Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Maskarinec, Maya.

Series:

The Middle Ages Series

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (337 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025.

Summary:

How elite Roman families used genealogy, architecture, and the urban fabric to appropriate the city’s saints for their ownDomesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome explores the creative efforts of some of Rome’s most prominent noble families to weave themselves into Rome’s Christian past. Maya Maskarinec shows how, from late antiquity to early modernity, elite Roman families used genealogy, architecture, and the urban fabric to appropriate the city’s saints for their own, eventually claiming them as ancestors.Over the course of the Middle Ages, there developed a pronounced sense that churches and their saints belonged to specific regions, neighborhoods, and even families. These associations, coupled with a resurgent interest in Rome’s Christian antiquity as well as in noble lineages, enabled Roman families to “domesticate” the city’s saints and dominate the urban landscape and its politics into the early modern era. These families cultivated saintly genealogies and saintly topologies (exploiting, for example, the increasingly prolific identification of churches as the former residences of early Christian and late antique saints), cementing presumed connections between place, descent, and moral worth.Drawing from sources spanning the fourth to the late sixteenth century, Maskarinec brings into conversation saints’ lives, documentary evidence, family genealogies, monumental and domestic architecture, and medieval and early modern guidebooks, sources not often studied together. Bridging the divide between secular and sacred histories of Rome, Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome repositions these materials within a new story, of how Romans made the city’s classical and Christian past their own and thereby empowered and immortalized their families.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction

CHAPTER 1 Medieval Rome and Its Noble Families

CHAPTER 2 Property and Piety: The Houses of Saints in Late Antique and Early Medieval Rome

CHAPTER 3 Genealogies of Saints: The Specter of the Anicii

CHAPTER 4 Saintly Genealogies: The Frangipani and Gregory the Great

CHAPTER 5 Saintly Genealogies: The Savelli and St. Alexius

CHAPTER 6 Religious Houses and Their Noble Founders in Rome: The Cells of St. Francis, St. Dominic, and St. Benedict Anicius

CHAPTER 7 Early Modern Rome and Its Hidden Treasures

Conclusion

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9781512827026

1512827029

OCLC:

1459225092