Ab Urbe in Franciam: Local topographies and the papal tour in the 12th century Liber pontificalis of Petrus Gulielmus

Abstract

The chronicle known as the Liber Pontificalis was redacted in Rome in the papal entourage. Begun in the middle of the 6th century, it was brought up to date for the next several centuries by several, largely anonymous compilers. Its central concerns were the papacy, and the city over which the bishop of Rome exercised his authority, whose monuments and physical development are charted in great detail. My paper examines a unique version of the Liber pontificalis, redacted in 1142 not in Rome, but in France, by Petrus Gulielmus, the librarian of the Abbey of Saint-Gilles (Nîmes). Using a Roman exemplar, composed in the 1130’s and now lost, Petrus Gulielmus revised the papal chronicle by inserting key episodes of his own abbey’s history within the ancient framework. In some cases, an imagined Rome and the papal court provide the setting in which the affairs of Saint-Gîlles are discussed and decided; in other cases, the abbey and its neighborhood are inserted within the itinerary of papal tours in France, creating a new ecclesiastical geography into which the pope’s person and its ceremonies are transferred from Rome and adapted to the local topographies.My paper explores these layered textual and geographical transformations, as a document of Rome and about the sites of Rome becomes a vehicle for the political and religious interests of a distant place.