A two-day, international workshop held at FU Berlin on diverse aspects of the late antique and early medieval papacy in its Mediterranean capacity, with a special focus on its connections to North Africa, Egypt, Constantinople, Illyricum, Spain and Southern Italy. The aim is informal discussion which will generate new questions and insights from the rich source material available, in ways that move beyond the (rather unhelpful) older paradigms of ‘East vs West’, ’emperor vs pope’, ‘papal Ostpolitik’, etc.

Attendance and participation from scholars at all career levels is very welcome! Please contact Prof. Stefan Esders or Dr Benjamin Savill to register your interest.

Recent scholarship has done much to resituate the post-Roman / early medieval European kingdoms within their wider, Mediterranean context; increasingly globalised approaches to the period now take developments in, and connections to, Asia and Africa into account. Yet while this research has drawn attention to the potential importance of the papacy as a connecting node between these worlds, much foundational work remains rooted in older paradigms of “East vs. West”, “Byzantine captivity”, the “emancipation” of Rome, or papal Ostpolitik. The significance within Rome of its Greek and Syrian popes has been argued up and down, and outstanding multi-generational research has revealed the importance of Mediterranean migrant communities, religions and cultures in the city. Legal and diplomatic scholars have shown how written communications bounced back and forth between Roman bishops and those in Asia, Africa and the Balkans throughout the first millennium – many only extant now because north-western ecclesiastics copied and cited them, sometimes centuries after the fact. But the degree to which any of this impinged upon wider thinking about the meaning, function or significance of the papacy in the early middle ages has not enjoyed sustained attention or critical reflection.

Thirty years after T.F.X. Noble criticised papal historiography for its ‘morbid’ linearity, tracing the realisation of a fixed papal ‘idea’ along a ‘series of political-diplomatic encounters’, a renewed set of questions for approaching the early medieval, trans-Mediterranean papacy has yet to take its place. Despite excellent individual studies, the master narrative of eastern- and southern-facing papal history still trudges along its morose path, from pope to pope, from schism to schism, heading inevitably towards 1054. We can probably do better than this.

THIS WORKSHOP aims to bring together works-in-progress on diverse texts documenting and memorialising the role of first-millennium papal Rome within its widest Mediterranean context, in an effort to generate new research approaches. Its focus is chiefly (if not exclusively) on written communications and their later tradition, and on representations of the papacy outside Rome. How might different societies have thought of Rome’s bishops as points of contact with the wider Mediterranean world, and to what degree could this have been integral to the see’s appeal? How might we understand this through the lens of recent work on the post-Roman west’s polities as ‘kingdoms of the empire’, and what changed through subsequent centuries? What can the relatively well-documented record of the papacy’s cross-Mediterranean communications reveal about other, now more obscure connectivities in this period? And how was this later received? – i.e., what can later collections, copies, even forgeries, of Mediterranean-spanning papal texts tell us about those audience’s expectations about Rome and its outer orbit, or their ‘mental map’ of a world beyond Latin western Europe?

Participation from researchers across all fields, at all levels, is welcome and encouraged. Please contact Dr Savill or Prof. Esders to register your interest, just so we have a good idea about numbers in advance.

Programme :

TUESDAY 25 JUNE

9:30/45 – Assemble at Villa Engler, Altensteinstraße 2

9:45 – Welcome and introduction

10:00 – I. TESTING LATE ANTIQUE COMMUNICATION: EASTER 455
– Immo Warntjes (Trinity College Dublin): ‘Leo I and Easter’
Chair: Benjamin Savill (FU Berlin)

11:00 – Kaffeepause

11:30 – II. REORIENTATING THE SIXTH-CENTURY PAPACY
– Sihong Lin (University of Glasgow): ‘Papal History Without Papal Sources: Reconstructing the Pontificate of John III (561-74)’
– Katy Cubitt (University of East Anglia): ‘How (and Why) Not to Be a Hypocrite: Gregory the Great, John the Faster and the Genesis of the Regula Pastoralis’
Chair: Michael Wuk (University of Lincoln / FU Berlin)

13:00 – Lunch

15:00 – III. COLLECTING PAPAL CONNECTIVITY: THE AVELLANA AND HISPANA
– Alexander Evers (Loyola University Chicago, John Felice Rome Centre): ‘Into and Out of Africa – Letters Between the See of Rome and North African Bishops in the Collectio Avellana’
– Cornelia Scherer (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg): ‘Decreta … non impar conciliorum extat auctoritas: Papal letters in the Collectio Hispana’
Chair: Stefan Esders (FU Berlin)

16:30 – Kaffeepause

17:00 – IV. SPACES, HIERARCHIES, AND THE ILLYRICUM PROBLEM
– Wolfram Brandes (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main): ‘The Vicariate of Thessalonica after 531’
– Sebastian Kolditz (Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften): ‘The Definition of Patriarchal Jurisdictional Spheres in Late Antiquity’
Chair: Maya Maskarinec (University of Southern California / FU Berlin)

Dinner (Luise, Dahlem Dorf)

WEDNESDAY 26 JUNE

9:30/45 – Assemble at Villa Engler, Altensteinstraße 2

9:45 – V. ROME AND THE SOUTH AFTER 800
– Clemens Gantner (Universität Wien): ‘‘God Opposed This’: Nicholas I, Louis II and the Frankish Siege of Rome in 864′
– Caroline Goodson (University of Cambridge): ‘Rome and Ifrīqiya (Ninth to Eleventh Centuries)’
Chair: Gerda Heydemann (FU Berlin)

11:15 – Kaffeepause

11:45 – VI. LATIN CHURCHES, ALEXANDRIAN NORMS
– Andrea Verardi (Pontificia Università Gregoriana, Rome): ‘A Norming Memory: Traces of a Historiographical-Institutional Koine of the Churches of Rome and Alexandria between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages’
– Mathew Clear (Trinity College Dublin): ‘Propagating Papal Paschal Practices: Roman Letters to Britain and Ireland in the Seventh Century and the Adoption of the Alexandrian Easter Reckoning in Rome’
Chair: Michael Wuk (University of Lincoln / FU Berlin)

13:15 – Lunch

15:00 – VII. MILLENNIAL TRANSFORMATIONS
– Benjamin Savill (FU Berlin): ‘The Last Papyri: Egyptian Industry, Chinese Technology, and the Early Medieval Papacy’s ‘Gramscian’ Moment, 1005-1049’
– Maya Maskarinec (University of Southern California / FU Berlin): ‘Writing the Pope into the History of Southern Italian Monasteries: S. Maria in Tremiti, S. Benedetto in Conversano and S. Clemente a Casauria.’
– Stefan Esders (FU Berlin): Response
Chair: Stefan Esders

Finish by 17:00

Dinner (Shoo Loong Kan, K’Damm)

Informations pratiques :

Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin
Villa Engler, Altensteinstraße 2

25.06.2024 – 26.06.2024

Kontakt : Dr Benjamin Savill, benjamin.savill@fu-berlin.de

Source : Royal Historical Society