The Walls and Aqueducts of Rome in the Early Middle Ages, A.D. 500–1000

1998 ◽  
Vol 88 ◽  
pp. 166-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Coates-Stephens
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Urban Infrastructure ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Dark Ages ◽  
The City

Our knowledge of the city of Rome after the fall of the Western Empire is largely determined by its position as the seat of the Papacy. Historical studies are based principally upon the Liber Pontificalis and the writings of the popes themselves, while architectural and archaeological research has concentrated on the city's numerous churches, many of which for the period A.D. 500–850 are remarkably well-preserved. The best known modern syntheses in English from each field are probably Peter Llewellyn's Rome in the Dark Ages (1971) and Richard Krautheimer's Rome. Profile of a City (1980). If we look beyond the purely ecclesiastical, however, we find very little Archaeological studies of Rome's urban infrastructure—walls, roads, bridges, aqueducts, sewers, housing—tend to stop, at the latest, with the Gothic Wars of the mid-sixth century. The lack of research, and therefore lack of data, have in turn been interpreted as a sign that early medieval Rome was a city bereft of an artificial watersupply, and of the resources necessary to maintain such structures as the Aurelianic Walls. Studies of medieval urbanism have been affected by this dearth of evidence proposing, for example, settlement models with the population of the city crowded into the Tiber bend in order to obtain water.

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 diaconiae of Early Medieval Rome: From “Greek” to “Roman”, from “Private” to “Papal”?

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 90-132
Author(s):  
Philipp Winterhager
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Roman History ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Charitable Foundations ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
Secular State

Abstract Traditionally, scholarship has seen the history of the diaconiae, charitable foundations in the city of Rome, in line with the alleged general trends in Roman history in the early Middle Ages, i.e. the gradual “Romanization” of formerly “Greek” elements of Byzantine origin, and the “papalization” of secular (state and private) initiatives, both taking place primarily in the mid-8th century. Although the diaconiae had come under papal control as late as the 9th and eventually the 10th centuries, this paper argues that this development took place not as an abandonment of private forms of endowments prominent in Byzantine Rome, but namely through the appropriation of “post-Byzantine” aristocratic endowment practice by the popes around the turn of the 9th century.

THE URBAN IDEAL AND URBAN PLANNING IN BYZANTINE NEW CITIES OF THE SIXTH CENTURY AD

2003 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 196-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enrico Zanini
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Conceptual Model ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Historical Texts ◽  
New City ◽  
The City

Archaeological evidence and historical texts can be combined to distinguish some of the physical characteristics of Byzantine cities of the 6th c. A.D. They can also be used to define a common conceptual model which Byzantine people of the 6th c. recalled when they pronounced the word polis, either when they were defining an existing settlement or when they were planning a new city. This paper considers in particular four cities that were built anew or completely rebuilt in this time. The survival of the idea of the city in the 6th c. East also appears to be significant in understanding the preservation and renewal of this concept in the West Mediterranean, after the dark centuries of the Early Middle Ages.

Children and Confession in the Early Middle Ages

1994 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 53-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rob Meens
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages

The handbooks for confessors known as penitentials are, I shall argue, an important source for our knowledge of early medieval attitudes on the part of churchmen and others towards children. These texts, basically lists of sins with the prescription of an appropriate penance for each iniquity, can be said to reflect widespread practices and ideas. They originated in the Irish and British Churches in the sixth century and spread from there over all of Western Europe, where they remained in use until the twelfth century.

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.

Poet of the Medieval Modern

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
In Parenthesis ◽  
Stone Sculpture

The early Middle Ages provided twentieth-century poets with the material to reimagine and rework local, religious, and national identities in their writing. Poet of the Medieval Modern focuses on a key figure within this tradition, the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones (1895–1974), and represents the first extended study of the influence of early medieval culture and history from England on Jones and his novel-length late modernist poem The Anathemata (1952). The Anathemata, the second major poetic project after In Parenthesis (1937), fuses Jones’s visual and verbal arts to write a Catholic history of Britain as told through the history of man-as-artist. Drawing on unpublished archival material including manuscripts, sketches, correspondence, and, most significantly, the marginalia from David Jones’s Library, Poet of the Medieval Modern reads with Jones in order to trouble the distinction we make between poetry and scholarship. Placing this underappreciated figure firmly at the centre of new developments in modernist and medieval studies, Poet of the Medieval Modern brings the two fields into dialogue and argues that Jones uses the textual and material culture of the early Middle Ages—including Old English prose and poetry, Anglo-Latin hagiography, early medieval stone sculpture, manuscripts, and historiography—to re-envision British Catholic identity in the twentieth-century long poem. In The Anathemata Jones returned to the English record to seek out those moments where the histories of the Welsh had been elided or erased. At a time when the Middle Ages are increasingly weaponized in far-right and nationalist political discourse, the book offers a timely discussion of how the early medieval past has been resourced to both shore up and challenge English hegemonies across modern British culture.

Aachen — the Second Rome: a City as a Symbol of Power in Poetic Carolingian Texts

Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (9 (107)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Maya Petrova
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
Narrative Poetry ◽  
The Third ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
The City

The paper deals the construction of Aachen as a symbol of the power of Charlemagne (742/4 — 814). It discusses the poetic Carolingian texts, which played an important role in the formation of the medieval ideology of the unity of the City and the power of its creator. It is shown that the most striking example of the statement of such a worldview is the third book (v. 1—536) of the anonymous epic poem (not fully preserved), known in the early Middle Ages under the title “Charlemagne and Pope Leo” (Karolus Magnus et Leo Papa). It is noted that this text, containing a description of the construction of the Second Rome — Aachen, influenced the subsequent Carolingian poetic tradition, serving as a turning point in the development of narrative poetry during the reign of Charlemagne.

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