and social rank contributes to a dynamic image of the late antique and early medieval worlds, providing further caution against assumptions that the local predominated in the worldview of those living in the centuries following the political fall of Rome. As we continue to gradually reinsert Rome into the narrative of the early medieval west, women should figure in our discussions of the developments in papal authority, the success of the cults of Roman saints, and the facilitation of pilgrimage and exchange routes that extended from Rome through Francia and across the English Channel. The continuity of women's roles in domestic devotion between late antique and early medieval culture grounds the survey of Rome and its reception in the west, even as we struggle with the real changes in its political and economic structures. Although early medieval men and women witnessed a localization of thought and exchange following the withdrawal of the Roman Empire, they were no less aware of the enduring ties between their region and that of Rome, the city that was once “Mistress of the World.

Sanctity and secularity in the early Irish church

1973 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 21-37
Author(s):  
Kathleen Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Outer Edge ◽  
Social Organisation ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
The West ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
The World

Ireland was odd in the early middle ages. She lay on the outer edge of the world, the survivor of that Celtic civilisation which had once covered much of the west. She had never immediately known the pervading influence of Rome, which continued in so many ways for so long after the Roman empire collapsed. Christianity had reached her rather early (there were enough christians to make it worth while to send a continental bishop, Palladius, in 431) and it came before many of the developments which determined the nature of monasticism in early medieval Europe. Ireland’s political and social organisation were somewhat different from those of the Germanic peoples of the west; and though the early church in Ireland had an episcopal, diocesan structure, within two hundred years or so of its inception it had been fundamentally modified by native Irish laws and institutions. It is therefore not surprising to find that both Ireland’s sanctity and her secularity had peculiar features.

scholarly journals The Return of the Sacral King

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 51-65
Author(s):  
Paul R. DeHart ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
The World ◽  
Ancient Christianity ◽  
The City

In Pagans & Christians in the City, Steven D. Smith argues that in contrast to ancient Rome, ancient Christianity, following Judaism, located the sacred outside the world, desacralizing the cosmos and everything in it—including the political order. It thereby introduced a political dualism and potentially contending allegiances. Although Smith’s argument is right so far as it goes, it underplays the role of Christianity’s immanent dimension in subverting the Roman empire and the sacral pattern of antiquity. This division of authority not only undermined the Roman empire and antique sacral political order more generally—it also subverts the modern state, which, in the work of Hobbes and Rousseau, sought to remarry what Western Christianity divorced.

scholarly journals Revival and Reality: The Carolingian Renaissance in Rome and the basilica of S. Prassede

1970 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 163-192
Author(s):  
Caroline Goodson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Urban Church ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Monumental Architecture ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Papal Authority ◽  
The City

The monumental architecture of the early middle ages in Rome has long been explained as a revival of ancient architecture, specifically Constantinian basilicas, a theory first advanced by Richard Krautheimer in two seminal articles in 1942. This article seeks to explore other ways in which early medieval buildings were significant, taking as its focus the basilica of S. Prassede, built by Paschal I (817-24). Paschal’s church incorporated a very significant collection of martyrs’ relics, translated from the catacombs outside the city into the urban church. Paschal’s church was a saints’ shrine, a mausoleum for his mother, and a locus of a new kind of papal authority. These aspects of the significance of the building were generated more in function than in form.

The Emergence of Nautical Astronomy in Portugal in the XVth century

1998 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. G. L. Randles
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Canary Islands ◽  
West African ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
Isidore Of Seville ◽  
Navigational Aid ◽  
Christian Writer ◽  
Methods Of Measurement

Of the great oceans of the world, the Atlantic, because of its violence, was the last to be mastered by man. The task in its entirety had to wait for the Portuguese sailors of the Renaissance. Isidore of Seville (c. 570–636), a Christian writer of the late Roman Empire, had written of the Atlantic that it was ‘incommensurable and uncrossable’. Although Pliny (a.d. 23–79) refers vaguely to the Canary Islands, all knowledge of them disappears in the Middle Ages until a Portuguese expedition under the command of the Italian Lanzarotto Malocello ‘re- discovered’ them in 1336. Italian charts of the XIVth century begin progressively to show the Canaries, Madeira, Porto Santo and the Azores, but all aligned along a N/S axis without any appreciation of the relative distances between them or how far they lay from the European shore. The first written evidence of the Portuguese ‘discovery’ of the islands of Madeira and Porto Santo appears in 1419–20 and of the Azores in 1427, about the same time as they began to be colonised under the aegis of Prince Henry of Portugal, called the ‘Navigator’. The difficulties of returning to them on regular voyages was to motivate the Portuguese to develop methods of measurement using the Pole Star as a navigational aid and this led, not only to a greater accuracy in placing the islands on the charts, but also to a greater precision in the charting of the west African coastline which they were progressively exploring during the second half of the XVth century.Claims that Portuguese nautical astronomy originated in Aragon and was transmitted from there to Portugal or was introduced into Portugal from Germany by Regiomontanus and Martin Behaim have long ago been shown to be baseless.

The Transformation into the Early Middle Ages (Fourth to Eighth Centuries)

2015 ◽  
pp. 490-519 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hubert Fehr
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
River Rhine ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Rural Settlements ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Roman Provinces ◽  
Roman Germany ◽  
Medieval Archaeology

This chapter focuses on the transformation of Roman Germany into the early Middle Ages (fourth to eighth centuries). The final collapse of Roman rule in northern Gaul in the middle of the fifth century signalled the de facto end of the three Late Roman provinces: Germania Prima, Germania Secunda, and Maxima Sequanorum. The territories along the western bank of the River Rhine experienced quite different political destinies between the middle of the fifth and the middle of the sixth century. The chapter first looks at how migrations of peoples from Barbaricum into the Roman Empire caused the end of a Roman-style society and economy in former Roman Germany. It then discusses early medieval archaeology in Germany, with particular emphasis on cemeteries and churches. Finally, it analyses methodological developments in late antique and early medieval archaeology, along with the transformation of towns and landscape/rural settlements.

scholarly journals The European Culture Under the Empire of Amir Temur

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 4653-4655
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Asia Minor ◽  
The Political ◽  
Diplomatic Relations ◽  
The West ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
The World ◽  
Vast Territory

Amir Temur is considered the great Eurasian empire of the Middle Ages. He united a multinational vast territory; the empire included various ethnic groups, nations, settled peoples and nomads. At the beginning of the XV century, the international situation in the Middle East and around the world became more and more aggravated. At that time, two great empires dominated Asia: the Ottoman Turks in Asia Minor and the empire of Amir Temur in Central Asia. Thus, some political forces in the Middle East united in two groups - supporters of Bayezet and the cohort of Amir Temur. During these processes, Bayazet successfully conducted a consecrated war in the West. In Maverannahr, the political power of Amir Temur is strengthening every day. Very soon, he will play a big role in the international arena, in the Middle East, inclusive. European kings tried to approach with Amir Temur. They saw in his personality a sapper from the threat of Bayazet. On the eve of the battle of Ankara, Amir Temur's diplomatic relations with European rulers are developing. They established very friendly relations, from that moment the peoples of Europe and Asia began to get acquainted closely with the cultures of both peoples. These pages are very dynamic and deep, it is worth exploring this topic in the future.

Early Medieval Architecture in Western Europe

Art History ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles McClendon
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Medieval Architecture ◽  
Native Languages ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The World ◽  
Definition Of

The precise definition of the early Middle Ages as a historical period is far from clear, as is the specific beginning and end of the Middle Ages as a whole. In terms of architecture, it is generally taken to postdate the experiments of the late antique/early Christian period and to end sometime soon after the year 1000, when according to the monk Raoul Glaber the world put on a “white mantle of churches,” which is usually related to the emergence of Romanesque. This bibliography follows these general chronological perimeters, extending from the middle of the 6th to the early 11th century. Unlike Romanesque and later Gothic, early medieval architecture does not embody a single, particular style, aside from the often perceived antiquarian tendencies of the so-called Carolingian Renaissance of the late 8th and 9th centuries under Charlemagne and his immediate successors. Most studies are therefore regional, produced often by scholars writing in their native languages and focused on the monuments of their homeland.

scholarly journals THE CITY SPEAKS: CITIES, CITIZENS, AND CIVIC DISCOURSE IN LATE ANTIQUITY AND THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES

Traditio ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 75 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
MEGAN WELTON
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Civic Discourse ◽  
Ultimate Fate ◽  
The City

This article investigates how civic discourse connects the virtue of citizens and the fortunes of cities in a variety of late antique and early medieval sources in the post-Roman west. It reveals how cities assume human qualities through the rhetorical technique of personification and, crucially, the ways in which individuals and communities likewise are described with civic terminology. It also analyzes the ways in which the city and the civic community are made to speak to one another at times of crisis and celebration. By examining a diverse range of sources including epideictic poetry, chronicles, hagiographies, and epigraphic inscriptions, this article addresses multiple modes of late antique and early medieval thought that utilize civic discourse. It first explores how late antique and early medieval authors employed civic discourse in non-urban contexts, including how they conceptualized the interior construction of an individual's mind and soul as a fortified citadel, how they praised ecclesiastical and secular leaders as city structures, and how they extended civic terminology to the preeminently non-urban space of the monastery. The article then examines how personified cities spoke to their citizens and how citizens could join their cities in song through urban procession. Civic encomia and invective further illustrate how medieval authors sought to unify the virtuous conduct of citizens with the ultimate fate of the city's security. The article concludes with a historical and epigraphic case study of two programs of mural construction in ninth-century Rome. Ultimately, this article argues that the repeated and emphatic exhortations to civic virtue provide access to how late antique and early medieval authors sought to intertwine the fate of the city with the conduct of her citizens, in order to persuade their audiences to act in accordance with the precepts of virtue.

Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Machado
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
The Social ◽  
Traditional Elite ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

This book analyses the physical, social, and cultural history of Rome in late antiquity. Between AD 270 and 535, the former capital of the Roman empire experienced a series of dramatic transformations in its size, appearance, political standing, and identity, as emperors moved to other cities and the Christian church slowly became its dominating institution. Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome provides a new picture of these developments, focusing on the extraordinary role played by members of the traditional elite, the senatorial aristocracy, in the redefinition of the city, its institutions, and spaces. During this period, Roman senators and their families became increasingly involved in the management of the city and its population, in building works, and in the performance of secular and religious ceremonies and rituals. As this study shows, for approximately three hundred years the houses of the Roman elite competed with imperial palaces and churches in shaping the political map and the social life of the city. Making use of modern theories of urban space, the book considers a vast array of archaeological, literary, and epigraphic documents to show how the former centre of the Mediterranean world was progressively redefined and controlled by its own elite.

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