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.

After the Roman empire fell, medieval Europe continued to be fascinated by Rome itself, 'the Chief of Cities', once the centre of the empire, including its history, its buildings, and above all its early Christian martyrs, and the papacy, central to the western Latin church. This book explores ways in which the city itself was preserved, envisioned, and transformed not only by its residents, but also by the many pilgrims who flocked to Rome, and by northern European cultures (in particular, the Irish and English) who imagined and imitated the city as they understood it.

An exploration of the significance of medieval Rome, both as a physical city and an idea with immense cultural capital.

Medieval Rome analyses the history of the city of Rome between 900 and 1150, a period of major change in the city. This volume doesn't merely seek to tell the story of the city from the traditional Church standpoint; instead, it engages in studies of the city's processions, material culture,legal transformations, and sense of the past, seeking to unravel the complexities of Roman cultural identity, including its urban economy, social history as seen across the different strata of society, and the articulation between the city's regions.This new approach serves to underpin a major reinterpretation of Rome's political history in the era of the "reform papacy", one of the greatest crises in Rome's history, which had a resonance across the entire continent. Medieval Rome is the most systematic analysis ever made of two and a halfcenturies of Rome's history, one which saw centuries of stability undermined by external crisis and the long period of reconstruction which followed.

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.

This book focuses on apse mosaics in Rome and engages topics including time, intercession, materiality, repetition, and vision.

Few other cities can compare with Rome's history of continuous habitation, nor with the survival of so many different epochs in its present. This volume explores how the city's past has shaped the way in which Rome has been built, rebuilt, represented and imagined throughout its history. Bringing together scholars from the disciplines of architectural history, urban studies, art history, archaeology and film studies, this book comprises a series of studies on the evolution of the city of Rome and the ways in which it has represented and reconfigured itself from the medieval period to the present day. Moving from material appropriations such as spolia in the medieval period, through the cartographic representations of the city in the early modern period, to filmic representation in the twentieth century, we encounter very different ways of making sense of the past across Rome's historical spectrum. The broad chronological arrangement of the chapters, and the choice of themes and urban locations examined in each, allows the reader to draw comparisons between historical periods. An imaginative approach to the study of the urban and architectural make-up of Rome, this volume will be valuable not only for historians of art and architecture, but also for students of cultural history and film studies.