| Paper 1319-d | O Roma Nobilis: The Mythical Image of Rome in the Middle Ages
(Language: English)
Javier Andrés Pérez, Departamento de Prehistoria, Historia Antigua & Arqueología, Universidad de Salamanca
Index terms: Language and Literature - Latin, Learning (The Classical Inheritance), Medievalism and Antiquarianism, Mentalities |
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| Abstract | Paper -a:
Born from the translation route of Three Wise Men's relics from Milan to Cologne, Epiphany music-liturgical drama Officium Stellae's sources (10th-14th centuries) told about another journey: the Three Kings' coming to Bethlehem to worship the baby Jesus. In a multidisciplinary, comparative, and semiotic approach will be analysed how the travel is realised in the drama by interacting plans and expressive codes: musical (notation, agogic, executives), liturgical (repertoires and believers as travellers), kinesics-proxemic (locus, transitional spaces, imaginary axis), dramaturgical (iconic objects, special machines), textual (rubrics, metaphorical, and allegorical devices) in a meaningful construction and communication of knowledge.
Paper -b:
We will try to study a series of accounts and beliefs that link the Holy Land and Galicia through magical objects that sail without a helmsman between the two places. These objects, which we will discuss, bore or were destined to bear, the remains of holy men.
The first testimony we have of these traditions concerns one of the best-known reoccurring themes in the universe of Jacobean legends.
We can also find this topic in popular legends that are deeply rooted in several points along the Galician coast, and which have generated some very important cycles of folklore, and some hagiographical texts dated from the Middle Ages.
Paper-c:
The 7th-century Visio Baronti presents us with a miraculous and visionary landscape of the mind. At the same time, it conveys a stern message on monasticism. The interesting contrast between playful narrative form (a lighter rendering of the forceful vision in the Vita Fursei) and strictly regular monastic content results in a fascinating mix of fact and fiction. The hallucinatory flight of Barontus above his own monastery conveys to him (and us) some key messages on the essence of devotion - a message with an unexpected political twist very relevant to 7th-century Austrasians.
Paper-d:
After the fall of the Roman Empire the city suffered a deep transformation and the Classical heritage almost disappeared. Pagan temples were transformed into churches and public structures, now completely ruined, became a source of building materials. Despite this loss, the idea of Aurea Roma was still alive in the minds of men, and the city attracted pilgrims fascinated by the splendour of the Christian legacy, but also by the remains of the Roman past. The purpose of this paper is to explore different literary and iconographic sources about the mythical image of Rome in the middle Ages, and how Rome gradually became a reference for Western identities.
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