The temptations of cult: Roman martyr piety in the age of Gregory the Great

Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) was arguably the most important Roman writer and civic leader of the early middle ages; the Roman martyrs were certainly the most important cult figures of the city. However modern scholarship on the relationship between Gregory and the Roman martyrs remains curiously underdeveloped, and has been principally devoted to comparison of the gesta martyrum with the stories of Italian holy men and women (in particular St Benedict) told by Gregory in his Dialogues; in the past generation the Dialogues have come to be understood as a polemic against the model of sanctity proposed by the Roman martyr narratives. This paper explores Gregory's role in the development of Roman martyr cult in the context of the immediate social world of Roman clerical politics of the sixth and seventh centuries. Gregory's authority as bishop of Rome was extremely precarious: the Roman clerical hierarchy with its well-developed protocols did not take kindly to the appearance of Gregory and his ascetic companions. In the conflict between Gregory and his followers, and their opponents, both sides used patronage of martyr cult to advance their cause. In spite of the political necessity of engaging in such 'competitive generosity', Gregory was also concerned to channel martyr devotion, urging contemplation on the moral achievements of the martyrs – which could be imitated in the present – as opposed to an aggressive and unrestrained piety focused on their death. Gregory's complex attitude to martyr cult needs to be differentiated from that which was developed over a century later, north of the Alps, by Carolingian readers and copyists of gesta martyrum and pilgrim guides, whose approach to the Roman martyrs was informed by Gregory's own posthumous reputation.     

Translating relics: Victricius of Rouen and fourth‐century debate

This article uses a little‐known sermon by Victricius, bishop of Rouen, as an approach to the fourth‐century debate on the translation of relics. In the last third of the fourth century, the cult of martyrs and their relics was promoted by Damasus of Rome, Paulinus of Nola and Ambrose of Milan, but remained controversial in the western churches. Roman law forbade the disturbance of dead bodies, especially where magic was suspected. Christians as well as non‐Christians were repelled by the veneration of bone, bloodstains and dust, and by the extreme asceticism that was often associated with relic‐cult. The sermon Victricius preached, welcoming to Rouen a gift of relics from Ambrose, is here interpreted as an attempt at cultural translation. Victricius deploys a late‐antique education in rhetoric and philosophy to make relic‐cult and asceticism acceptable. Like many others, he uses the adventus, the ceremonial reception of a visiting emperor or his deputy by local aristocracy and officials, as an analogy for the reception of relics by ascetics and clergy. Exceptionally, he equates corporeal relics with the presence of God; but his unique theology of relics was lost to view.     

SEASONAL FEASTS IN ROMAN BRITAIN

Summary: Epigraphic sources for the celebration of festivals in Roman Britain mainly come from military sites. Archaeological evidence indicates that a calendar of festivals similar to that of Rome was also observed by civilians within the province. the temene of the larger temples, and theatres connected with such shrines, were obvious places for large-scale, popular gatherings but there was also an intimate family cult represented by the care of ancestral tombs and the midwinter Saturnalia festivities.
Finds of sacred objects such as a cernus for first-fruits (offered to Ceres) and a castration-clamp (used in the worship of Cybele) as well as works of art, including gems and terracottas, also throw light on Roman religion. There were close resemblances with Celtic practice, and fusion between imported cults and native ones must have occurred very frequently.
In late Roman times, the Christian calendar came into use in Britain; the celebrations of Easter and the veneration of the Saints are both attested in Dark-age written sources.     

The Convertible Saint: Expeditus through Time and Space

Expeditus, a Roman soldier who was for centuries simply a name on a list of early Christian martyrs, took on new life in the late eighteenth century in a Catholic cult that expanded greatly in the late nineteenth century and has continued to spread since then. His name linked him with time and the answering of prayers for urgent causes in particularly modern ways, despite growing scholarly scepticism about him. His unforgettable image — a Roman soldier crushing a crow or raven underfoot — has been adopted by Italian fascists and practitioners of Haitian vodou, among many others. Expeditus?s popularity on the internet is only the latest version of this unusual devotion.     

Through the eyes of a deacon: lesser clergy,major donors,and institutional property in fifth-century Rome

This is a study of the cults of two holy deacons at Rome: St Stephen and St Laurence. It is argued that the narratives associated with these saints were a medium for the resolution of two key, overlapping areas of tension: status anxiety within the clerical hierarchy, and relations between clergy and wealthy lay patrons. Controlling the ambitions of lesser clergy on the one hand, and on the other commanding the attention of major donors, absorbed a great deal of the energies of Roman priests and their bishop in this period. These issues converged on the figure of the deacon, understood in its early Christian sense as the helper/patron of the bishop. Defining the role of ‘deacons’ through the medium of saint cult was a necessary condition of the institutional development of the Roman church, and of church property.     

The martyr, the matrona and the bishop: the matron Lucina and the politics of martyr cult in fifth- and sixth-century Rome

The present study attempts to build on the achievement of Pietri and Llewellyn in assessing the peculiarities and limitations of the gesta martyrum as a source for late ancient and early medieval Rome, while shifting interpretative stress away from the lay—clerical binary which has dominated recent treatments of the cult of the saints, and toward an emphasis on factional conflict among lay—clerical coalitions. Central is an analysis of the literary motif, which recurs across the gesta of Lucina, the aristocratic matrona or widow who sees to the burial of the martyr on her own lands. Though the stereotypical figure of Lucina warns us of the limitations of the gesta as a source for the patronage activity of the lay aristocracy, it is argued, her appearance in crucial texts such as the Passio Sebastiani can nonetheless help us to trace the role which the memory of the martyrs played in texts such as the gesta martyrum, the Symmachan Forgeries, or the Liber Pontificalis, as well as the role which martyr shrines such as the Vatican basilica and the memoria apostolorum on the Via Appia played in the contestation and consolidation of Roman episcopal authority.     

罗马时代的信仰危机

异教时期的罗马国教具有公共性、反个人崇拜及相对宽容等特点。自从元首政治建立之后,随着东方思想的大量涌入,有关个人灵魂拯救的秘传崇拜开始打破公共崇拜对于信仰领域的垄断;皇帝崇拜日益冲击着城邦宗教中的共和与民主传统;与此同时,帝国政府对于异己思想表现得越来越不宽容。这种信仰危机随着3世纪社会总危机的爆发而日益加剧,其最直接的后果就是造成了普遍的道德危机。基督教的崛起有效地缓解了公共崇拜与私人信仰之间的张力,彻底瓦解了个人崇拜赖以存在的基础,并用一套全新的伦理原则重塑了社会的道德模式,因而最终结束了这场长达四百年之久的信仰危机。     

Constantine and the Bishop: The Roman Church in the Early Fourth Century

When Constantine first entered Rome after his defeat of Maxentius in October 312, he encountered a rich and complex Christian community and a bishop whose position was precarious. Centuries of growth and a long religious peace had resulted in the development of a large number of locally based communities in Rome with their own centres of worship - the tituli. Constantine needed to convince these communities of his bona fides as a Christian emperor. The bishop of Rome, Miltiades, was the ruler of a relatively newly unified see, recently fractured by persecution and controversy. Miltiades' relative weakness was to Constantine's political advantage, especially since it made him eager to receive the vast ocean of generosity which Constantine began to pour into the Roman Church. The particular and immediate beneficiary of this generosity was the bishop, who gained a vast and lavishly appointed cathedral, and a palace to go with it.     

Material memory: rebuilding the basilica of S. Cecilia in Trastevere,Rome

Examining Pope Paschal I's early ninth‐century architectural project of S. Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome, brings to light the diversity of functions of tituli in early medieval Rome. Not only was the church a papal basilica and site of the stational liturgy of Rome, but it was also a shrine to the saint Cecilia, a popular Roman martyr. The architectural arrangement makes clear that the papal project incorporated both the papal cult and the popular cult of the saint by manipulating the archaeology of the site and translating corporeal relics to the urban church.     

Enjoying the saints in late antiquity

The discovery at Mainz by Franĉois Dolbeau of a new collection of sermons of Augustine has enabled us to study, in far greater detail, the attitude of Augustine to the reform of the cult of the martyrs between 391 and 404. This study aims to understand Augustine's insistence on the need to imitate the martyrs against the background of his views on grace and the relation of such views to the growing differentiation of the Christian community. It also attempts to do justice to the views of those he criticized: others regarded the triumph of the martyrs over pain and death as a unique manifestation of the power of God, in which believers participated, not through imitation but through celebrations reminiscent of the joy of pagan festivals. In this debate, Augustine by no means had the last word. The article attempts to show the continuing tension between notions of the saints as imitable and inimitable figures in the early medieval period, and more briefly, by implication, in all later centuries.     

Review Article: The Lights that Failed - and Those Never Lit

The unresolved question of who would succeed Queen Elizabeth I in the last years of the sixteenth century had repercussions beyond the British Isles. For the papacy, the contested succession seemed to provide a possibility of returning England to the Roman Catholic Church. This article places the English succession crisis in an international context, analysing the interests of princes in Spain, France, Flanders, and on the Italian peninsula from the perspective of papal diplomacy. Studying Pope Clement VIII's efforts to balance these princely interests, this article examines the options discussed in Rome, which ranged from converting James VI of Scotland - if he became King of England - to installing a Catholic candidate from the European mainland. It argues that Pope Clement VIII was not duped into passivity by James VI/I's vague promises of conversion and demonstrates that the Pope pursued a flexible policy which considered the succession in England within a much wider context: the retention of the Catholic religion in Europe.     

Buried together,buried alone: Christian commemoration and kinship in the early Middle Ages

This essay explores the ways in which strategies of commemoration elaborated by kin groups changed after the end of the western Roman empire and what role Christianity played in these transformations. In order to shed some light on the situation, a broad sample of cemeteries dating from late antiquity and the early Middle Ages was analysed, focusing on the spatial organization of the individuals within the cemeteries and around cult places. For this purpose archaeological, physical anthropological and epigraphic data were studied and juxtaposed with the theoretical debates expressed by Christian writers. The data at hand seem to suggest that rather than radically transforming kinship commemoration strategies, Christianity added new ideological layers, making its use and display multidimensional.     

Polytheism impossible; or,the empty gods: Reasons behind a void in the history of roman religion

From the first decades of the nineteenth century, the gods of Rome have suffered discredit with respect to both the influence of Greek polytheism and the fervor of pre‐Christian and Christian monotheism. This attitude, not yet espoused by Gibbon and Herder, goes back to Hegel, whose system proclaimed the distressing emptiness of the mechanical gods of a religion already dead at the end of the third century B.C. This way of looking at Roman polytheism, propounded by a series of specialized studies published throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, gained even more ground with the appearance, in 1854, of Theodore Mommsen's History of Rome. The influence of the book as well as the personality of this unchallenged master of the German Universities were such that the theory of the death and the incoherence of the Roman gods spread throughout the universities of Europe, and continues even today to be determining in an important number of studies.     

De Gasperi and Togliatti: Political leadership and personality cults in post‐war Italy*

After twenty years of Fascism, political leaders were faced with the need to rediscover or invent new ways of relating to the mass public and, in the first place, to distance themselves from the type of relationship consolidated under Fascism. This article is based on an examination of the representations of De Gasperi and Togliatti in illustrated weeklies and in the satirical press, as well as their more or less hagiographical biographies. From the sources it emerges that, in the case of the Christian Democrat leader, the hypothesis that there was a personality cult is hard to sustain. By contrast, in the case of Togliatti, it does seem possible to argue that there were manifestations of a genuine cult, but these were set within the context of an institutional charisma.     

Roman soil and Roman sound in Irish hagiography

ABSTRACT

Irish hagiography displays considerable interest in communication between Ireland and Rome, particularly as this featured saints, popes and relics. While people and objects travel between the two places, there is also concern to circumvent the distance involved. This article discusses an episode of miraculous communication in the Irish Life of St Colmán Élo. Here messages and messengers travel from Rome, but time and space are also telescoped through aural and material means: the sound of the bell marking the death of Pope Gregory the Great and a gift from him of Roman soil to be spread on Colmán Élo’s cemetery. The article considers how the two elements function within their hagiographical context to connect Rome and Ireland, and how these places shaped the account. The roles of bell and soil both draw on their associations in Ireland and relate to papal communication as this was experienced and imagined more widely.     

Reading Livy against Livy: The dream and nightmare of (American) empire1

Recent debates over the rise of an American Empire have relied on analogies to past empires, from ancient Athens to modern Britain. Such historical analogies, while inexact and debatable, are a basic mode of understanding our relation to the past. This article explores the analogy of the United States to the Roman Empire. The figure of Rome is a contested legacy, as can be seen in the long-ago writings of Livy and Tacitus, in the developing ideal of Rome during the Middle Ages, and in the works of modern scholars and poets living under Soviet domination in Poland. Tacitus tells us that the most profound symptoms of empire may be seen in the homeland. The debate over analogies for the American Empire is thus a debate over the “state of America's soul.”