Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome

Maya Maskarinec

Enjoy 40% off

academic books on De Gruyter Brill *

Book

Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome

Maya Maskarinec

Language: English

Published/Copyright: 2025

Published by

View more publications by University of Pennsylvania Press

To Publisher Page

About this book

How elite Roman families used genealogy, architecture, and the urban fabric to appropriate the city’s saints for their own

Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome explores the creative efforts of some of Rome’s most prominent noble families to weave themselves into Rome’s Christian past. Maya Maskarinec shows how, from late antiquity to early modernity, elite Roman families used genealogy, architecture, and the urban fabric to appropriate the city’s saints for their own, eventually claiming them as ancestors.

Over the course of the Middle Ages, there developed a pronounced sense that churches and their saints belonged to specific regions, neighborhoods, and even families. These associations, coupled with a resurgent interest in Rome’s Christian antiquity as well as in noble lineages, enabled Roman families to “domesticate” the city’s saints and dominate the urban landscape and its politics into the early modern era. These families cultivated saintly genealogies and saintly topologies (exploiting, for example, the increasingly prolific identification of churches as the former residences of early Christian and late antique saints), cementing presumed connections between place, descent, and moral worth.

Drawing from sources spanning the fourth to the late sixteenth century, Maskarinec brings into conversation saints’ lives, documentary evidence, family genealogies, monumental and domestic architecture, and medieval and early modern guidebooks, sources not often studied together. Bridging the divide between secular and sacred histories of Rome, Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome repositions these materials within a new story, of how Romans made the city’s classical and Christian past their own and thereby empowered and immortalized their families.

Author / Editor information

Contributor: Maya Maskarinec Maya Maskarinec is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Southern California.

Reviews

"Boldly foraying from late antiquity to early modernity, Maya Maskarinec shows not only how much remains to be learned about the early Roman martyrs and saints whose legacy underpins Rome’s ecclesiastical topography to this day, but also how much remains to be unlearned. By demonstrating how deeply what we think we know about storied sites and their founders is informed by the artful imaginings of medieval and early modern families eager to reinvent the past to suit present institutional and genealogical ambitions, she sheds new light on the evolving strategies for self-fashioning employed by prominent individuals, families, and institutions across a millennium and more." --- "Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome displays an astonishingly comprehensive command of the relevant primary and secondary sources combined with a forensic intelligence that reframes and recasts our understanding of the matter at hand. Maya Maskarinec brings a powerful intelligence and an impressive command of the scholarship to bear on anything she writes." --- "Maya Maskarinec is a brilliant scholar of early medieval Italy, who blends hard-nosed documentary research and skilled mining of hagiography with the ability to imaginatively reconstruct individual and cultural mentalities that guided and were guided by the historical processes she seeks to understand. Both deeply erudite and highly engaging and readable, Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome is a fitting sequel to Maskarinec’s first book, City of Saints."

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	1
CHAPTER 1 Medieval Rome and Its Noble Families Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	17
CHAPTER 2 Property and Piety: The Houses of Saints in Late Antique and Early Medieval Rome Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	42
CHAPTER 3 Genealogies of Saints: The Specter of the Anicii Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	72
CHAPTER 4 Saintly Genealogies: The Frangipani and Gregory the Great Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	96
CHAPTER 5 Saintly Genealogies: The Savelli and St. Alexius Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	119
CHAPTER 6 Religious Houses and Their Noble Founders in Rome: The Cells of St. Francis, St. Dominic, and St. Benedict Anicius Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	141
CHAPTER 7 Early Modern Rome and Its Hidden Treasures Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	174
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	202
Abbreviations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	207
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	209
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	269
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	297
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	309

Publishing information

Pages and Images/Illustrations in book

eBook published on:

February 18, 2025

eBook ISBN:

9781512827026

Pages and Images/Illustrations in book

https://doi.org/10.9783/9781512827026

eBook ISBN: 9781512827026

Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome

Overview

About this book

Author / Editor information

Reviews

Topics

Table of contents

Bibliographic data