Medievalism Disoriented

This chapter examines the valency of the Middle Ages in the recent French political imaginary, tracing how the nationalist medievalisms of recent decades can be read as a response to the perceived threats and uncertainties of globalization. The chapter explores the heated debates sparked by neoreactionary commentator Éric Zemmour’s use of the Middle Ages to account for France’s apparent loss of identity in the era of multiculturalism and the globalized economy. It also analyses how these debates play out in three recent novels that offer medievalist explorations of contemporary French identity: Jérôme Ferrari’s Sermon on the Fall of Rome (2012), Michel Houellebecq’s notorious 2015 novel Submission, and Mathias Enard’s 2015 novel Compass. By examining these texts together, the chapter offers an account of how France in the age of globalization has used the Middle Ages to understand its own long, contradictory love affair with ideas of nation, empire, and world.

The Colosseum

This chapter provides an overview of the uses and structural history of the Colosseum, the largest amphitheatre constructed in the Roman world. Romans knew it as the ‘Amphitheatrum Flavium’, after the dynasty of emperors responsible for its construction. It continued in use even after the fall of Rome, with games still popular into the sixth century. The chapter examines the evidence for naumachiae during the inaugural games and concludes that it is most unlikely that the Colosseum area was flooded to a practical depth. It also reviews the evidence for the accommodation of spectators and its reflection of Roman society.

Conversions

This chapter discusses the gradual expansion of the Christian movement into Ireland. Despite widespread fears, the fall of the Roman empire did not herald the end of Christianity. Instead, it encouraged its expansion. Christian missionaries in Ireland worked to ensure that an island with an unfamiliar language and culture beyond the edge of the western empire would accept Christianity more than 100 years before the Anglo-Saxons, and centuries before other northern European peoples. For the fall of Rome and the crisis of imperial Christianity were contexts for the emergence in Ireland, and elsewhere, of a new kind of faith. From the early fifth century, and over several hundred years, the Irish converted to Christianity, shaping their new faith, exporting their theological and missionary cultures, and working for the conversion of the Picts, the Northumbrians, and Anglo-Saxons, as their Christian culture expanded throughout Europe, saving souls, if not ‘saving civilization’, at the end of the Roman world.

The Falls of Rome

Over the course of the fourth through seventh centuries, Rome witnessed a succession of five significant political and military crises, including the Sack of Rome, the Vandal occupation, and the demise of the Senate. Historians have traditionally considered these crises as defining events, and thus critical to our understanding of the 'decline and fall of Rome.' In this volume, Michele Renee Salzman offers a fresh interpretation of the tumultuous events that occurred in Rome during Late Antiquity. Focusing on the resilience of successive generations of Roman men and women and their ability to reconstitute their city and society, Salzman demonstrates the central role that senatorial aristocracy played, and the limited influence of the papacy during this period. Her provocative study provides a new explanation for the longevity of Rome and its ability, not merely to survive, but even to thrive over the last three centuries of the Western Roman Empire.

The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome

The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea traces the development and use of the rhetoric of Roman decline and renewal across 2200 years. Beginning in the Roman Republic at the turn of the second century BC and stretching to the uses of Roman decline in the present day, the book argues that the use of this common rhetoric frequently blamed people for sparking Roman decline. It also evolves over time. In the Republic, politicians like Cato pointed to decline in the present and promised future renewal. Augustus and other emperors beginning a new imperial dynasty often claimed to have sparked a renewal that corrected the decline caused by their predecessors. Early Christian emperors like Constantine and Theodosius I experimented with a rhetoric of progress in which they claimed that Rome’s embrace of Christianity meant it would become better than it ever had been before. The fifth-century loss of the West forced Christians like Augustine to disentangle Christian and Roman progress. It also enabled the Eastern emperor Justinian to justify invasions of Africa, Italy, and Spain as restorations of lost territories to Roman rule. Western emperors ranging from Charlemagne to Charles V used similar claims to support military action directed from the West against the East. Figures as diverse as Napoleon and Mussolini show that the allure of restoring Rome remained potent into the twentieth century, but the story of Rome’s decline and fall, popularized by eighteenth-century writers like Montesquieu and Gibbon, is now most frequently evoked as a warning about the consequence of social or political change.

(Mis)Identifying Teachers in Late Antique Gaul

Mamertus Claudianus, a priest in Vienne in the mid-fifth century, has been identified by some scholars as a professional teacher of Latin rhetoric. This article contests this classification, arguing that Claudianus was an active member of learned Christian literary circles and leader of philosophical and theological ‘literary salons’. It demonstrates the importance of correctly identifying teachers in the prosopography and illustrates the potential of incorrect identifications to produce flawed and distorted historical reconstructions of the cultural transformations of the late antique west. A close reading of the sources for Claudianus, coupled with a firm understanding of the cultural and educational realities of late antique Gaul, sheds light on the evolution of an increasingly Christian intellectual culture among the Gallo-Roman litterati of the fifth century, and contributes to a better understanding of the transformation of educational practices in this period and after the ‘fall’ of Rome.

The Conquest of Ruins: The Third Reich and the Fall of Rome

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