, Brepols, 2020 Hardback, xiv + 337 pages, Size:156 x 234 mm, Illustrations:12 b/w, 2 col., 5 graphs, Language: English. ISBN 9782503583235.
Summary Throughout a distinguished career, Raymond Van Dam has contributed significantly to our understanding of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages with ground-breaking studies on Gaul, Cappadocia, and the emperor Constantine. The hallmarks of his scholarship are critical study of a wide variety of written and material sources and careful historical analysis, insightfully rooted in sociological and anthropological methodologies. The essays in this volume, written by Van Dam's former students, colleagues, and friends, explore the dynamics between leaders and their communities in the fourth through seventh centuries. During this period, people negotiated profound religious, intellectual, and cultural change while still deeply enmeshed in the legacy of the Roman Empire. The memory of the classical past was a powerful and compelling social and political force for the denizens of Late Antiquity, even as their physical surroundings came to resemble less and less the ideals of the Greco-Roman city. These themes - leadership, community, and memory - have been central to Van Dam's work, and the contributors to this volume build on the legacy of his scholarship. Their papers examine how leaders exercised their authority in their communities, at times exhibiting continuity with ancient patterns of leadership, but in other cases shifting toward new paradigms characteristic of a post-classical world. Taken together, the essays produce a fuller picture of the Mediterranean world and add further nuance to our understanding of Late Antiquity and early Middle Ages as a time of both continuity and transformation. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Images Acknowledgements Introduction: Leadership and Community - YOUNG RICHARD KIM AND A. E. T. MCLAUGHLIN Abstract Social Network Modelling and the Rise of Singular Bishops: Textual Guidance from Three Urban Roman Settings - ADAM M. SCHOR Leadership and Community in Late Antique Poitiers - LISA BAILEY Go Set a Watchman: The Bishop as Speculator - BRENT D. SHAW Attitudes about Social Hierarchy in a Late Antique City: The Case of Libanius and John Chrysostom's Antioch - JACLYN MAXWELL The Authority of Tradition: Governors and their Capitals in Late Antique Asia Minor - GARRETT RYAN Peter Beyond Rome: Achilleus of Spoleto, Neon of Ravenna, and the Epigramma Longum - DENNIS TROUT Remembering Constantina at the Tomb of Agnes and Beyond - VIRGINIA BURRUS Roofing Rome: Church Coverings and Power in the Postclassical City - BENJAMIN GRAHAM AND PAOLO SQUATRITI How Was a 'New Rome' Even Thinkable? Premonitions of Constantinople and the Portability of Rome - ANTHONY KALDELLIS The Sack of Rome in 410: The Anatomy of a Late Antique Debate - SHANE BJORNLIE Hagiography, Memory, and the Fall of Rome in Ostrogothic Italy - JONATHAN J. ARNOLD Conclusion: Leadership and Community in Late Antiquity - NOEL LENSKI Select Curriculum Vitae, Raymond Van Dam Index