Title Of Address In Christian Latin Epistolography To 543 A D

The present volume’s focus lies on the formation of a multifaccetted discourse on Christian martyrdom in Late Antiquity. While martyrdom accounts remain a central means of defining Christian identity, new literary genres emerge, e.g., the Lives of Saints (Athanasius on Antony), sermons (the Cappadocians), hynms (Prudentius) and more. Authors like Eusebius of Caesarea and Augustine employ martyrological language and motifs in their apologetical and polemic writings, while the Gesta Martyrum Romanorum represent a new type of veneration of the martyrs of a single site. Beyond the borders of the Roman Empire, new martyrs’ narratives can be found. Additionally, two essays deal with methodological questions of research of such sources, thereby highlighting the hitherto understudied innovations of martyrology in Late Antiquity, that is, after the end of the persecutions of Christianity by Roman Emperors. Since then, martyrology gained new importance for the formation of Christian identity within the context of a Christianized imperium. The volume thus enlarges and specifies our knowledge of this fundamental Christian discourse.

This collection of legal documents affecting the Christian Church in the Roman Empire is the first its kind in any language. In time the monuments here translated cover the period from the foundation of the Church to the deposition of Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor in the West (476), and to the publication of the second (and only extant) edition of the Code of Justinian I, the most conspicuous champion of Caesaropapism in the East (534)—each terminus ad quem being an arbitrary, but a natural, limit. The character of the originals, which are mostly in either Greek or Latin, is strictly secular, that is, the documents emanate from the State’s officials, ordinarily the emperors, and thus expose the State’s attitude toward the Church. —From the Introduction

Collected Studies CS1065 We assume that we have a clear understanding of how people in the Middle Ages thought and which attitudes they struck but in reality this is a subject of enormous complexity of which conclusions can only be drawn via painstaking archival research and decades of study. Giles Constable has spent a career analysing these forces and impulses and this new collection draws together his major findings on a host of topics including frontiers, metaphors, religious life and spirituality, and concepts of political theory.

The sixteen papers in this volume investigate the links between law and society during Late Antiquity (260-640 CE). On the one hand, they consider how social changes such as the barbarian settlement and the rise of the Christian church resulted in the creation of new sources of legal authority, such as local and 'vulgar' law, barbarian law codes, and canon law. On the other, they investigate the interrelationship between legal innovations and social change, for the very process of creating new law and new authority either resulted from or caused changes in the society in which it occurred. The studies in this volume discuss interactions between legal theory and practice, the Greek east and the Roman west, secular and ecclesiastical, Roman and barbarian, male and female, and Christian and non-Christian (including pagans, Jews, and Zoroastrians).