IMC 2019: Sessions
Session 150: Amicitia and Beyond: An Elite Culture of Gift-Exchange in the Later and Post-Roman West, 4th-6th Centuries
Monday 1 July 2019, 11.15-12.45
| Sponsor: | Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz |
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| Organisers: | Tabea Meurer, Historisches Seminar - Alte Geschichte, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz Christian Stadermann, Historisches Seminar - Alte Geschichte, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz |
| Moderator/Chair: | Ralph Mathisen, Department of History, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign |
| Paper 150-a | A Question of Etiquette: Gift-Exchange and Epistolography as an 'Aristocratic' Art in the 4th-Century West (Language: English) Index terms: Rhetoric, Social History |
| Paper 150-b | Subversive Gifting in the Monastery: Clandestine Transactions, Hidden Solidarities, and Corporate Surveillance in Early Monasticism (Language: English) Index terms: Canon Law, Monasticism, Religious Life |
| Paper 150-c | 'Et quando fuerint a stupore conversi, non audebunt se aequales nobis dicere …': Gift and Gift-Exchange in Politics of the Ostrogothic Court of Ravenna (Language: English) Index terms: Political Thought, Politics and Diplomacy, Rhetoric |
| Abstract | In Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the term amicitia both marked and shaped social relations as mutual, value-based and binding obligations. Thus, amicitia is multi-layered: It did not only describe personal friendship, but also a symmetrical or pseudo-symmetrical bond between supposedly equal, functional, social, and political elites. Amicitia also provided a foreign policy instrument. Such individual and collective ties were primarily confirmed through the exchange of tangible as well as intangible gifts. This section deals with the socio-political dimension of amicitia and gift-exchange in the later and Post-Roman West. The papers focus on the objects, practices, rhetorics and strategies of gift-exchange as a means of diplomacy, as a phenomenon of in- and exclusion, and as a status symbol. Finally, they touch upon the impact of socio-political transformation on a late antique and early medieval culture of gift exchange. |