The dominant literate culture of early medieval England – male, European, and Christian – often represented itself through comparison to exotic beings and monsters, in traditions developed from native mythologies, and Classical and Biblical sources. So pervasive was this reflexive identification that the language of the monstrous occurs not onl…[Read more]

The dominant literate culture of early medieval England – male, European, and Christian – often represented itself through comparison to exotic beings and monsters, in traditions developed from native mythologies, and Classical and Biblical sources. So pervasive was this reflexive identification that the language of the monstrous occurs not onl…[Read more]

Susan Kim and Asa Simon Mittman, “Keeping History: Images, Texts, Ciphers, and the Franks Casket,” with Susan Kim, in A Material History of Medieval and Early Modern Ciphers, ed. K Ellison and S Kim (New York: Routledge, 2017)

Medieval Christians arguably lived in a ‘real’ world – a tangible place in which they lived, worked, loved, hated, and died – but through a process of worldbuilding continually reconstructed it anew around themselves as the mythical land they called ‘Christendom.’ This was predicated first on reconceptualizing and then ultimately on removing (o…[Read more]

For more than four hundred years, up to the accession of the present king Carl XVI Gustaf in 1973, did the Swedish monarchs hold the title “King of the Wends“. The first evidence of this claim dates from the reign of Gustav I Vasa (1523-1560), who adopted the title Sveriges, Göthes och Wendes Konung in official sources around the year 1540. In L…[Read more]

We must, first of all, ask what a barbarian is or could have been in our sources. There were different kinds of barbarians, based upon the Roman and Greek ethnographic tradition and view of geography. Greek writers defined identities of human societies in the known world and bequeathed ethnonyms. Since the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E., these…[Read more]

Das vandalische Afrika gilt als Musterbeispiel des „Kirchenkampfs“ zwischen homöischen Barbaren und katholischen Römern. Kronzeugen sind Victor von Vita, Fulgentius von Ruspe und Quodvultdeus von Karthago. Etwa 50 Jahre nach dem Ende der Vandalenkönige in Afrika 533 kam es in Spanien zum Ausgleich zwischen Katholiken und Homöern. Die westgot…[Read more]

The Vandal royal title Rex Vandalorum et Alanorum is known from the reign of king Huneric (477-484) from two decrees preserved in Victor of Vita’s History of the Vandal persecution. This catholic polemic pamphlet itself derives from the eighties or nineties of the fifth century. As traditional diplomatics throughout the 19th and 20th centuries c…[Read more]

This paper offers a re‐examination of some problems regarding the coinage of Vandal North Africa. The coinage of this barbarian successor state is one of the first non‐imperial coinages in the Mediterranean world of the fifth and sixth centuries. Based on the fine collection in the Coin Cabinet of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, this art…[Read more]

Seit der frühen Neuzeit standen geschichtsmächtige Gruppen im Zentrum historischer Meistererzählungen. Vor allem die Umgestaltung der römischen Welt zwischen Antike und Mittelalter erklärte man durch die Wanderungen von Völkern, mit Dekadenzmodellen und konstruierten nationalen Charakteren. Meist wurde eine klare ethnische, kulturelle oder gar r…[Read more]

Some gentes–armed social units or peoples such as the Goths, the Franks, the Burgundians or the Vandals–became an intrinsic part of European history. Others like the Heruli, the Sciri, the Gepids and the Rugians played their somewhat vague role, but disappeared from our sources without having had the opportunity to form any stable regnum on…[Read more]

“Who were the Romans? Shifting Scripts of Romanness in Early Medieval Italy,” in Post-Roman Transitions. Christian and Barbarian Identities in the Early Medieval West, eds. Walter Pohl and Gerda Heydemann, Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 14

“Foreign Saints at Home in Eighth- and Ninth-century Rome. The Patrocinia of Diaconiae, Xenodochia and Greek Monasteries,” in Cuius patrocinio tota gaudet regio. Saints’ Cults and the Dynamics of Regional Cohesion, eds. S. Kuzmová, A. Marinković and T. Vedriš

“Saints for All Christendom: Naturalizing the Alexandrian Saints Cyrus and John in Seventh- to Thirteenth-Century Rome.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 71 (2017): 337–366

This paper investigates the multiple impulses that contributed to the early medieval interest in Pope Damasus’s inscriptions. In part, Damasus’s verses were read as guides to Rome’s martyrial topography; in part, they served as models of a classicizing Christian style. Above all, the appeal of these verses derived from their association with…[Read more]

“Why Remember Ratchis? Medieval Monastic Memory and the Lombard Past,” Archivio Storico Italiano 177.1 (2019): 3–57

The aim of this research, focusing on representations of light and the symbolism of early Christian lamp decorations, has been to examine and summarise the existing knowledge of the symbolism of light in the Mediterranean region and the models by which this symbolism was manifested in the early Christian visual culture. Lamps with Early Christian…[Read more]

Review of Christianization and Commonwealth in Early Medieval Europe: A Ritual Interpretation, by Nathan J. Ristuccia. The Medieval Review (TMR 18.11.01), 2018

Bibliography of research on bishops in Anglo-Saxon England and Ottonian-Salian Germany in the tenth and eleventh centuries, as well as comprehensive and comparative studies of this period, as long as either of the aforementioned geographical entities is covered.

The book chapter analyses how bishops saw their role in succession struggles of tenth and early eleventh centuries Germany.