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CulturalMemoryandtheResourcesofthepast |
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MIGRATION OF ROMAN AND BYZANTINE CULTURAL TRADITONS TO THE
CAROLINGIAN WORLD The multiple images of Rome in Europe and the ways in which the Roman imperial past played a role in the cultural memory of Western Europe have begun to attract an increasing amount of scholarly attention. This, of course includes the Christian Roman Empire as the backdrop for the construction of a Christian past. It is this aspect of the topic which provides fertile links with the other strands of the project. The complex dialogue between the Greek East and the Latin West and the transfer of cultural resources from the Byzantine World to the Latin West in the early middle ages can be conducted by means of a comparative study of translations of Greek texts (such as historiography, hagiography, acts of councils, liturgy, exegesis or sermons) into Latin. The principal research concern will be with the concepts and narrative models that were in the process of being appropriated in the West. How did they stimulate the creation of new cultural contents in the Latin West? What notions of canonicity and authenticity were involved in the process of selection and transmission? Was there a shared understanding of authority? In addition to Rosamond McKitterick’s current work on early medieval Rome, and on the migration of ideas in the early middle ages, the two Cambridge doctoral sub-projects on the Historia Tripartita of Epiphanius-Cassiodor and the Chronicle of Frechulf of Lisieux. The study of historical imaginations in the past and the emphasis on historical writing and its different uses of and responses to the past is a particularly fruitful category of evidence for an exploration of the migration of cultural traditions – Roman, biblical, Christian - and their reception. But we hope to demonstrate how these hugely influential texts selected for study here were the catalysts of Europe’s historical identity. The attitude to and knowledge of our past is one of the most fundamental elements of our identity. What these projects do is explore some of the most fundamental elements, not only of Europe’s past, but of the historical imagination of the peoples of Europe and how these might be deployed in the formation of political ideologies and senses of identity in Europe. As a scholarly enterprise this concept has been translated into research projects on specific influential texts. The two Cambridge projects, furthermore complement both the Vienna project’s focus on papal Rome between the Franks and Byzantium and the Utrecht project’s emphasis on the biblical past as an imagined community and a precise instance of how the biblical past was itself woven into a narrative designed to place the Franks themselves in their proper place in the history of the world. |
Sub-Projects:
The
transmission and trnslation of
ecclesiastical history: The Historia
Tripartita of Epiphanius-Cassiodorus
Roman
history east and west: |
