IMC 2014: Sessions
Session 814: Rome and Israel: Gildas and the Fall of Empire
Tuesday 8 July 2014, 16.30-18.00
Sponsor: | Prato Consortium for Medieval & Renaissance Studies |
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Organiser: | Stephen Joyce, Centre for Studies in Religion & Theology, Monash University, Victoria |
Moderator/Chair: | Luca Larpi, School of Arts, Languages & Cultures, University of Manchester |
Paper 814-a | 'What happens when we leave?': Gildas and the End of Roman Britain (Language: English) Index terms: Historiography - Medieval, Political Thought |
Paper 814-b | The Chosen People of God: Gildas and the Historiographical Imagination (Language: English) Index terms: Historiography - Medieval, Language and Literature - Latin |
Paper 814-c | Criticising Authority: Gildas and His Prophecy for Britain (Language: English) Index terms: Biblical Studies, Monasticism, Theology |
Paper 814-d | Remembering the Fall: The Manuscript Reception of Gildas's De excidio Britanniae (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Latin, Manuscripts and Palaeography |
Abstract | In his De excidio Britanniae, Gildas systematically set out to admonish the morally corrupt secular and church leaders of partitioned 5th- or 6th-century Britain, calling for repentance, unity, and obedience to God's law in order to restore his beloved patria. In doing so, Gildas – straddling the transition between the antique and the medieval – was strikingly original: E.A. Thompson notes that Gildas was the first man in the entire west to write a provincial history; Michael E. Jones notes that this provincial history must have been a conscious rhetorical innovation; D.R. Howlett notes that no-one before Gildas had identified a single Christian people as praesens Israel; Thomas O'Loughlin notes that this perception of a people as a distinct baptised nation marks an important break in the history of theology. This session will examine the historical, rhetorical, and religious innovations of Gildas within the context of the topos, the Fall of the Roman Empire. |