Damasus and the Christian Epigram in the West

Trout, Dennis

doi:10.1002/9781118841709.ch35

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

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“…For Dennis Trout, 'Damasus's invention of early Christian Rome around the tombs of the saints relied as heavily upon remembering as forgetting'. 60 Trout argues that the inscriptions, taken together, present a purely Damasan fiction, with the bishop himself at the centre as the interpreter of tradition. Thus Damasus's work on the catacombs was not a transformation of the Roman Christian world so much as it was one selective vision of it.…”

Section: Damasus and Fourth-century Ecclesiastical Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In Damasus's 'imagineered protogeography', history would be 'pulled forward and reflection turned back; here, while the future became "a thing of the past," the past was also restaged to keep pace with the present'. 61 The particular strength of both Trout's and Diefenbach's work is that it localizes Damasus's vision, locating his concerns within the narrow, if fissile, world of Roman ecclesiastical politics. While this is inarguably the correct approach, I argue that Trout and Diefenback simultaneously afford Damasus too much ground in transforming, Christianizing, or orchestrating a new Rome organized around martyrial shrines.…”

Section: Damasus and Fourth-century Ecclesiastical Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Damasus and the derelict relics

Lewis

2018

Early Medieval Europe

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This article considers the language of ‘mapping’ and ‘topography’ often invoked to describe the activities of Pope Damasus (366–84). Damasus, widely seen as an impresario of the saints, is credited with creating a systematic Christian topography around Rome. This article challenges this perspective, asserting instead that Damasus worked neither systematically nor holistically to transform landscape; his modest interventions relied upon forgotten cemeterial sites of little interest to Rome's dominant Christian power‐brokers. To see Damasus's activities as transformative of the Christian landscape, then, is to confuse later evaluations of his work and to ignore the complex political processes that ‘mapped’ Christianity onto the urban and suburban landscape of late fourth and early fifth‐century Rome.

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Section: Damasus and Fourth-century Ecclesiastical Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Damasus and Fourth-century Ecclesiastical Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%