The Cult of Relics in the Letters and ‘Dialogues’ of Pope Gregory the Great: A Lexicographical Study

Traditio ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. McCulloh
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Human Remains ◽  
The West ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Gregory The Great

Late antiquity and the early Middle Ages witnessed a change in the Christian attitude toward the remains of the saints. Holy bodies came to be treated less and less as normal corpses, worthy of special veneration but still subject to many of the laws and customs which had regulated the treatment of human remains in pagan Antiquity. They came rather to be viewed as cult objects which could be moved or even divided up according to the demands of religion with little regard for earlier prohibitions of these practices. This change occurred relatively early in the Greek, eastern portion of the Roman Empire. In the mid-fourth century the Caesar Gallus translated a saint's body from one tomb to another, and less than two centuries later Justinian asked Pope Hormisdas for portions of the bodies of the apostles. Despite some outstanding exceptions such as the translations performed by St. Ambrose, the Christians of the West were more conservative in these matters. Nevertheless, by the ninth century at the very latest, western Christians had followed the lead of the eastern church in both translating and dismembering holy bodies.

The Fate of Small Towns, Hilltop Settlements, and Elite Residences in Merovingian-Period Gaul

2020 ◽  
pp. 610-640
Author(s):  
Luc Bourgeois
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
Power Networks ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
The Many

The study of places of power in the Merovingian realm has long been focused on cities, monasteries, and royal palaces. Recent archaeological research has led to the emergence of other categories. Four of them are addressed in this chapter. These include the capitals of fallen cities, which continue to mark the landscape in one way or another. Similarly, the fate of small Roman towns during the early Middle Ages shows that most of them continued to host a variety of secular and ecclesiastical powers. In addition, from the fourth century onward, large hilltop fortified settlements multiplied anew. They complemented earlier networks of authority, whether elite residences, artisan communities, or real towns. Finally, from the seventh century onward, the great aristocratic villas of late antiquity were transformed into settlements organized around one or more courtyards and supplemented by funerary and religious structures. The evolution of political spaces and lifestyles explains both the ruptures in power networks that occurred during the Merovingian epoch and the many continuities that can be seen in the four kinds of places studied in this chapter that were marked by these developments.

Archiatri and the Medical Profession in Antiquity

1977 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 191-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivian Nutton
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Health Service ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Public Health Service ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
The West ◽  
High Level

How far there was ever in classical antiquity a public health service, organised and paid for by the state, has been often debated by both doctors and classical scholars, with conflicting results. For fifth and fourth century Greece the amount of evidence available is insufficient to permit any certainty, but there can be no doubt that in the Hellenistic age individual cities offered special privileges in order to secure the residence of a qualified physician. But whether and in what ways such a system was carried over into the very different society of the Roman empire, and still more into that of late antiquity, are questions which have never been satisfactorily answered, and the authority of the Roman part of Pohl's dissertation De graecorum medicis publicis, despite its increasing age, has never been seriously challenged—indeed, some more recent studies have only highlighted by contrast its high level of accuracy, judgement and, for its time, comprehensiveness. However, the discovery of three new inscriptions of archiatri from Aphrodisias affords an opportunity to re-examine the institution of public doctors in the Roman empire and thereby to throw light upon a professional designation, archiatros/archiater, which has troubled scholars ever since Herodian the grammarian attempted to settle the position of its Greek accent. By surveying the evidence according to the varied societies in which the archiatri practised—the courts, the Eastern cities, the West and Rome in late antiquity, Constantinople and Roman and Byzantine Egypt—a much clearer picture of the spread of public doctors can be obtained without introducing anachronistic or extraneous attitudes and institutions to provide a single uniform pattern of development.

The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Nicholson
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Near East ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
The West ◽  
Persian Empire ◽  
Significant Period ◽  
Oxford Dictionary

Over 5,000 entriesThe first comprehensive, multi-disciplinary reference work covering every aspect of history, culture, religion, and life in Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East (including the Persian Empire and Central Asia) between c. AD 250 to 750, the era now generally known as Late Antiquity. This period saw the re-establishment of the Roman Empire, its conversion to Christianity and its replacement in the West by Germanic kingdoms, the continuing Roman Empire in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Persian Sassanian Empire, and the rise of Islam.Consisting of more than 1.5 million words, drawing on the latest scholarship, and written by more than 400 contributors, it bridges a significant period of history between those covered by the acclaimed Oxford Classical Dictionary and The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages, and aims to establish itself as the essential reference companion to this period.

Late latin grammars in the early middle ages

1986 ◽  
Vol 13 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 365-380 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivien Law
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Subsistence Level ◽  
Latin Language ◽  
Survival Pattern

Summary The popularity, and hence survival, of certain of the grammars of late Antiquity in the early Middle Ages can to a large extent be described in typological terms. The two principal ancient genres, the Schulgrammatik and the regulae type, were joined in the fifth century by a new genre, the grammatical commentary. The overwhelming importance of Donatus and commentaries on Donatus and the emergence of the elementary foreign-language grammar in the seventh and eighth centuries reveal the subsistence level of language study in early Christendom. The conceptually more challenging grammars of the regulae type, as well as shorter works of the Schulgrammatik type, suffered a temporary eclipse. The greater linguistic confidence of the Carolingian Renaissance shifted the balance toward works of a more varied and demanding nature. Priscian’s Partitiones and Institutiones grammaticae re-entered circulation and in the next few centuries were assiduously excerpted and glossed. Ancient Donatus commentaries were superseded by newly-written ones and were joined by Carolingian commentaries on the principal authors of the regulae type, Phocas and Eutyches. Shorter grammars of the Schulgrammatik type and minor regulae grammars enjoyed a brief return to favour in the first half of the ninth century but failed to establish themselves in the curriculum. Instead, Carolingian teachers devoted themselves to the development of another new genre, the parsing grammar, which was to survive well into the sixteenth century. The survival pattern of Late Latin grammars thus reflects the priorities of the early Middle Ages. In an environment in which the Latin language, and with it basic literacy, were barely established, the theoretical disquisitions of Varro and Priscian were irrelevant and unhelpful. Many ancient grammatical texts were undoubtedly lost at the end of Antiquity, during the transition from papyrus to parchment; others may well have disappeared in the pre-Carolingian period, when the demands of elementary language teaching were uppermost. This was the final hurdle: those ancient grammars which survived to the Carolingian Renaissance are virtually all available today.

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 Manipulating the Message: Letters of Gelasius and Nicholas I on Papal Authority

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bronwen Neil
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Papal Authority ◽  
The Way

Gelasius I, bishop of Rome during the problematic period of Odoacer’s replacement as rex Italiae in 493, was greatly concerned with the power of the bishop of Rome. While Gelasius was one of the most significant bishops of the first five hundred years of the Roman church, he is primarily known for his letter to the Byzantine emperor Anastasius in 494. His Epistula 12 introduced the controversial theory of “two powers” or “two swords.” The idea was taken up in the mid-ninth century by another champion for papal primacy, when Nicholas I embedded a quote from Gelasius in his denunciation of the Byzantine emperor Michael III. I examine the use of political rhetoric in ecclesiastical contexts in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, in particular the way that extracts from such letters could go on to have a life of their own in canon law. Finally, I measure the historical impact of each letter as a form of soft diplomacy.

scholarly journals Kościół późnoantyczny i wczesnośredniowieczny wobec problemu niechcianych dzieci w świetle postanowień zachodniorzymskich zgromadzeń biskupich

2020 ◽  
pp. 295-308
Author(s):  
Maciej Wojcieszak
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Small Contribution ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Church Hierarchy ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Church

The author analyses canon laws about abortion and unwanted children, which were issued by western Roman assemblies of bishops in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages (between the fourth and sixth centuries). Such problems were not mentioned often, but the Church instituted severe penalties for abortion and abandoning unwanted children. Bishops did not discuss reasons for abortion and abandoning children. They only penalized the results, but we can comment on the causes of such behaviours, analysing the contents of canon laws and using other sources from the epoch, like the writings of the Church Fathers and the Codes of Theodosius and Justinian. We can say that problems like abortion or abandoning unwanted children existed in various places and they were a subject of the local bishops’ concern. The church hierarchy did not devote much attention to the issue of unwanted children, considering that imperial and synodal regulations were adequate to deal with those problems. The issues analyzed here constitute a small contribution to our knowledge of the everyday life of the societies of the western part of the Roman Empire in late antiquity and in the early Middle Ages.

Coinage and the Tributary Mode of Production

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eduardo Manzano Moreno
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Role ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
The Social ◽  
Simple Question ◽  
Mode Of Production

This chapter addresses a very simple question: is it possible to frame coinage in the Early Middle Ages? The answer will be certainly yes, but will also acknowledge that we lack considerable amounts of relevant data potentially available through state-of-the-art methodologies. One problem is, though, that many times we do not really know the relevant questions we can pose on coins; another is that we still have not figured out the social role of coinage in the aftermath of the Roman Empire. This chapter shows a number of things that could only be known thanks to the analysis of coins. And as its title suggests it will also include some reflections on greed and generosity.

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