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Showing posts from September, 2009

A still-wandering warlord

My slow journey to the completion of a MA in history is leading me, this semester, through the Protestant Reformation and its attendant upheavals. As someone who has taken every opportunity offered by his program requirements to focus on the third through seventh centuries, with occasional forays into earlier times, I approached this seminar with a certain amount of trepidation. Here was the far side of the bridge spanning the great, fermenting river that is medieval history. I have spent the bulk of my studies pawing through the silt of that river's near side, marveling over found gewgaws and sometimes pausing to wonder how, or whether, eddies near the shore affected the greater flow of the river. The task of crossing to the opposite bank and appreciating its landscape promised to take me well outside my comfort zone. You might imagine my surprise when, in the midst of Luther's screeds and classic studies of the period , I encountered a man whose mark on the historical re

"There are profane persons here, who obstruct the rites." *

Just stopped by Wikipedia and noticed that the Diocletianic Persecution is subject of today's featured article. * Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors (De Mortibus Persecutorum) 10

Bones

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One day in June of 594, Gregory the Great had to excuse himself from his daunting daily responsibilities to field a letter from Constantina, Empress of the Romans and still, in theory, Gregory's temporal superior. The Empress was erecting a glorious church for St. Paul in the middle of the palace environs in Constantinople, and she'd made an extraordinary request of the Bishop of Rome: the Apostle's head. Gregory must have found the Empress's letter exasperating. It was only a year earlier that he'd negotiated a fragile truce with the barbarian Lombards (with virtually no help, it must be said, from the imperial administration). Protected from their pillaging, the shrunken, tattered city had finally begun to stabilize under Gregory's tireless ministrations. Now, though, the wife of the distant Augustus, who had never set foot in Rome, sought to relieve the former capital of one of its most precious assets. Gregory's response was carefully worded: Being d