History

Crosses and cruciform representations on everyday objects found at Amorium provide a glimpse into the relationship between daily life and the spiritual world of the Byzantines. Of the objects found during the excavations, the encolpia (bronze crosses worn against the chest) have the most overt religious function both as objects of private veneration and as amulets to ward off evil. In addition, they clearly played an important role in funerary rites. Crosses also appear on a number of everyday objects, including lamps and jewelery, suggesting that the symbol was also popular as a decorative motif. Nevertheless, the ubiquitous nature of its use, even in the context of industrial and domestic buildings, clearly implies that the cross was a potent symbol and a very visible indication of Byzantine religiosity.

Few records survive from the early Middle Ages which demonstrate the way in which individuals were connected to one another within and among different segments of local elites, broadly defined by social position or occupation.  However, the wills and donations found in the Ravenna papyri shed light on specific moments when networks between individuals are visible and they capture the complex relationships among local elites of varying classes, occupations, and status who are gathered together under the direction of a testator or donor.  I argue that the witness subscriptions to these texts depict a fluid connection across ranks and occupation among those in military, episcopal, administrative, and mercantile groups in the changing environment of early medieval Ravenna.

Within the range of funerary monuments available in the early middle ages in Italy, sarcophagi were unique in that they were able to communicate in a number of different, and sometimes discordant ways: through the visual language of their decorative schemes and carved images; through the written word of inscriptions, labels, and epitaphs; and through the perceived power or authority of the body held within the stone. From the fourth century, when pagan funerary monuments were wholly adopted to new ideologies of Christian burial, to the twelfth century and its political, ecclesiastical, and spiritual reforms, sarcophagi remained important and visible commemorative vessels for deceased nobles, royals, bishops and saints.

Since Erwin Panofsky’s Tomb Sculpture (offered as four lectures in 1956), the iconographic language and iconological significance of these sepulcher monuments have received thorough attention and has generated valuable and insightful scholarship; what has lagged has been the relationship between the visual, the textual, and the imaginary means of communication, and especially the effect that the written word and memory has on the reception of these  objects. This paper will explore the interconnection of these three facets through a number of specific examples and case studies from Rome, Ravenna, and Milan, and focus on the ways in which words and text can disrupt, amend, or transform the commemorative function of funerary monuments. This broad sampling of monuments will offer a variety of was that beyond just writing on the bodies of the dead, each level of discourse, the object, the text, and its imaginary value, work to communicate to an audience different aspects of the deceased and to aid in the choreography of the responses.

This public workshop will bring together art historians, historians, archaeologists, botanists, and paleoecologists for short presentations and to discuss the ways in which evidence can be integrated across these diverse disciplines to understand changes in the landscape of medieval Italy. We seek to explore how data derived from the environment and human cultural production, at times contradictory, can be used to evaluate changes in climate and the effects of human modification on the landscape.

This public workshop will bring together art historians, historians, archaeologists, botanists, and paleoecologists for presentations and to discuss the ways in which evidence can be integrated across these diverse disciplines to understand changes in the landscape of medieval Italy. We seek to explore how data derived from the environment and human cultural production, at times contradictory, can be used to evaluate changes in climate and the effects of human modification on the landscape.

The position of Ravenna within Italy, its history connection to the Byzantine Empire, and its great importance to the 8th and 9th century Carolingians and 10th century Ottonians left deep and lasting impacts on the local aristocratic families in terms of their composition, titles, and roles. However, there were no set patterns or rules which governed the legitimacy of these familial lines and from the period of the exarchate until the arrival of the Ottonians, and various new families and relationships were formed and transformed in line with larger issue of central authority. While Ravenna begins the seventh century with a unique set of aristocratic families under the supervision of a Byzantine exarch, by the tenth century its notable families have become indistinguishable from and integrated into the comital ranks of northern Italy.

There are many sources that illuminate these families, including: chronicles and histories; episcopal, royal and imperial charters; and inscriptions and dedications.  Yet our most effective way to view these local and regional elites who we might label as nobles or aristocrats is through the papyrus and parchment records of sales, donations, wills and grants of emphyteusis connected to Ravenna, its church, and the broader region of Romagna, almost all of which have been recently reedited and republished. This chapter focuses on the titles, networks, and relationships which follow the transition from Ravennate aristocracy to a nobility using two methodological approaches. The first is a broad overview of the land exchanges through donations or through grants of emphyteusis as a means to identify noble families through their titles and relationship with the church of Ravenna and other religious houses, especially in the seventh and eighth centuries. The second methodological example takes into consideration the heredity nature of nobility in Ravenna through the observation of a single family, those descended from a dux, Gregory, and their integration into the larger network of comital families through marriages to Franks and members of the nobility originating from north of the Alps

Published in: Ravenna: its role in early medieval change and exchange , Judith Herrin and Jinty Nelson (eds)

http://humanities-digital-library.org.ac.uk/index.php/hdl/catalog/book/ravenna

Like many other locally produced ceramic objects, lamps were a ubiquitous part of Late Roman society, found associated with structures across the economic spectrum and in a wide range of contexts.  When filled with oil, they illuminated rooms, shops, and other buildings, but beyond this quotidian function they could play other roles through the images and decorations they possessed or the alternative contexts in which they could be used.  The analysis of these two facets assists in problematizing the ways in which an object could or could not designate religious persuasion, either paganism or Christianity. Between the fourth and sixth centuries, lamps take on a wide range motifs and images; some ornamental, such as vegetal or geometric motifs, with others far more illustrative, including those bearing mythological, Jewish, or Christian symbols or decoration.  These range from the depiction of simple crosses and menorot within decorate patterns to full depictions of gods, cult figures (such as Mithras or Isis), or saints; and while the cross or the Chi-Rho does not become a popular decoration until the fourth century, mythological figures continue to be depicted on lamps into the sixth century, suggesting that as popular object lamps may have little religious value without contextual evidence. 
Beyond their decoration, lamps often found alternative uses, funerary, devotional, and apotropaic.  In the city of Rome, they held magical defixiones; in Anatolia, they are frequently found in assemblages of late Roman Grave goods; in Egypt, they could be the vessels for holy oil.  While some of these contexts point to social and cultural practices, they do not exclude lamps as representative of a certain devotional practice, but rather can reinforce their religious functions.  By tying together these approaches with a range of examples from across the late antique Mediterranean, this chapter seeks to assess how everyday objects take on religious meanings and functions in the changing social and cultural contexts of Late Antiquity.

Published in: Pagans and Christians in the Late Roman Empire: New Evidence, New Approaches (4th-8th centuries), ed. M. Sághy, E. Schoolman (Budapest, 2017)

Knowledge of the direct role humans have had in changing the landscape requires the perspective of historical and archaeological sources, as well as climatic and ecologic processes, when interpreting paleoecological records. People directly impact land at the local scale and land use decisions are strongly influenced by local sociopolitical priorities that change through time. A complete picture of the potential drivers of past environmental change must include a detailed and integrated analysis of evolving sociopolitical priorities, climatic change and ecological processes. However, there are surprisingly few localities that possess high-quality historical, archeological and high-resolution paleoecologic datasets. We present a high resolution 2700-year pollen record from central Italy and interpret it in relation to archival documents and archaeological data to reconstruct the relationship between changing sociopolitical conditions, and their effect on the landscape. We found that: (1) abrupt environmental change was more closely linked to sociopolitical and demographic transformation than climate change; (2) landscape changes reflected the new sociopolitical priorities and persisted until the sociopolitical conditions shifted; (3) reorganization of new plant communities was very rapid, on the order of decades not centuries; and (4) legacies of forest management adopted by earlier societies continue to influence ecosystem services today.

Published in: Scientific Reports 8 (2018) 2138
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-20286-4

Abstract:
This article examines the instances when Greek script was used in the sixth- and seventh-century papyri documents originally preserved as part of the archive of the church of Ravenna. In interpreting these instances, we find both reflections of larger political events and smaller personal choices against the backdrop of continued migration from the Byzantine east to Italy following the conquest of the Ostrogothic kingdom by the armies of Justinian in the middle of the sixth century and the establishment of an exarchate dominated by military officials with various levels of clear »Greek« identity – political, hereditary, religious, and linguistic. Within this framework, participants in the creation of legal documents who were identified as grecus or wrote in Greek script did so for individual and micropolitical reasons that were distinct from conveying an ethnic identity, highlighting differences brought on by the situations in which they participated.

Keywords:  Byzantine Italy, Naples, literacy, linguistic identity, ethnic identification, Italian papyri, migration and acculturation

The final publication is available at Medieval Worlds via http://dx.doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no9_2019s139.

Knowledge of the direct role humans have had in changing the landscape requires the perspective of historical and archaeological sources, as well as climatic and ecologic processes, when interpreting paleoecological records. People directly impact land at the local scale and land use decisions are strongly influenced by local sociopolitical priorities that change through time. A complete picture of the potential drivers of past environmental change must include a detailed and integrated analysis of evolving sociopolitical priorities, climatic change and ecological processes. However, there are surprisingly few localities that possess high-quality historical, archeological and high-resolution paleoecologic datasets. We present a high resolution 2700-year pollen record from central Italy and interpret it in relation to archival documents and archaeological data to reconstruct the relationship between changing sociopolitical conditions, and their effect on the landscape. We found that:...

Romuald of Ravenna was one of the foremost reformers of the late tenth and early eleventh century, devoting his energy to establishing monastic communities that emphasised asceticism. After his death, he was celebrated for this work in a vita written by Peter Damian that described the conditions of the conversion of Romuald, who rejected the world after an encounter with St Apollinaris in the church of Sant'Apollinare in Classe outside Ravenna. Peter Damian's detailed account of this space not only created a fitting location for the conversion to monastic life, but in its appropriation of the visual, textual and hagiographic landscape it would have invited his eleventh-century audience who entered Sant'Apollinare in Classe to share in the same type of experience as his monastic hero, Romuald, and to connect with Ravenna's late antique patron saint directly.

In the 500 years after the political collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century CE, various new groups entered Italy, recasting the ranks of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals and local elites. In the social hierarchy of the late fifth century, Ostrogothic elite would exist in parallel with the late Roman aristocracy, while later arrivals-Lombards, Byzantines, and Franks, among others-would form entirely new aristocracies, bound primarily by local landownership and management, leaving behind the administrative apparatus of the late Roman Empire. Consequently, Italian aristocracies, especially at their highest levels, tended to reflect the conditions of their political systems through the tenth century, when changing pressures caused many family groups of the social and political elite to take on the qualities of hereditary nobility. This article traces the various developments of aristocracies, their composition, and contemporary definitions of dominant groups. 1 | INTRODUCTION The history of early medieval Italian aristocracies, the groups that held elevated status and significant local authority derived from social position, wealth, land, and the administration of justice, is one that is tied to the political history of Italy itself during this period. 1 With the decline of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, traditional hierarchies and systems of administration (such as using taxation to raise revenue) were replaced by, or evolved into, very different systems. The senatorial elites of late Roman Italy derived their status equally from family landholdings and from civil or military service in the Roman Empire and its immediate successors; new local and regional aristocracies arose, whose elevated positions were related to new wealth, service, and landholding, but in systems distinct from their Roman predecessors. These sometimes porous and often changing social groups arose in the sixth century This article was primarily written as a visiting researcher at the University of Padova.

From the fourteenth through the end of the sixteenth centuries, the primary political, economic, and environmental changes in Italy have been considered to be the impacts of a century of plague following 1348 and the transition from medieval to early modern political and social systems. While at the macro level across the politically divided Italian peninsula these are well attested, in the intermountain basin of the Velino River north of the central Italian city of Rieti, the historical and paleoecological data point to a range of other factors having an eff ect on the changing landscape. As events such as the arrival of the Black Death resonated in the resurgent forest following the steep decline in population, other local activities, such as the city's political realignment with Rome and its interest in controlling the hydrology of the basin as a free commune, equally left their mark on the local ecology of the basin. Ultimately, the historical and paleoecological evidence demonstrates infl uence by continental climate patterns; regional demographic, political, and economic changes; and local priorities in concert.