Doctoral Dissertations
Date of Award
5-2021
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Major
History
Major Professor
Jacob A. Latham
Committee Members
Christine Shepardson, Matthew Gillis, Maura K. Lafferty
Abstract
The Roman world of the fourth and fifth centuries CE was one of imaginative potential. Following the emperor Constantine’s embrace of Christianity, Christians across the Mediterranean grappled with the pitfalls and possibilities presented by accession to positions of power in the Roman Empire. Chief amongst the pressing concerns facing late ancient Christians was the thorny question of what a Roman Christian world might look like – how Christianitas or “Christianness” might be understood, envisioned, and experienced in landscapes and communities dotting the Empire. Related were issues of what shape(s) this Christianitas might take, and how post-Constantinian Christians would make sense of the inheritances of their past. Theirs was a history in which legacies of violence and ideals of martyrdom loomed large. Yet, with Christians increasingly at the helm of Empire, the question remained as to what role(s) this violent martyrial past might play, or, indeed, if it would play any role at all. In order to meet these challenges and opportunities head-on, Christians had to exercise the resources of imagination. Processes of so-called Christianization were thus inherently entangled with a kaleidoscopic array of imaginative approaches to understanding the past while making sense of it for the present.
This dissertation dives headlong into these imaginative Christianizing processes. In it, I examine how the late ancient Christian poets Damasus, Prudentius, and Paulinus of Nola used verse to help Christianize their audiences’ social imaginaries. I argue that this trio of poets encouraged their audiences to understand and experience their histories, communities, and landscapes through a lens of memorialized martyrial violence. By crafting narratives of torture and embedding them poetically in commemorative sites and practices, these poets offered their audiences a vision of a Roman Christian world that was distinctly martyrial, violent, and spatial. Inflected by the wider context of post-Constantinian potential as well as local tensions, these poets’ works provide essential texture to our understandings of imaginative Christianization in communities across the western Mediterranean. Through intensive study of poeticized martyr narratives of the late fourth and early fifth centuries, my project reveals the bloody beating heart of late ancient Roman Christian imaginaries.
Recommended Citation
Roesch, Laura Kathleen, "“A Fine Spray of Blood”: Martyrdom, Violence, and Sacred Landscapes in the Late Antique Mediterranean. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2021.
https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/6740
Included in
Ancient History, Greek and Roman through Late Antiquity Commons, History of Christianity Commons, History of Religion Commons