The subtle and slightly puzzling title of this volume poses the risk that the important contributions it contains may escape all but the most vigilant bibliographers and scholars. It is at once scrupulously edited and splendidly produced. The editors' introduction explains both the source of the title—a Carolingian hymn for the feast of Saints Peter and Paul—and the three scholarly conferences from which the fourteen papers here presented have been drawn.
The volume is divided into two parts. The seven papers in the first, “Articulating the City: Communities, Congregations, Cults and Processions,” deal primarily with the early Middle Ages and focus mostly on Rome itself. The main context for the cultural expressions that are explored in several of the other contributions is set by Alan Thacker's long paper on “Rome of the Martyrs: Saints, Cults and Relics, Fourth to Seventh Centuries.” This was of course the period in which the city is regularly messed up (the colloquial verb is meant to cover sacks, attacks, and sieges, to say nothing of several outbreaks of plague) by external forces; nonetheless, pilgrims persisted, and were awed: evidently, Thacker concludes, “it was the sheer number of Rome's martyrs that impressed” (49). The next paper, Caroline Goodson's on the architecture of saint veneration in early medieval Rome, complements this well; she emphasizes sensibly “the distinction between Roman and non-Roman relics, and the distinction between bodies and their shrines within the walls and without” (54).
The great basilicas were of course central to Rome's impact. Studied carefully here are the placement of the imagery in Santa Maria Maggiore, by Carol Neumann de Vegvar (who takes a surprisingly but convincingly gendered approach), and the patrons of Santa Maria Antiqua, by Stephen Lucey (who finds one of the key factors to be that of ethnicity). A different approach is taken by Joseph Dyer, whose study of the processions in Rome for the Major Litany on April 25th is a musicological contribution of wide-ranging import. This story, the origins of which lie in the sixth century, is of necessity carried into the twelfth, and is drawn out with welcome attention to the topographical and textual aspects as well as the musical. A major change in both route and character some time during the eleventh century seems to carry implications that historians interested in the so-called Investiture Controversy might want to pursue.
The reuse of sarcophagi in Ravenna as well as Rome is investigated by Dorothy Verkerk; ingenious examples of “inscribing” on the original word-carving abound. The latest chronological treatment in part 1 is Kirstin Noreen's fascinating consideration of the insignia used by the late medieval Confraternity of the Santissimo Salvatore, whose ostensible purposes were to protect the miraculous image of Christ in the Vatican but which inevitably came to exercise political influence (the Colonna were major players) and philanthropic patronage.
The second part, “Reading the City: Envisioning, Interpreting and Imitating Medieval Rome,” extends the volume's purview as far as England and Ireland, with two papers devoted to each. It is refreshing to have a numismatic contribution, Anna Gannon's engagingly titled “Three Coins in a Fountain”: a consideration of three stages of Anglo-Saxon coinage from evidence found in Rome. In a study of absorbing interest John Doran lays out the picture of Rome presented by a Benedictine monk of Chester named Lucian in 1195: a lengthy treatise on Rome (and a detailed comparison of it with his home city!). The result is the suggestion that “the prestige of Rome remained an important factor in twelfth-century England” (307), despite the troubles that Henry II and John had with the papacy. The three surviving letters of Columbanus to early seventh-century popes are mined by Damian Bracken to sketch a picture for which his title, “Juniors Teaching Elders,” is entirely apt. The same sort of evidence is used, to different effect, in Charles Doherty's wide-ranging survey of seventh-century Ireland in several self-conscious relationships with Rome.
Two of the papers in the second part are mainly art-historical. John Osborne argues carefully that the celebrated mural paintings in San Lorenzo fuori le mura should be dated from the twelfth rather than the eighth century; and Martina Bagnoli looks at decorative motifs in the crypt of the Duomo at Anagni in the light of ornament in Roman painting as a whole (the eleven photographs of the Anagni crypt, which few will have seen, are specially welcome). Finally, in an appropriately high-spirited vein, Dale Kinney attempts to balance “Fact and Fiction” in the enigmatic twelfth-century treatise Mirabilia urbis Romae; a document so puzzling its author might well have been Umberto Eco.
The production values of the volume are high. The numerous illustrations (over sixty, including musical notation for Dyer's piece) are printed on the most relevant page, as are the sometimes lengthy footnotes. Altogether it is a fine addition to the substantial series of which it is a part.
