scholarly journals Death and Veneration: Treatment of a Martyr Death by Severus, Patriarch of Antioch (512–518)

Scrinium ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-21
Author(s):  
Pauline Allen
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
John Chrysostom ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

Among the homiletic corpora of late antiquity the 125 surviving homilies of Severus, patriarch of Antioch (512–518), provide us with a rich lode of works on martyrs. This is not surprising, given that Antioch was second only to Rome in the number of martyrs and saints it venerated. Previously I have examined Severus’ treatment of the deaths of two local martyrs, Barlaam/Barlaha and Romanus (in Martyrdom and Persecution in Late Antique Christianity. Festschrift Boudewijn Dehandschutter, ed. J. Leemans, Leuven – Paris – Walpole, MA, 2010, pp. 1–14) and of four martyrs foreign to Antioch, Drosis/Drosina, Julian, Dometius, and Leontius ( Journal of the Australian Early Medieval Association, 5 [2009], pp. 9–20), an examination that proved the quality of the sources which the patriarch used in his preaching. In this paper I intend to carry the discussion further by concentrating on Severus’ treatment of the death of St Babylas in one homily and two hymns, particularly in relation to the treatment accorded to the martyr in John Chrysostom, in order to situate Severus’ homily in the martyrial homiletic tradition and to trace the history of the veneration of this saint in the city of Antioch.


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.

scholarly journals DECONSTRUCTING THE SYMBOLIC CITY: JEROME AS GUIDE TO LATE ANTIQUE ROME

2012 ◽  
Vol 80 ◽  
pp. 125-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Grig
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Final Analysis ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
History Of ◽  
Saint Jerome ◽  
The City ◽  
Main Attraction

This article considers the writings of Saint Jerome as a source for writing a cultural history of the city of Rome in late antiquity. Jerome is of course, in many respects, an unreliable witness but his lively and often conflicted accounts of the city do none the less provide significant insights into the city during an age of transition. He provides a few snippets for the scholar of topography, but these do not constitute the main attraction. Jerome's city of Rome appears above all as a textual palimpsest: variously painted in Vergilian colours as Troy and frequently compared with the biblical cities of Babylon, Bethlehem and Jerusalem. In the final analysis, it is argued, Jerome's Rome is surprisingly unstable, indeed a ‘soft city’.

Life and Death, City and SuburbThe Transformations of Late Antiquity

2020 ◽  
pp. 229-234
Author(s):  
Allison L. C. Emmerson
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Cultivated Land ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The City

“Life and Death, City and Suburb: The Transformations of Late Antiquity” is a brief epilogue considering urbanism of the fifth century CE and beyond. As Rome’s population shrank, the city reoriented itself into a constellation of small settlements, scattered within the Aurelian Wall and surrounded by cultivated land. The residents of these settlements buried their dead within the wall, a development that has been seen to represent a sea change in mentality, but which is better read as a result of the city’s new topography and demography. Suburbs, furthermore, did not disappear in this period. Late Antique suburbs grew up around the suburban shrines of Christian martyrs, not only at Rome, but also in other Italian cities like Mediolanum and Nola. This period was marked by both continuity and change, but through it the dead remained present in urban life, continuing relationships carried through all stages in the history of Italy’s cities.

DARK AGE ROME: TOWARDS AN INTERACTIVE TOPOGRAPHY

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 311-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Cooper ◽  
Julia Hillner ◽  
Conrad Leyser
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Traditional Scholarship ◽  
The University ◽  
The City ◽  
And Diffusion

This paper represents a report on work in progress at the University of Manchester’s Centre for Late Antiquity. The goal of our research is to open a new chapter in research on late ancient and Early Medieval Rome, through the systematic collation and diffusion of relatively neglected sources, in particular the Roman gesta martyrum. They are not usually considered as a source for the social history of the city, because of their transparently tendentious character. Yet the gesta are our best witness to the ebullient of the Roman laity, on whose patronage the ecclesiastical hierarchy continued to depend. We hope to make the gesta more widely accessible, and to facilitate their cross-referencing with other kinds of source; our method is to combine the tools of traditional scholarship with contemporary digital technologies, the operation of which we briefly describe here.

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.

Environmental Change, the Acts of John, and Shifting Cultic Landscapes in Late Antique Ephesus

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-215
Author(s):  
Travis Proctor
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
Deep Water ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Christian Identity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Cultural Shift ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The City

The city of Ephesus experienced a marked civic transformation in Late Antiquity. After having centered its settlements and economic fortunes on its proximity to a deep-water harbor for over a millenium, late antique Ephesus gradually shifted to an inland, fortified settlement on Ayasoluk Hill. While several factors undoubtedly informed this civic reorientation, the most commonly cited impetus for Ephesus’s late antique reorientation was the infilling of its deep-water harbor. This article argues that, in addition to this environmental cause, an important cultural shift correspondingly informed Ephesus’s late antique reconfigurations. Namely, the emergence and development of the tomb of John on Ayasoluk Hill, informed by an array of literary legends associating the apostle with the city, increasingly positioned this site as a cultic and economic focal point in Late Antiquity. This article argues that an important early strand in this cultural fabric was the Acts of John, a collection of apocryphal tales that narrate John’s exploits in Ephesus. Significantly, the Acts of John articulates a “counter-cartography” that disassociates Christian identity from prominent Ephesian cultic sites and accentuates the importance of spaces “outside the city” of Ephesus, including and especially the tomb of John. Through its own circulation as well as its influence on later Johannine narratives, the early Acts of John helped inform a shift in the cultural cartographies of Ephesus, where Greco-Roman polytheistic spaces were gradually devalued in favor of Christian sites, the tomb of John on Ayasoluk chief among them.

Urban Change in Early Medieval Italy: The Example of Pavia

1966 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 82-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. A. Bullough
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Social History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Medieval Studies ◽  
Medieval Italy ◽  
Warm Hospitality ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

Prefatory Note.—My interest in Pavia goes back at least to 1951 when I was elected Rome Scholar in Medieval Studies. I began seriously to collect material for the history of the city in the early Middle Ages in the winter and spring of 1953 when I enjoyed the warm hospitality of the Collegio Ghislieri, thanks to the efforts made on my behalf by the late Hugh Last, to whose memory this article is dedicated. The published proceedings of the Reichenau and Spoleto congresses on ‘The early medieval town’ in the 1950s clearly underlined the need for detailed studies of particular towns; but the lack of adequate archaeological evidence discouraged me from attempting such a study of early medieval Pavia. In 1964, however, Dr. A. Peroni, Director of the Museo Civico invited me to read a supplementary paper on this topic to the Convegno di Studio sul Centro Storico di Pavia held in the Università degli Studi at Pavia on July 4th and 5th of that year. The present article is an amplified and corrected version of that paper: I have made no substantial alterations to my account of the ‘urbanistica’ of early medieval Pavia—written for an audience of architects and art-historians as well as of historians—but have dealt more fully with the social history of the city in this period. Professor Richard Krautheimer read a draft of the revised version and made some pointed and helpful comments. I am greatly indebted to Dr. Peroni, not merely for the invitation to present the original paper but also for supplying illustrations and answering queries at a time when he and his staff were engaged in helping to repair the ravages of the Florence floods.

Mime and the Dangers of Laughter in Late Antiquity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Webb
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Role Play ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
John Chrysostom

This chapter asks why joking and laughter were perceived as so dangerous and problematic by early Christians. Condemnations of laughter in the sermons of John Chrysostom refer to Paul’s rejections of eutrapelia (wittiness) in his Letter to the Ephesians and seek to create an association with Late Antique stage practices, particularly the comic performances of the mimes. In so doing, Chrysostom plays on widespread social prejudices against the mime. He also activates the root meaning of eutrapelia or ‘versatility’, thus identifying it firmly with theatrical role play. One result of this move, however, is to highlight a particular aspect of humour and its effects: much humour, including that of the mimes, demands a degree of intellectual versatility, the ability to see situations and practices from a different perspective and it may be precisely this that underlies the ban on laughter and wittiness pronounced by Paul and taken up by Chrysostom and others

Andrey Murav’yov’s travel in Abkhazia

2021 ◽  
pp. 217-233
Author(s):  
Marina I. Shcherbakova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Black Sea ◽  
The Black Sea ◽  
History Of Christianity ◽  
City Life ◽  
Literary Pilgrimage ◽  
Black Sea Coast ◽  
John Chrysostom ◽  
History Of ◽  
Economic State ◽  
The City

The article is devoted to the little-known travel notes about Abkhazia by Andrey N. Murav’yov, an outstanding Russian spiritual writer, the pioneer of the genre of literary pilgrimage travels, the discoverer of Christian and Orthodox shrines in Russia and abroad for his compatriots and contemporaries. Travel essay “Abkhazia. Pitsunda”, included as a separate chapter in the book “Georgia and Armenia”, was created under the impression of the author’s trip in the spring of 1847 to the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus. It presents genre sketches of the city life of Sukhumi, descriptions of the luxurious southern nature, it gives excursions into the history of the region, and it characterises the features of the economic state. The main part of Andrey Murav’yov’s Black Sea memories concerns Pitsunda. As a deep connoisseur of the history of Christianity, Andrey Murav’yov traced its ancient roots in the land of Abkhazia, where the apostles Simon the Canaanean, Andrew the First- Called, St. John Chrysostom. In detailed descriptions of the ancient churches, the writer recorded their condition; despite the artistic form of the story, they have the value of a reliable historical document that helps to reconstruct many of the losses that occurred under the influence of time.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document