IMC 2015: Sessions

This session will take a closer look at some of the many strategies employed by bishops to establish themselves in Late Antiquity. During this dynamic period, political and religious affiliations were continuously renegotiated and new Spielräume created for elites to re-affirm their role in the intellectual elite of the post-Roman West. Each of the papers will, in turn, explore how different bishops took on various roles in these negotiations, in order to consolidate not only their own newly formulated authority, but also that of the religion they represented. To that end, Merle Eisenberg will first look at the ways bishops in fifth-century Gaul employed shifting representations of 'Romanness' and 'Christianity' in their sermons and homilies to argue for the establishment of orthodoxy in the face of Arianism, which was seen as a threat to their Nicene version of Christianity. Pia Bockius will then zoom in on the way the 6th-century senatorial bishop Gregory of Tours made use of the Bible to bolster his episcopal authority: namely, through the appropriation of relic cults. Specifically, the significance he gives to bodily resurrection and its relation to his ideas about saints and their relics will be addressed – ranging from the conservation of saintly bodies to the partition of their relics.