Hagiography, Historiography, and Identity in Sixth-Century Gaul

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamar Rotman

Gregory of Tours, the sixth-century Merovingian bishop, composed extensive historiographical and hagiographical corpora during the twenty years of his episcopacy in Tours. These works serve as important sources for the cultural, social, political and religious history of Merovingian Gaul. This book focuses on Gregory's hagiographical collections, especially the <i>Glory of the Martyrs, Glory of the Confessors, and Life of the Fathers</i>, which contain accounts of saints and their miracles from across the Mediterranean world. It analyses these accounts from literary and historical perspectives, examining them through the lens of relations between the Merovingians and their Mediterranean counterparts, and contextualizing them within the identity crisis that followed the disintegration of the Roman world. This approach leads to groundbreaking conclusions about Gregory's hagiographies, which this study argues were designed as an 'ecclesiastical history' (of the Merovingian Church) that enabled him to craft a specific Gallo-Christian identity for his audience.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamar Rotman

Gregory of Tours, the sixth-century Merovingian bishop, composed extensive historiographical and hagiographical corpora during the twenty years of his episcopacy in Tours. These works serve as important sources for the cultural, social, political and religious history of Merovingian Gaul. This book focuses on Gregory’s hagiographical collections, especially the Glory of the Martyrs, Glory of the Confessors, and Life of the Fathers, which contain accounts of saints and their miracles from across the Mediterranean world. It analyses these accounts from literary and historical perspectives, examining them through the lens of relations between the Merovingians and their Mediterranean counterparts, and contextualizing them within the identity crisis that followed the disintegration of the Roman world. This approach leads to groundbreaking conclusions about Gregory’s hagiographies, which this study argues were designed as an “ecclesiastical history” (of the Merovingian Church) that enabled him to craft a specific Gallo-Christian identity for his audience.


Author(s):  
Sarah Davis-Secord

This book examines Sicily's place within the religious, diplomatic, military, commercial, and intellectual networks of the Mediterranean world. It traces the history of Sicily, from the sixth-century incorporation of the island into the Byzantine empire, through the period of Muslim rule (827–1061), until the end of Norman rule there in the late twelfth century. In particular, it investigates how Sicily moved from the Latin Christian world into the Greek Christian one, then into the Islamicate civilization, and then back into Latin Christendom. In order to understand Sicily's role(s) within the broader Mediterranean system of the sixth through twelfth centuries, the book explores patterns of travel and communication between Sicily and elsewhere—between Constantinople and Rome, between Byzantium and the Islamic world. Finally, it describes Sicily in the dār al-Islām.


2002 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER SARRIS

This article addresses the subject of the first well-attested outbreak of bubonic plague in the history of the Mediterranean world – the so-called ‘Justinianic Plague’ of the sixth century. The African origin of the disease is examined and contextualized, whilst recent revisionist arguments in relation to the scale of the depopulation caused by the plague are responded to with reference to the numismatic, legal, and papyrological sources. The numismatic evidence in particular points to a major crisis in imperial finances for which large-scale depopulation would be the most likely cause. The legal and papyrological sources record how both landowners and the imperial authorities responded to this situation.


Author(s):  
Georgiana Bianca Constantin ◽  
Ionuţ Căluian

The bubonic plague is an extremely old disease (apparentely from the late Neolitic era). The so-called “Justinianic plague” of the sixth century was the first well-attested outbreak of bubonic plague in the history of the Mediterranean world. It was thought that the Justinianic Plague, along with barbarian invasions, contributed directly to the so-called “Fall of the Roman Empire.”


Author(s):  
Graham Shipley

The treatise known as the Periplous of Pseudo-Skylax survives on 44 pages of a 700-year-old codex in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The manuscript as a whole comprises a set of geographical texts assembled by Markianos of Herakleia, probably in the sixth century AD. The work describes the coasts of the Mediterranean and Black Sea, beginning at Gibraltar and proceeding clockwise to return to the same place (and a little way down the Atlantic coast of Africa). We do not know the original name of the work. The introduction examines the history of the manuscript, difficulties of interpretation, and what is known about the author. It addresses date, the debate around the measurements used in the text and what its purpose may have been. Finally it discusses what sort of geography the text offers, its literary features, influences and legacy.


Author(s):  
Karen C. Britt

This chapter provides an introduction to early Christian mosaics that emphasizes the important role played by archaeology in improving our understanding of their geographical and architectural contexts. After a short discussion of the position of early Christian mosaics in the history of the medium, a brief review of the most productive methodologies used in research on mosaics is undertaken, followed by a survey of mosaic technology that includes the workshops and artists involved in mosaic production. In the rest of the chapter, a selection of mosaics in churches, martyria, chapels, and Christian mausolea located in various parts of the Mediterranean world is examined. The evidence from archaeology demonstrates that although early Christian mosaics share universal themes, the diversity reflected in their iconography and the presence of secondary themes rooted in local traditions necessitate a regional approach to their interpretation.


1976 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor B. Lieberman

TheSāsanavaṃsa‘History of the religion’, a Pali work written in Burma in 1861, has long been recognized as an important source for the study of Theravāda Buddhism. It is essentially a chronicle of famous monks which seeks to trace the lineal succession of orthodoxtherasfrom the Buddha's immediate disciple Upāli to the heads of thesaṅghaat Mandalay in the author's own lifetime. As early as 1882 Louis de Zoysa in hisCatalogue of Pali, Sinhalese, and Sanskrit manuscripts in the temple libraries of Ceylonreferred to theSāsanavaṃsaas a work containing ‘very interesting information on the religious history of … Burma and Ceylon’. In 1892 the Russian Orientalist Ivan Pavlovitch Minaev drew upon theSāsanavaṃsafor hisRecherches sur le bouddhisme, in which he quoted fairly extensively from the Pali text. H. Kern in 1896 classed it along with the better-knownDīpavaṃsaandMahāvaṃsaas ‘highly important for the ecclesiastical history of Ceylon’, and the treatise also gained mention in the researches of such leading Buddhist scholars as E. Hardy, Wilhelm Geiger, and G. P. Malalasekera.


Rough Waters ◽  
2010 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Silvia Marzagalli ◽  
James R. Sofka ◽  
John J. McCusker

In his path-breaking study of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean world, Fernand Braudel identified the “invasion” by Atlantic ships and merchants as one of the major, long-lasting events in the history of the Mediterranean Sea in early modern times.2 According to Braudel, the arrival of English, Flemish and French Atlantic vessels and their captains began discretely in the early sixteenth century as a result of an increased Mediterranean demand for cheap transport services. Within a few decades, however, northern Europeans evolved from a complementary to a commanding position in the region. Atlantic shipping and trade came to dominate the most lucrative Mediterranean trades, and the Atlantic powers steadily imposed their rules and politics on Mediterranean countries, progressively subordinating the region to Atlantic interests. Their ...


1997 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 115-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjorie Chibnall

When Eusebius set out to write an Ecclesiastical History he claimed to be ‘the first to undertake this present project and to attempt, as it were, to travel along a lonely and untrodden path’. The claim was justified: there had been little room for religious history, even the history of pagan religions, in the works of classical historians and their imitators. Following the rules laid down by Thucydides, they concentrated on the political life of the present and its military consequences; they preferred oral to written sources, provided the historian had either been present at the scene of action or had heard reports from eyewitnesses. Both in method and in content Eusebius was an innovator. Since his starting point was ‘the beginning of the dispensation of Jesus’ he was entirely dependent on written sources for more than three hundred years; and, innovating still more, he introduced documents such as letters and imperial edicts into his narrative. Far from being political and military, his subject matter was primarily the history of the apostles, the succession of bishops, the persecutions of Christians, and the views of heretics. He was widening the scope of historical writing and using the techniques previously employed in the biographies of philosophers. It is not surprising that, once his work had been translated into Latin and extended by Rufinus and Jerome, it became the starting point for writers on ecclesiastical history for generations to come.


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