Events
Guest Lectures
We are pleased to announce that our guest researchers will deliver a paper on November 28. Please register by sending an email before 25 November to: citizenshipdiscourses@uu.nl
From Murder to Martyrdom: the Passio Sigismundi regis in its textual context
Prof. dr Gordon Blennemann (Université de Montréal)
This paper offers some new thoughts on an important example of late Merovingian hagiography: the Passio of the Burgundian king Sigismund. The Passio Sigismundi not only contributed to the elaboration of the hagiographical figure of the novus martyr, it redefined the history of the decline of the Burgundian kingdom in a context of ongoing debates about the balance between the universal framework of a Frankish realm and the legitimacy of traditions and political ambitions within the Tria regna. A careful analysis of the structure of the text and its relationship with other textual traditions opens perspectives to better understand the political and social implications of the Passio Sigismundi as part of these debates.
Civic Ideology and Citizenship Discourses in the Liber Pontificalis
Thomas Langely MPhil (University of Cambridge)
The Liber Pontificalis forms one of our principal textual sources for late antique and early medieval Rome, and its role in constructing and disseminating the papal account of events in the city has long been acknowledged. Yet despite this papal focus, there are traces of a more civic idiom in the later sections of the text. Via close textual analysis, I will examine when, how and why the writers of the Liber Pontificalis used concepts like the good of the city or its people, particularly when talking about benefaction and donation in the city. While generally functioning beneath or within a broader discourse of papal Christian charity, this analysis will suggest that civic language had a distinct, and sometimes uncomfortable, persistence in papal histories.