Reading Rome in the Middle Ages and Beyond

Catalog description

This course will examine the ways Rome has been described and imagined from late antiquity through the Middle Ages, when the imperial city was transformed into a Christian capital, renowned for its monuments and its complex historical significance. The city became the goal of pilgrims, visitors, artists and scholars, but also the subject of criticisms and satire, and continued to be so into the modern age. The great German poet Goethe wrote at length in his Italian Journey (1786-1787) about his enchantment with the monuments of “the First City of the world [sic]” (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey (1786-1788), trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer [1962], p. 115), while at the same time he described the living contemporary city and its inhabitants through stereotypical and ethnic preconceptions. His near-contemporary Edward Gibbon declared that he was inspired to write his great work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as he contrasted the city’s classical ruins and the Christian Church of the Ara Coeli, once a pagan temple: “It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefoot friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.” Memoirs of My Life (1796). This course is not meant to be a history of post-classical Rome. Rather, we will consider and discuss a selection of interdisciplinary texts, written, visual and material (buildings, artistic works in various forms, including films, and other physical evidence) that present the transformation of old Rome into new Rome, but which also shaped the varied images of Rome in the Middle Ages, and beyond, even in modern times, as illustrated by the films included in the syllabus