UCLA

This dissertation situates the development of early medieval Rome as a sacred city in its 6th- to 9th-century Mediterranean and Carolingian contexts. It demonstrates how the circulation of saints' cults through Rome contributed to fashioning Rome into a cosmopolitan cultural center that could radiate abroad its practices of commemoration to the Carolingian world north of the Alps. I challenge traditional teleological narratives that portray the early Middle Ages as a `dark' age in which Rome's sacred topography was orchestrated single-handedly by the papacy. Instead, I use understudied evidence (in particular saints' legends and recent archeological work), to retrieve a vibrant plurality of voices--of Byzantine administrators, refugees, aristocrats, monks, pilgrims, and others--who, together with ecclesiastics, participated in a shared eastern Mediterranean/Byzantine Christian culture and shaped a distinctly Roman version of Christian sanctity. This new Rome was appreciated and emulated by Carolingian audiences north of the Alps: a circulation of sanctity that reified and expanded Rome's `universalizing' pretensions.

An introduction explains the topic and presents an overview of Christian dedications in early medieval Rome. Six chapters consider saints or groups of saints in different neighborhoods, illustrating how diverse communities integrated these saints into Rome's sacred topography and how, in turn, these cults were exported to Carolingian audiences north of the Alps. Two chapters then investigate the means by which Rome's diverse sanctity was gradually incorporated into a more unified physical and mental landscape: Ch. 7, on the evolving papal interest in groupings of saints who offered bulwarks of sanctity for Rome and the papacy, and Ch. 8, on the Carolingian reception and appropriation of Roman sanctity, as seen through the lens of Ado's highly successful late-9th-century martyrology (calendar of saints), which presents a comprehensive vision of a Christian Rome.

Altogether, this reveals a city enmeshed in a wider world, whose distinctive profile of sanctity was not autochthonous or predestined, but which developed gradually, drawing on the far-flung resources of the medieval world.