The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine offers students a comprehensive one-volume survey of this pivotal emperor and his times. Richly illustrated and designed as a readable survey accessible to all audiences, it also achieves a level of scholarly sophistication and a freshness of interpretation that will be welcomed by the experts. The volume is divided into five sections that examine political history, religion, social and economic history, art, and foreign relations during the reign of Constantine, who steered the Roman Empire on a course parallel with his own personal development.
In this book, an international team of experts draws upon a rich range of Latin and Greek texts to explore the roles played by individuals at ports in activities and institutions that were central to the maritime commerce of the Roman Mediterranean. In particular, they focus upon some of the interpretative issues that arise in dealing with this kind of epigraphic evidence, the archaeological contexts of the texts, social institutions and social groups in ports, legal issues relating to harbours, case studies relating to specific ports, and mercantile connections and shippers. While much attention is inevitably focused upon the richer epigraphic collections of Ostia and Ephesos, the papers draw upon inscriptions from a very wide range of ports across the Mediterranean. The volume will be invaluable for all scholars and students of Roman history.
The Tempietto, the embodiment of the Renaissance mastery of classical architecture and its Christian reinvention, was also the pre-eminent commission of the Catholic kings, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabel of Castile, in papal Rome. This groundbreaking book situates Bramante's time-honored memorial dedicated to Saint Peter and the origins of the Roman Catholic Church at the center of a coordinated program of the arts exalting Spain's leadership in the quest for Christian hegemony. The innovations in form and iconography that made the Tempietto an authoritative model for Western architecture were fortified in legacy monuments created by the popes in Rome and the kings in Spain from the later Renaissance to the present day. New photographs expressly taken for this study capture comprehensive views and focused details of this exemplar of Renaissance art and statecraft.
This book explores the intersection between two key developments of the fourth through seventh centuries CE: the construction of monumental churches and the veneration of saints. While Christian sacred topography is usually interpreted in narrowly religious terms as points of contact with holy places and people, this book considers church buildings as spatial environments in which a range of social 'work' happened. It draws on approaches developed in the fields of anthropology, ritual studies, and social geography to examine, for example, how church buildings facilitated commemoration of the community's dead, establishment of a shared historical past, and communication with the divine. Surveying evidence for the introduction of saints into liturgical performance and the architectural and decorative programs of churches, this analysis explains how saints helped to bolster the boundaries of church space, reinforce local social and religious hierarchies, and negotiate the community's place within larger regional and cosmic networks.
The last half century has seen an explosion in the study of late antiquity, which has characterised the period between the third and seventh centuries not as one of catastrophic collapse and ‘decline and fall’, but rather as one of dynamic and positive transformation. Yet research on cities in this period has provoked challenges to this positive picture of late antiquity. This study surveys the nature of this debate, examining problems associated with the sources historians use to examine late antique urbanism, and the discourses and methodological approaches they have constructed from them. It aims to set out the difficulties and opportunities presented by the study of cities in late antiquity in terms of transformations of politics, the economy, and religion, and to show that this period witnessed very real upheaval and dislocation alongside continuity and innovation in cities around the Mediterranean.
Il Convegno nasce come espressione della volontà della Soprintendenza Speciale Archeologica Beni Artistici e del Paesaggio di Roma, condivisa con questa Azienda, di ampliare le conoscenze sugli ipogei, che insistono al di sotto dei nostri Presidi Ospedalieri, in relazione e in analogia a quanto già condotto in precedenza, presso l’area di insediamento della Basilica Costantiniana, intitolata al Santissimo Salvatore, e le aree adiacenti, sulle quali vennero edificate tutte le altre strutture a compimento del Patriarchio, sin dal IV sec. d.C. La sopra citata volontà si è concretizzata con una apposita Convenzione, sottoscritta nel febbraio del 2018, che ha ritenuto di coinvolgere studiosi, appartenenti a prestigiose Università Italiane ed Internazionali, i cui attori principali erano quelli che fino ad allora avevano già dato il loro massimo contributo di alto valore scientifico, sia sull’ Area Lateranense sia nell’area di competenza dell’Antico Ospedale. The Conference came about as the expression of the desire of the Soprintendenza Speciale Archeologica Beni Artistici e del Paesaggio for Rome, a desire which our Administration also shared, to expand knowledge of the underground remains that stand below our hospital buildings, in relation to, and in analogy with, the work already done in the past, near the area where the Constantinian Basilica stood, which was dedicated to the Most Holy Saviour, and the adjacent areas, on which were built all the other structures to complete the Patriarchio, ever since the 4th century AD. This aforementioned desire took concrete shape with a special Agreement, signed up to in February 2018, which set out to involve academics from prestigious Universities, in Italy and abroad. The main players in this Agreement were the same ones who, up until that time, had already made their biggest contribution, of high scientific value, both in the Lateran Area and in the area pertaining to the Ancient Hospital itself.