This illustrated book is a coherently conceived collection of interdisciplinary essays by distinguished authors on the city of Rome and its contacts with western Christendom in the early Middle Ages (c. 500-1000 AD). The first part integrates historical, archaeological, numismatic and art historical approaches to studying the transition of the city of Rome from Antiquity to the Middle Ages and offers groundbreaking new analyses of selected sites and problems. Attention is given to the economic, social, religious and cultural history of the city. In the second part of the volume historical, archaeological, liturgical and palaeographical approaches address Rome's contacts and influence in Latin Christendom in this period, with particular regard to Rome's place within Italian politics and its cultural influence in Carolingian Francia and Anglo-Saxon England.

A new narrative history of medieval Christianity, spanning from A.D. 500 to 1500, focuses on the role of women in Christianity; the relationships among Christians, Jews and Muslims; the experience of ordinary parishioners; the adventure of asceticism, devotion and worship; and instruction through drama, architecture and art.

This illustrated collection of interdisciplinary essays addresses the transformation of the city of Rome from late antiquity to the middle ages, evaluates Rome's place in early medieval Italian politics and assesses contacts and influence in the Frankish and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

This tenth anniversary revised edition of the authoritative text on Christianity's first thousand years of history features a new preface, additional color images, and an updated bibliography. The essential general survey of medieval European Christendom, Brown's vivid prose charts the compelling and tumultuous rise of an institution that came to wield enormous religious and secular power. Clear and vivid history of Christianity's rise and its pivotal role in the making of Europe Written by the celebrated Princeton scholar who originated of the field of study known as 'late antiquity' Includes a fully updated bibliography and index

Discusses German influence on the development of early medieval Christianity.

The liturgy, the public worship of the Catholic Church, was a crucial factor in forging the society of early medieval Rome. As the Roman Empire dissolved, a new world emerged as Christian bishops stepped into the power vacuum left by the dismantling of the Empire. Among these potentates, none was more important than the bishop of Rome, the pope. The documents, archaeology, and architecture that issued forth from papal Rome in the seventh and eighth centuries preserve a precious glimpse into novel societal patterns. The underexploited liturgical sources in particular enrich and complicate our historical understanding of this period. They show how liturgy was the ‘social glue’ that held together the Christian society of early medieval Rome - and excluded those who did not belong to it. This study places the liturgy center stage, filling a gap in research on early medieval Rome and demonstrating the utility of investigating how the liturgy functioned in medieval Europe. It includes a detailed analysis of the papal Mass, the central act of liturgy and the most obvious example of the close interaction of liturgy, social relations and power. The first extant Mass liturgy, the First Roman Ordo, is also given a new presentation in Latin here with an English translation and commentary. Other grand liturgical events such as penitential processions are also examined, as well as more mundane acts of worship. Far from a pious business with limited influence, the liturgy established an exchange between humans and the divine that oriented Roman society to God and fostered the dominance of the clergy.

After the Roman empire fell, medieval Europe continued to be fascinated by Rome itself, the 'chief of cities'. Once the hub of empire, in the early medieval period Rome became an important centre for western Christianity, first of all as the place where Peter, Paul and many other important early Christian saints were martyred: their deaths for the Christian faith gave the city the appellation 'Roma Felix', 'Happy Rome'. But in Rome the history of the faith, embodied in the shrines of the martyrs, coexisted with the living centre of the western Latin church. Because Peter had been recognised by Christ as chief among the apostles and was understood to have been the first bishop of Rome, his successors were acknowledged as patriarchs of the West and Rome became the focal point around which the western Latin church came to be organised. This book explores ways in which Rome itself was preserved, envisioned, and transformed by its residents, and also by the many pilgrims who flocked to the shrines of the martyrs. It considers how northern European cultures (in particular, the Irish and English) imagined and imitated the city as they understood it. The fourteen articles presented here range from the fourth to the twelfth century and span the fields of history, art history, urban topography, liturgical studies and numismatics. They provide an introduction to current thinking about the ways in which medieval people responded to the material remains of Rome's classical and early Christian past, and to the associations of centrality, spirituality, and authority which the city of Rome embodied for the earlier Middle Ages. Acknowledgements for grants in aid of publication are due to the Publication Fund of the College of Arts, Humanities, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences at University College Cork; to the Publication Fund of the National University of Ireland, Dublin; and to the Office of the Provost, Ohio Wesleyan University.

Far from the oral society it was once assumed to have been, early medieval Europe was fundamentally shaped by the written word. This book offers a pioneering collection of fresh and innovative studies on a wide range of topics, each one representing cutting-edge scholarship, and collectively setting the field on a new footing. Concentrating on the role of writing in mediating early medieval knowledge of the past, on the importance of surviving manuscripts as clues to the circulation of ideas and political and cultural creativity, and on the role that texts of different kinds played both in supporting and in subverting established power relations, these essays represent a milestone in studies of the early medieval written word.

This book explores the development of the cult of the saints in western Europe between c.400 and 1000 AD. The main emphasis is upon Anglo-Saxon England, post-Roman Britain, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, but there are important contributions on Francia and on western Europe as a whole. No other volume combines such a broad geographical spread with such a wide range of disciplines and approaches - textual, archaeological, genealogical, onomastic, as well as historical. Veneration of innumerable local saints and martyrs is one of the defining characteristics of early medieval society. This book looks at how such saints came to be recognized and how they were enshrined, the circumstances in which they proliferated, and the factors leading to the development of their often extremely localized cults. Throughout, the aim is to emphasize the pan-European context, to place insular developments in a wider continuum extending from Ireland through to Rome and Byzantium. The volume combines wide-ranging surveys providing fundamental orientation on a variety of core subjects, with crucial reference material (including a handlist of all known Anglo-Saxon saints). It will be indispensable to all interested in Early Britain and Ireland, Anglo-Saxon England and to the culture of early medieval Europe as a whole.

The 19 papers presented in this volume by North American and European historians and archaeologists discuss how early medieval political and religious elites constructed ‘places of power’, and how such places, in turn, created powerful people. They also examine how the ‘high-level’ power exercised by elites was transformed in the post-Roman kingdoms of Europe, as Roman cities gave way as central stages for rituals of power to a multitude of places and spaces where political and religious power were represented. Although the Frankish kingdoms receive a large share of attention, contributions also focus on the changing topography of power in the old centres of the Roman world, Rome and Constantinople, to what ‘centres of power’ may have meant in the steppes of Inner Asia, Scandinavia or the lower Vistula, where political power was even more mobile and decentralised than in the post-Roman kingdoms, as well as to monasteries and their integration into early medieval topographies of power.