Rome, Ravenna, and Venice, 750-1000

Rome, Ravenna, and Venice, 750-1000
Author: Veronica West-Harling
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 600
Release: 2020-08-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191069124

The richest and most politically complex regions in Italy in the earliest middle ages were the Byzantine sections of the peninsula, thanks to their links with the most coherent early medieval state, the Byzantine empire. This comparative study of the histories of Rome, Ravenna, and Venice examines their common Byzantine past, since all three escaped incorporation into the Lombard kingdom in the late 7th and early 8th centuries. By 750, however, Rome and Ravenna's political links with the Byzantine Empire had been irrevocably severed. Thus, did these cities remain socially and culturally heirs of Byzantium? How did their political structures, social organisation, material culture, and identities change? Did they become part of the Western political and ideological framework of Italy? This study identifies and analyses the ways in which each of these cities preserved the structures of the Late Antique social and cultural world; or in which they adapted each and every element available to them to their own needs, at various times and in various ways, to create a new identity based partly on their Roman heritage and partly on their growing integration with the rest of medieval Italy. It tells a story which encompasses the main contemporary narratives, documentary evidence, recent archaeological discoveries, and discussions on art history; it follows the markers of status and identity through titles, names, ethnic groups, liturgy and ritual, foundation myths, representations, symbols, and topographies of power to shed light on a relatively little known area of early medieval Italian history.

Rome, Ravenna, and Venice, 750-1000

Rome, Ravenna, and Venice, 750-1000
Author: Veronica West-Harling
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 721
Release: 2020-03-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0198754205

The richest and most politically complex regions in Italy in the earliest middle ages were the Byzantine sections of the peninsula, thanks to their links with the most coherent early medieval state, the Byzantine empire. This comparative study of the histories of Rome, Ravenna, and Venice examines their common Byzantine past, since all three escaped incorporation into the Lombard kingdom in the late 7th and early 8th centuries. By 750, however, Rome and Ravenna's political links with the Byzantine Empire had been irrevocably severed. Thus, did these cities remain socially and culturally heirs of Byzantium? How did their political structures, social organisation, material culture, and identities change? Did they become part of the Western political and ideological framework of Italy? This stusy identifies and analyses the ways in which each of these cities preserved the structures of the Late Antique social and cultural world; or in which they adapted each and every element available to them to their own needs, at various times and in various ways, to create a new identity based partly on their Roman heritage and partly on their growing integration with the rest of medieval Italy. It tells a story which encompasses the main contemporary narratives, documentary evidence, recent archaeological discoveries, and discussions on art history; it follows the markers of status and identity through titles, names, ethnic groups, liturgy and ritual, foundation myths, representations, symbols, and topographies of power to shed light on a relatively little known area of early medieval Italian history.

After Charlemagne

After Charlemagne
Author: Clemens Gantner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2020-12-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108840779

Offers new perspectives on the fascinating but neglected history of ninth-century Italy and the impact of Carolingian culture.

The Bonds of Love

The Bonds of Love
Author: Gordon Mursell
Publisher: CUA Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2021-12-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0813234417

St Peter Damian (1007-1072) is an exceptional example of a paradox that is found in many saints and thinkers through the ages (St Jerome, St Bernard, St Bridget of Sweden, St Teresa of Avila and Thomas Merton come to mind) – of a lifelong tension between two competing vocations: the call to solitude and holiness and the call to prophetic social and ecclesial engagement. The author has explored this tension throughout his adult life, both in his published work and in his own life as an Episcopalian/Anglican priest and later bishop. Damian’s “The Book of ‘The Lord be with you’” is a profound exploration of the spirituality of solitude, whereas his “Book of Gomorrah” is an intense attack on clerical sexual abuse which has helped to give Damian a new recent prominence in the light of the huge challenges facing the Church today. The Bonds of Love shows that the paradox at the heart of Damian's life and everything he cared about was rooted in the remarkable theology of love which finds expression across the whole of his work and gives it both coherence and dynamism. His life and spirituality are of far more than academic interest, and will make a major contribution, not only to those committed to ecclesial reform and renewal, but to all who struggle to live with the kind of competing tensions that made St. Peter Damian who he was.

Bounded Wilderness

Bounded Wilderness
Author: Kathryn Jasper
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2024-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501777629

In Bounded Wilderness, Kathryn Jasper focuses on the innovations undertaken at the hermitage of Fonte Avellana in central Italy during the eleventh century by its prior, Peter Damian (d. 1072). The congregation of Fonte Avellana experimented with reforming practices that led to new ways of managing property and relations among clergy, nobles, and the laity. Jasper charts how Damian's notion of monastic reform took advantage of the surrounding topography and geography to amplify the sensory aspects of ascetic experiences. By focusing on monastic landscapes and land ownership, Jasper demonstrates that reform extended beyond abstract ideas. Rather, reform circulated locally through monastic networks and addressed practical concerns such as property boundaries and rights over water, orchards, pastures, and mills. Putting new sources, both documentary and archaeological, into conversation with monastic charters and Damian's letters, Bounded Wilderness reveals the interrelationship of economic practices, religious traditions, and the natural environment in the idea and implementation of reform.

The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages

The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages
Author: Shane Bobrycki
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2024-11-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691189692

The importance of collective behavior in early medieval Europe By the fifth and sixth centuries, the bread and circuses and triumphal processions of the Roman Empire had given way to a quieter world. And yet, as Shane Bobrycki argues, the influence and importance of the crowd did not disappear in early medieval Europe. In The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages, Bobrycki shows that although demographic change may have dispersed the urban multitudes of Greco-Roman civilization, collective behavior retained its social importance even when crowds were scarce. Most historians have seen early medieval Europe as a world without crowds. In fact, Bobrycki argues, early medieval European sources are full of crowds—although perhaps not the sort historians have trained themselves to look for. Harvests, markets, festivals, religious rites, and political assemblies were among the gatherings used to regulate resources and demonstrate legitimacy. Indeed, the refusal to assemble and other forms of “slantwise” assembly became a weapon of the powerless. Bobrycki investigates what happened when demographic realities shifted, but culture, religion, and politics remained bound by the past. The history of crowds during the five hundred years between the age of circuses and the age of crusades, Bobrycki shows, tells an important story—one of systemic and scalar change in economic and social life and of reorganization in the world of ideas and norms.

Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome

Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome
Author: Maya Maskarinec
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2025-03-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1512827029

How elite Roman families used genealogy, architecture, and the urban fabric to appropriate the city’s saints for their own Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome explores the creative efforts of some of Rome’s most prominent noble families to weave themselves into Rome’s Christian past. Maya Maskarinec shows how, from late antiquity to early modernity, elite Roman families used genealogy, architecture, and the urban fabric to appropriate the city’s saints for their own, eventually claiming them as ancestors. Over the course of the Middle Ages, there developed a pronounced sense that churches and their saints belonged to specific regions, neighborhoods, and even families. These associations, coupled with a resurgent interest in Rome’s Christian antiquity as well as in noble lineages, enabled Roman families to “domesticate” the city’s saints and dominate the urban landscape and its politics into the early modern era. These families cultivated saintly genealogies and saintly topologies (exploiting, for example, the increasingly prolific identification of churches as the former residences of early Christian and late antique saints), cementing presumed connections between place, descent, and moral worth. Drawing from sources spanning the fourth to the late sixteenth century, Maskarinec brings into conversation saints’ lives, documentary evidence, family genealogies, monumental and domestic architecture, and medieval and early modern guidebooks, sources not often studied together. Bridging the divide between secular and sacred histories of Rome, Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome repositions these materials within a new story, of how Romans made the city’s classical and Christian past their own and thereby empowered and immortalized their families.

Ravenna and the Traditions of Late Antique and Early Byzantine Craftsmanship

Ravenna and the Traditions of Late Antique and Early Byzantine Craftsmanship
Author: Salvatore Cosentino
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 473
Release: 2020-08-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110684438

In the last twenty years scholarship on late antique and early medieval Ravenna has resulted in a certain number of publications mainly focused on the fields of architecture, mosaics and archaeology. On the contrary, much less attention has been paid on labour – both manual and intellectual – as well as the structure of production and objects derived from manufacturing activities, despite the fact that Ravenna is the place which preserves the highest number of historical evidence among all centres of the late Roman Mediterranean. Its cultural heritage is vast and composite, ranging from papyri to inscriptions, from ivories to marbles, as well as luxury objects, pottery, and coins. Starting from concrete typologies of hand-manufactured goods existing in the Ravennate milieu, the book aims at exploring the multifaceted traditions of late antique and early Byzantine handicraft from the fourth to the eighth century AD. Its perspective is to pay attention more on patronage, social taste, acculturation, workers and the economic industry of production which supported the demand, circulation and distribution of artefacts, than on the artistic evaluation of the objects themselves.

The Inheritance of Rome

The Inheritance of Rome
Author: Chris Wickham
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 548
Release: 2009-01-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 014190853X

The idea that with the decline of the Roman Empire Europe entered into some immense ‘dark age’ has long been viewed as inadequate by many historians. How could a world still so profoundly shaped by Rome and which encompassed such remarkable societies as the Byzantine, Carolingian and Ottonian empires, be anything other than central to the development of European history? How could a world of so many peoples, whether expanding, moving or stable, of Goths, Franks, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, whose genetic and linguistic inheritors we all are, not lie at the heart of how we understand ourselves? The Inheritance of Rome is a work of remarkable scope and ambition. Drawing on a wealth of new material, it is a book which will transform its many readers’ ideas about the crucible in which Europe would in the end be created. From the collapse of the Roman imperial system to the establishment of the new European dynastic states, perhaps this book’s most striking achievement is to make sense of an immensely long period of time, experienced by many generations of Europeans, and which, while it certainly included catastrophic invasions and turbulence, also contained long periods of continuity and achievement. From Ireland to Constantinople, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, this is a genuinely Europe-wide history of a new kind, with something surprising or arresting on every page.

Three Empires, Three Cities

Three Empires, Three Cities
Author: Veronica West-Harling
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Cities and towns, Medieval
ISBN: 9782503562285

This volume presents most of the papers given at a workshop held in Oxford at All Souls College in 2014, part of a research project which focuses on Northern and Central Byzantine and post-Byzantine Italy between 750 and 1000, and proposes a comparison between the development of three cities: Venice, Ravenna and Rome. These three cities share a common feature, which is to find themselves outside the framework of Longobard-Frankish power and society. A comparison between them allows us to glimpse the political, social and cultural development of areas in which the points of reference inherited from the past remain always more 'Roman' than 'Longobard' or 'Frankish'. These three cities have geopolitical characteristics which make them very different from each other: one is effectively independent from Frankish and Ottonian power (Venice), a second is formally independent but nevertheless much involved with Frankish politics (Rome), and the third becomes increasingly an integral part of the imperial system (Ravenna). The social and cultural analysis proposed here therefore includes political and ideological practice as well as self-representation through material culture. It aims to discuss the convergences and the divergences between the political realities and the political rhetoric, images and ideology, of early medieval Italy's empires, and to highlight the ways in which these have contributed to creating the cultures and societies of these three cities. Ultimately, its aim is to illuminate the factors which created the political, social, cultural, religious, artistic and material identity of early medieval Rome, Ravenna and Venice, based on their perception of both their past and their contemporary environments.