This book traces the long-term genesis of the sixth-century Roman legal penalty of forced monastic penance. The late antique evidence for this penal institution runs counter to a scholarly consensus that Roman legal principle did not acknowledge the use of corrective punitive confinement. Dr Hillner argues that forced monastic penance was a product of a late Roman penal landscape that was more complex than previous models of Roman punishment have allowed. She focuses on invigoration of classical normative discourses around punishment as education through Christian concepts of penance, on social uses of corrective confinement that can be found in a vast range of public and private scenarios and spaces, as well as on a literary Christian tradition that gave the experience of punitive imprisonment a new meaning. The book makes an important contribution to recent debates about the interplay between penal strategies and penal practices in the late Roman world.
In the period between 542 and 556 c.e. Justinian issued a number of laws that prescribed monastic imprisonment as punishment for both higher clergy and members of the lay elite. Through this legislation, the emperor introduced into Roman law the unprecedented concept of corrective imprisonment as a penalty. Starting from a detailed analysis of the laws, this article demonstrates how the emperor's innovations built upon both traditional legal practices and on more recent ecclesiastical and monastic ideals. With monastic imprisonment, Justinian adapted the Roman custom of domestic internment as a substitute for the penalty of exile for elite criminals. The reason for using monasteries, rather than private households, to provide this public service of prisoner internment may, on the one hand, have been practical. Ideals of hospitality within a Christian monastic context and imperial influence especially over Constantinopolitan monasteries may have encouraged Justinian to believe that monasteries were far less likely to avoid an obligation to host an exile convict than private households. On the other hand, the emperor also saw monastic imprisonment as offering additional, historically unprecedented benefits over traditional domestic internment. As the emperor tried to make sure in his own legislation on monastic life, monasteries ideally provided an institutional and architectural framework, as well as a guiding penitential ideology based on an ideal of correction, which not only offered the opportunity for enhanced supervision, but also for spiritual correction of the criminal. Justinian's innovations may have been inspired by the established use of monasteries as penitential space for failing clerics in ecclesiastical legislation. However, his specific aim in using monasteries as places of penance, for which an ecclesiastical precedent does not exist, seems to have been to police the sexual promiscuity which he discerned among the married laity at his own court.
Ferrua, Epigrammata = A. Ferrua, Epigrammata Damasiana, Città del Vaticano, 1942 (Sussidi allo studio delle antichità cristiane, 2). -LP I-III = L. Duchesne, Le Liber pontificalis, vol. 1-3, 2 d ed., Paris, 1955. -NVal and NMai = Novellae Valentiniani and Novellae Maioriani, in T. Mommsen, P. Meyer (ed.), Theodosiani libri XVI cum constitutionibus Sirmondianis, 2, Berlin, 1905. All translations are my own. 1. We only know of twelve fairly securely attested interventions by Roman aristocrats on behalf of Roman churches in this period: ICVR, II, 4097: decoration of S. Petrus by a lady called Anastasia and an anonymous man (366-Clergé, propriété et patronage : le cas des églises titulaires romaines On sait qu'un certain nombre d'églises romaines de l'antiquité tardive étaient désignées par le terme titulus suivi d'un nom de personne au génitif. Une analyse de l'emploi légal du terme titulus chez les Romains montre qu'on peut raisonnablement présumer que ces noms étaient, au moins à l'origine, ceux des fondateurs d'églises titulaires. Cependant, alors que l'on considère traditionnellement que la plupart de ces fondateurs étaient des sénateurs romains, l'auteur suggère que les patrons d'églises titulaires venaient au moins autant du milieu clérical que du milieu sénatorial. Cette hypothèse s'appuie sur les sources onomastiques, qui montrent que beaucoup de noms des églises titulaires coïncident avec des noms récurrents dans le clergé romain, et sur les légendeshagiographiques, qui présentent dans le rôle de patrons aussi bien des ecclésiastiques que des sénateurs ; enfin, l'hypothèse s'appuie sur l'engagement actif financier des ecclésiastiques dans l'érection et la décoration des églises titulaires. Si l'on considère que, comme la loi romaine tardive le suggère, beaucoup de membres du clergé romain étaient recrutés parmi des classes urbaines prospères, on peut commencer à comprendre les ressources financières qui ont rendu le patronage clérical possible. [Auteur.]
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