As its title suggests, this excellent collection of essays, which grew out of a 2016 workshop held at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, examines the different ways late- and post-Roman Christian authors attempted to regulate access to cultural, economic, and social resources, and the texts that were produced (or manipulated, or altogether forgotten) as part of this process. Edited by Yaniv Fox (Bar-Ilan University) and Erica Buchberger (University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley), the volume contains twelve chapters divided into four parts, bookended by an introductory essay by Fox and a short conclusion by Chris Wickham. As Fox explains in his introduction, inclusion and exclusion “come into sharper relief when seemingly monolithic social and cultural constructs are shaken, setting into motion processes of adaptation and change” (6). The various disruptions that marked the late antique and early medieval Mediterranean makes this a particularly fertile area to explore this topic.
Part I, entitled “Literate Communities and their Texts,” is comprised of three essays. Carmela Vircillo Franklin’s opening chapter considers the Liber Pontificalis, a fascinating text that was revised over centuries, often for reasons that remain obscure to modern scholars. Franklin focuses on the so-called “Frankish Redaction,” a group of manuscripts containing 23 interpolations in four eighth-century papal vitae, six of which relate to the Franks. This has often been understood as a deliberate attempt by Frankish scribes to incorporate the Carolingians into the history of the Roman church and its bishops. But as Franklin reasonably argues, “Frankish Redaction” must be understood considering all 23 interpolations, which likely began as marginal notes, most of which had nothing to do with the Franks. And crucially, if there was a plan to include the Franks in papal history, it was executed in Rome, not Francia. Next, Dirk Rohmann considers the strategies of textual inclusion and exclusion employed by “pagan” and Christian authors between the fifth and seventh centuries. Specifically, the author sketches out how pre-Christian conceptions of heresy (hairesis), which denoted different philosophical views or schools, influenced the Christian rhetoric of exclusion. Heresy came to refer to deviant branches of the “true faith” (as understood by the authors who employed the term), but also philosophical systems that likewise stood outside the biblical/revelatory tradition. In the context of theological debates such as the Christological Controversy, Christian polemicists blamed “pagan” philosophy for causing divisions within the church. Shane Bjornlie’s stimulating essay suggests that Beowulf, likely produced (translated? transliterated? transcribed?) as part of the literary culture associated with the court of Alfred the Great, was a reaction to anxieties about cultural conflict between Anglo-Saxons and Vikings (and to a lesser extent, the Carolingian Franks). Thus, the central conflict in the poem “between the monster and the mead hall, or Grendel and Heorot, may be understood as a means by which an Anglo-Saxon audience transposed the dilemma of Viking settlement in England onto earlier Scandinavian society” (71).
Part II examines Christian responses to late antique theological controversies and the competing group identities these controversies engendered. Yonatan Livenh’s contribution argues that the emphasis upon intra-Christian conflict in the ecclesiastical histories of Socrates Scholasticus and Sozomen can be read as a deliberate literary strategy mobilized to condemn the increasingly vitriolic nature of the theological controversies of the fifth century. While many of our surviving sources portray the opposing factions of the Christological Controversy in starkly antagonistic, terms, there are exceptions. Daniel Neary explores the writings of Anthony of Choziba, a surprisingly nonpartisan seventh-century Palestinian monk who, unlike many of his peers, emphasized the accommodation of various positions, although as Neary admits, in “demanding that the religious squabbles of the past be placed to one side,” Anthony’s goal was the restoration of the Levantine church to its past glory. Anthony’s “message was one borne less of tolerance, than of mounting exasperation” (127). Peter Schadler’s chapter assesses the authority (or lack thereof) of ecumenical councils for Christian communities located in areas of the former Roman world conquered by the Arabs in the seventh century. Increasingly detached from the Constantinopolitan church, Melkite Christians in the east paid little attention to councils after Chalcedon (451), with the partial exception of the Sixth Ecumenical Council, which is featured in Theodore Abū Qurrah’s defense of conciliar authority written in the early ninth century. Taken together, Schadler illustrates the gradual and contingent processes through which councils did (or did not) become authoritative.
Four thought-provoking essays are included in Part III, entitled “Persecution and Dissent.” For several decades, scholars have recognized that Vandal religious policies targeting Nicene Christians were based on Roman anti-heretical legislation, especially laws directed at suppressing Donatism promulgated at the court of Honorius. Éric Fournier’s excellent essay takes this point further: Vandal lawmakers did not simply copy Roman precedent; they carefully selected the least coercive laws, which called for fines and banishments. This relatively mild approach contrasts starkly with the with the aggressively intolerant attitudes of North African Nicene bishops such as Augustine, whose petitions to Honorius produced the very laws that would later be used by the Vandals against Nicene Christians. Ultimately, the Donatists were classified as heretics rather than schismatics, and as such were made subject to the harshest legislation including proscription and the death penalty. Equally stimulating is Robin Whelan’s chapter, which skillfully problematizes the association posited by some historians between Gothic ethnicity and “Arian” (more accurately, Homoian) Christianity in Ostrogothic Italy and Visigothic Spain. As Whelan convincingly demonstrates, the priority for late antique Homoian Christians (not unlike their Nicene counterparts) was the preservation of orthodoxy, not ethnic boundaries. This point is crucial for our understanding of the post-Roman kingdoms in the Latin west and should be shouted from the rooftops. The final two essays in this section examine Christian attitudes towards the Jews in the Visigothic Spain and Merovingian Gaul respectively. Erica Buchberger’s study traces the construction of Gothic identity in Spain after 589 and its relation to the kingdom’s famously anti-Jewish polices. As Buchberger explains, as the term “Goth” gradually came to denote a both a political and religious community (subjects of the Visigothic kingdom and Catholics), the Jews were left as conspicuous others whose presence undermined “the idealized image of a unified Christian people” (211). Finally, Thomas J. MacMaster situates the anti-Jewish polices of Dagobert I within the wider context of Emperor Heraclius’ general persecution of the Jews, which he initiated following the defeat of Sassanian Persia. Surprisingly, Heraclius’ hostility towards Judaism may have had its greatest impact beyond the empire. Imported into Merovingian Gaul, the author concludes, Dagobert initiated what was perhaps the most successful purge of Jews in the early medieval period.
The final section contains two essays, which examine elite networks. Emmanuelle Raga’s reading of Sidonius Apollinaris’ references to the food habits of barbarians cleverly illustrates the primacy of status rather than ethnicity. Theoderic the Visigoth demonstrated himself to be a perfect sovereign through his mastery of aristocratic hospitality; Burgundian soldiers were vulgar rustics gorging themselves with garlic and onions like peasants (the same critique would apply to “Roman” soldiers); the Vandal king Geiseric was a gluttonous, debased, aristocrat. In short, Sidonius relates food habits to social status. “For Sidonius,” Raga concludes, “food habits are a tool of social distinction, not ethnic differentiation” (254). In the volume’s final essay, Aleksander Paradziński argues that the Ardaburri, a clan of powerful military men of Alanic origins, achieved power and influence in the empire precisely because they were able to transcend religious and ethnic boundaries to develop wide-ranging networks of patronage, which situated the family firmly within fifth-century Roman society. But while quintessentially Roman in some ways, the Ardaburii also sought to position themselves as separate from the traditional circles of Roman elites. This allowed them to establish close ties with other non-Roman military elites. But the “symbolic community” of barbarians and heretics, which they constructed cut both ways. Ultimately, their otherness was mobilized by their opponents to justify their suppression.
It is hard to disagree with Wickham’s assessment in his conclusion that this is an extremely satisfying volume. In a world that feels both increasingly polarized and uncertain, this volume makes for timely reading. It illuminates criteria for inclusion and exclusion and reconsiders how these criteria created (or failed to create) the boundaries separating peoples and communities. It also points to several examples of modern scholarly misunderstandings of these boundaries and problematizes the notion that late antique and early medieval identities based on religion and/or ethnicity were largely stable and mutually-reinforcing. In short, this is an excellent collection of thought-provoking essays deserving of a wide audience.