The "Aufbruchsstimmung" of the last decade of the second millennium did not leave the world of scholarship unaffected. As the political map of Europe was re-drawn in dramatic and unexpected ways, historians, including those of Late Antiquity, sought to re-position themselves and to accommodate the realities of the new world order in their interpretations of the past. The end of the Cold War and the simultaneous coincidental move towards a unified Europe challenged traditional views of the possibility of historical change, of the persistence of binary oppositions, and of the balance between regional interests and overarching political structures.
This is the spirit in which the "Transformation of the Roman World" project was created. Sponsored by the European Science Foundation, and under the general direction of Ian Wood, over 100 participants from more than twenty countries divided into five large working groups to engage in intense collaboration over a number of years. The five original working groups were: Imperium, regna et gentes; Settlement in Town and Countryside; Production and Demand; The Transformation of Beliefs and Cultures; Power and Society. Three large plenary conferences were held in Merida in 1994, in Le Bischenberg in 1996, and in Isernia in 1997. The findings of the working groups are published in a series, put out by Brill. The seven volumes that have already appeared have provided new stimulus to the study of a variety of aspects of Late Antiquity, and several more are in preparation. Also, an important exhibition was held in 1997 at the British Museum in London, the catalog of which integrates fundamental studies with archaeological evidence.
The present volume, the fifth in the series, is most successful as a documentation of the excitement generated by the project among participants and other scholars alike. All the papers are printed as they were originally delivered, with the sole addition of footnotes and rather less editorial intervention than the English idiom of some contributors should have required, so that the reader is very deliberately invited to be the proverbial fly on the wall.
In many other respects, it is rather a like an amorphous amassment of erudition. The volume is by its very composition a hybrid, since the last two papers, by Paolo Delogu and Thomas F. X. Noble, were delivered at the last plenary conference in 1997 to provide a critical assessment of the whole project from the perspective of the informed outsider, while the remaining 15 papers were given at the first plenary conference in 1994 dedicated to the specific theme of "Modes of Communication". In this context, Averil Cameron makes a passionate plea for the centrality to the whole TRW project of "communication" which she understands in the widest possible sense as subsuming concepts of continuity and change in the discourse of Late Antique culture. In her view, the theme of the Merida conference in itself constitutes the culmination of the TRW project as a whole. This is echoed by Ian Wood in the conclusion of his Afterword (282): "These lectures deserve to be taken together and treated as explorations of a single major theme." But no matter how forcefully such assertions are made, they fail to convince this reviewer that this volume presents a meaningful whole. It rather seems to resemble an attempt to justify a comparison between apples and oranges by calling both 'fruit'.
The hybridity of the volume is evident also in other ways. Within the parameters of the gigantic undertaking of the TRW project, the 1994 conference at Merida was the only venue where the Eastern Roman Empire and its successor, the Byzantine Empire, could be given their due. Many contributors to the volume were not part of the TRW project, which may go some way towards explaining the lack of cohesion between the papers and the absence of a uniform approach. The bulk of the contributions are arranged into pairs of two, with a first paper emphasizing the Eastern evidence followed by a corresponding contribution from a Western perspective. Hence the title "East and West". The reader who expects a volume on communication between East and West will be disappointed. The subject of communication over geographical distances has recently been en vogue at conferences, not only at sessions of the meeting of the American Philological Association in January 2000, but also at the "Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity" Conference held at San Francisco State University in March 2000, which was dedicated to the theme of "Travel in Late Antiquity". The forthcoming conference proceedings of that last event will speak to the issue of contacts between East and West in much greater detail than the volume under review.
The actual theme of the volume is "communication" understood in the widest possible sense to include not only the conveyance of information, knowledge and understanding (whether worldly or other-worldly), but also the means of that conveyance through language, texts and artistic representations.
Javier Arce, "The City of Merida (Emerita) in the Vitas Patrum Emeritensium (VIth Century A.D.)" analyzes this hagiographical document, of which two redactions were composed in the seventh century, as a historical source for the city of Merida under its bishops from 530 to 605. He shows that the work was intended to assert a distinct civic identity through the creation of a Christian (anti-Arian) history centered on the succession of bishops of the city under the continued protection of the martyr Eulalia. This paper may have served the purpose of setting the historical context for the plenary conference at Merida, but it does not directly address the conference theme, except perhaps by explaining how the anonymous deacon who authored the earlier of the two redactions aimed his work "at the people of Merida, straightforward and simple people, and also at the mixed Romano-Gothic society which still inhabited the city" (5) through the deliberate adoption of a simple narrative style.
The actual sequence of paired papers begins with Peter Brown's contribution "Images as a Substitute for Writing". He discovers a "watershed in the Christian imagination that falls somewhere in the late sixth century" (32) and is certainly evident in Gregory the Great's letters to Serenus of Marseilles of 599 and 600, where pictorial representations are treated as equivalent to texts. The kind of communication that interests Brown is that from viewer to picture, as he isolates two basic approaches towards Christian images and symbols in Late Antiquity: that which imbues images with an almost magical presence of numinous quality (reminiscent of the traditional approach to pagan statuary and to imperial images and hence deeply suspect to Christian thinkers), and that which focuses on the message of the picture itself. In order to control the magically charged approach and to evade any suspicion of idolatry in Christian guise, men of the church such as Gregory advocated a shift of Christian viewing practices from adoratio to lectio, so that pictures ceased to communicate a divine presence and instead were considered as conveyors of a message or story. Ian Wood's response "Images as a Substitute for Writing: A Reply" puts Brown's thesis of a shift from praesentia to pictura to the test by studying several works of art from Italy and Northern Europe. He shows that the notion of praesentia cannot be completely excised from the Christian approach to art in the Early Middle Ages. Praesentia furthermore remains a key component in ritual re-enactments such as liturgical celebrations and pilgrimage. The first pair of papers thus explores communication in the hierarchically inverted sense of viewer response to an existing message or conveyor of meaning.
The next pair of papers, by contrast, deals with communication that proceeds from top down. Specifically, they investigate the social and political factors that influence the choice of a particular language (Latin or Greek) or of a particular linguistic register (high or low). The late Nikolaos Oikonomides discusses the development of bilingualism in the Byzantine Empire between the sixth and the ninth century in a very interesting and meticulously researched paper on "Administrative Language and its Public Deployment". As the administrative language of the Roman Empire, Latin continued to enjoy a certain cachet in the East until the seventh century. This is most evident in the employment of Latin letters for the inscriptions of Greek names or titles on the lead seals that were used in commercial enterprises. After that time, however, there is a noticeable disjunction between the Byzantine political identity as "Rhomaioi", the heirs of the Roman Empire, and the preferred use of Greek in all public communication. Mayke de Jong juxtaposes these observations with her study of the use of high-level Latin by the Carolingians in the ninth century ("Some Reflections on Mandarin Language"). She terms this stylized and formal register of Latin a "Mandarin" language that enables its users to signal their close relation to the center of power. She dismisses the commonly held notions that the use of "Mandarin" Latin separates the clergy from the laity and administrative from ecclesiastical use. Rather, this deliberately exclusive language was employed by a small group of highly educated men within each context, thus contributing to a further stratification within the educated elite.
The literary medium of hagiography and its differentiation from history is the subject of the papers by Lennart Ryden and Ian Wood. Ryden ("Communicating Holiness") examines some 50 prologues of Greek hagiographical texts from the fourth to the tenth centuries in order to illustrate how Byzantine hagiographers themselves reflected on their role as authors. They regarded themselves as communicators of eternal spiritual truths, made manifest in individual holy people, that are exempt from the passage of time--a crucial distinction to the writing of history. Ian Wood's paper "The Use and Abuse of Latin Hagiography in the Early Medieval West", which was not originally delivered at the Merida conference, provides an overview of the varieties of purpose and the multiplicity of literary forms that were employed in Latin hagiography from the fifth to the eighth century, and concludes by drawing attention to the peculiar difficulties in using such texts as historical sources.
The next pair of papers by Averil Cameron and Walter Pohl are, along with the concluding lectures of Paolo Delogu and Thomas Noble, the most methodologically far-reaching in the whole volume. They concern communication as the management of knowledge and as the means for the representation of identity. Cameron ("Social Language and its Private Deployment") interprets the concepts of "communication" and "language" in the widest possible sense to advocate a de-centralized model of Late Antique society, characterized by "modularity". In this view, the impetus for change does not necessarily reside with the state and its representatives, but may originate from a variety of sources, thus resulting in a greater "permeability" of society and culture than the traditional model would allow. As an example of this kind of change in the cultural landscape of Early Byzantium, she chooses to examine the different manifestations of a general "uncertainty...about the status of knowledge itself" (116) and comes to the conclusion that access to knowledge and its dissemination was not monopolized or regulated by a central authority, but was "a matter of what one could get and where one could get it". (120) This goes some way to confirm that, despite its own posturing and assertions to the contrary, especially in legal and administrative texts, the Late Roman state was "a creaking and leaky boat rather than a well-controlled ship of state". (113) Walter Pohl ("Social Language, Identities and the Control of Discourse") gives a masterful reading of four personal histories of sixth century on the dual levels of factual history and cultural discourse: the Armenian strategos Giliakos who is killed in Gothic captivity, the soldier Busas who instructs his Avar captors in siege warfare, the young Gepid at pains to explain how he gained possession of the gold belt of a member of the imperial guard, and the hermit Hospitius who is mistaken for a condemned murderer by his Lombard attackers. These vignettes illustrate how individuals successfully navigated "the twilight between romanitas and barbarism" (138) and employed multiple identities to their own advantage. Pohl thus shows how changes in the discourse about and representation of ethnic and--in the case of the hermit--religious identity accompanies the transformation of the imperium into gentes and regna. (140)
The only two strictly art historical papers in the volume address Late Antique sculpture as a means of communication. Beat Brenk ("Mit was fur Mitteln kann einem physisch Anonymen auctoritas verliehen werden?") focuses on portrait sculpture from the fourth to the sixth centuries. He shows that, despite the apparent uniformity of facial features in Late Antique portraiture, individuality of character, particularly auctoritas and dignitas, could be expressed through the addition of a beard or through the choice of a particular hairdo. Niels Hannestad ("How did Rising Christianity Cope with Pagan Sculpture?") re-visits the issue already raised by Brenk of the disappearance of three- dimensional sculpture by the end of Late Antiquity. He rejects the notion that Christianity, despite its anti-iconic Second Commandment and its hostility towards the honors shown by pagans to religious and imperial statuary, should be held responsible for this development. Instead, he situates Christian religiosity and aesthetic firmly in the contemporary context of an "Age of Spirituality" which facilitated the interpretatio Christiana of large numbers of statues of figures from Greek and Roman history and literature and from pagan mythology that were displayed prominently in the private villas of the fourth century and later. According to Hannestad, the reason for the disappearance of three- dimensional sculpture should be sought in the decline of city life which seriously impacted the circle of potential patrons and reduced the actual space available for the display of large sculptures in the round. A further contributing factor was the fashionable predilection, among the wealthy elite, for small- scale luxury items such as ivories. Thus, while Brenk deals with a very specific question about the content of artistic communication in the medium of sculpture, Hannestad's contribution addresses the more general issue of the disappearance of this medium altogether.
The final pair of papers on the theme of communication concern the interrelation of language with religious and ethnic identity. Christian Hannick ("Le développement des langues regionales et l'introduction d'alphabets dans des communautes illettrees"), similar to Hannestad, is reluctant to hold Christianity responsible for the emergence of new cultural trends. His analysis of the circumstances of the introduction of the alphabet to Armenia and Georgia in Late Antiquity and to Bulgaria in the ninth century shows that the creation of new languages or new alphabets was not a missionary tool, but occurred after the initial encounter with Christianity in order to accommodate the liturgical needs of the growing Christian communities. Michel Banniard ("Conflits et compromis langagiers en occident latin: de la crise culturelle a l'invention linguistique [IIIe-Xe siecle]") traces internal developments in the use of Latin in Late Antiquity and then discusses the subsequent emergence of Romance languages that is evident in the different regions of the former Western Roman Empire from the eighth century. Far from being an unchangeable monolith, Latin as a written language was subject to changes over time. Banniard abandons the traditional distinction between literary and oral communication for a more sophisticated model that restores agency to all users of Latin, including the illiterate, because authors as well as listeners belong to the "community of speakers". (239) The development of Romance languages should thus be seen not as a decline of traditional latinitas, but as an organic development of which culminates in the modern European languages. (241)
The two concluding papers do not address the theme of "communication", but are general assessments of the TRW project as a whole. Paolo Delogu ("Transformation of the Roman World: Reflections on Current Research") notes that the project, for all its merits, continued to operate within the parameters of chronology and geography established by Henri Pirenne. At the same time, it succeeded in advancing scholarship by focusing on the concepts of ethnogenesis and acculturation, of disruption (especially in the archaeological record), and of regional disaggregation and re-integration (evident in the patterns of distribution of material goods). He concludes by suggesting an agenda for future research that would place the real break in the periodicization of the Western Middle Ages in the tenth century and that would pay greater attention to Italy and Spain as regions where the Northern and the Mediterranean-based systems overlap, and where the influence of Byzantium (and of Islam) is most noticeable. Thomas Noble ("The Transformation of the Roman World: Reflections on Five Years of Work") gives a detailed history of the project and its component groups and their achievements. The reader who endeavors to ingest the whole volume is well advised to read Noble's paper first in order to understand the workings of the TRW project. Its great contribution, Noble agrees, lies in advancing the understanding of ethnogenesis and the multi-layered processes involved in the settlement of the barbarians. This line of research, it must be added, was not generated by the TRW project, but was pioneered by the Viennese school associated with the names of Herwig Wolfram and Walter Pohl. Noble further applauds the project for its deliberate abandonment of the model of a centralized state in favor of greater attention to small spaces, which represent the only tangible reality for the people at the time. Like Delogu, Noble notes that Pirenne's master narrative has not been replaced in outline, but acknowledges that it has been seriously challenged in most details. He too advocates an expansion of the geographical range of inquiry to include the Balkans, Scandinavia and the Celtic world. His main critique of the project concerns its lack of methodological reflection in its publications and its lack of cohesion (270): "Even as I admire and learn from the individual contributions, I have a hard time fitting them together into a coherent picture."
This remark could equally well be applied to the volume under review. It is a book by insiders for insiders in Late Antique studies. It assembles an array of important and widely recognized scholars whose contributions merit attention in their own right. It sometimes gives a glimpse of the inner workings of the TRW project. On the bookshelves of posterity, it will have its place as one component part, and perhaps not the most significant one, in the substantial library of publications created by the TRW project.