Urban Developments in Late Antique and Medieval Rome: Revisiting the Narrative of Renewal ed. by Gregor Kalas and Ann van Dijk

Abstract

Reviewed by: Urban Developments in Late Antique and Medieval Rome: Revisiting the Narrative of Renewal ed. by Gregor Kalas and Ann van Dijk Douglas Boin Urban Developments in Late Antique and Medieval Rome: Revisiting the Narrative of Renewal. Edited by Gregor Kalas and Ann van Dijk. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 2021. Pp. 342. €128,00. ISBN: 9789462989085.) In this model volume of collaborative scholarship, editors Gregor Kalas and Ann van Dijk have assembled an all-star list of scholars to address, in nine master-class case studies, one gradually emerging central question. As imperial Rome’s circle of influence diminished and other global centers of culture and commerce emerged in Asia and the Islamic worlds, with the Italian peninsula growing ever more insular by the minute, how did life in the city of Rome change over the third through twelfth centuries? Under the editors’ orchestration and jointly-authored introduction, the seemingly parochial theme reveals surprising insights into the legacy of Rome’s capacity for “creativity” (p. 26) in art, poetry, architecture, music, ritual and even financial matters, underscoring the city’s legacy of pursuing “productive responses to evolving circumstances” (p. 7). Rome as a symbol of apocalyptic disaster, this is not. Claims of liveliness across any city or community over a long stretch of nearly a thousand years, of course, can easily drain any analysis of historical specificity. The search for stability during a time of change becomes a sentiment just bland enough to keep all problematic or extenuating circumstances out of the scholar’s focus. Too sagacious to settle for trite and tired frameworks, however, editors Kalas and van Dijk have pushed their contributors toward precision, and what emerges here quite sharply is how important the seventh century was, in particular, in marking the gateway toward many of the new social and cultural realities that distinguished the classical city from the medieval one. The century that saw the last meeting of the Roman Senate (p. 28) would witness, as in Erik Thunø’s essay, the indisputable establishment of the popes as “martyr-saint impresarios” in church building, while Dennis Trout’s study of church inspirations under Pope Honorius, whose under-appreciated artistry is rendered by Trout in original verse translations, reveal a papal city “renewed and embarking on a novel course” (p. 162). In a city “deeply committed to curating its past for present purposes,” the seventh century, Trout writes in epigrammatic fashion marked “yet another renaissance” (p. 150). Where the contributors excel—Kristina Sessa on war, finance, and the clergy; Dale Kinney on the nuanced collaboration between lay and ecclesiastical stakeholders in illuminated manuscript production and architectural renovation; Luisa Nardini’s fascinating account of manuscript changes in musical notation, charting the “permeability” of Roman chant, replete with Frankish, Gallican, and Beneventan [End Page 173] influences—is to bring a radical or unorthodox way of seeing old material which asks scholars to consider it anew, to see even this later Rome still shaped by factors beyond its walls, and to study complex processes outside the traditional boundary divisions of time. Jacob Latham’s nod to the Jewish contexts for the study of early Christianity in his essay on public rituals, as well as William North’s discussion of Hebrew Scripture in the eleventh century, shows a welcome sensitivity to religious inclusion in an otherwise excellent volume that misses an opportunity to engage directly with the history and archaeology of Rome’s Jewish community on the eve of the Middle Ages. When the Roman Empire withdrew from its control of Dacia in the third century—a stunning retreat—foreigners threatened the empire’s borders, exposing what would become a lingering issue of who possessed citizenship and whether these rights and judicial protections might be acquired by outsiders. Kalas’s own study of the monuments of the fifth-century city reminds us that Romans frequently lived in a “denial of conflict” (p. 103). In his analysis of the medieval guidebook, the Mirabilia, John Osborne goes a step further. In Rome always lay a “wonderful blend of possible fact and utter fantasy” (p. 209). Douglas Boin Saint Louis University Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press ...