This article investigates how civic discourse connects the virtue of citizens and the fortunes of cities in a variety of late antique and early medieval sources in the post-Roman west. It reveals how cities assume human qualities through the rhetorical technique of personification and, crucially, the ways in which individuals and communities likewise are described with civic terminology. It also analyzes the ways in which the city and the civic community are made to speak to one another at times of crisis and celebration. By examining a diverse range of sources including epideictic poetry, chronicles, hagiographies, and epigraphic inscriptions, this article addresses multiple modes of late antique and early medieval thought that utilize civic discourse. It first explores how late antique and early medieval authors employed civic discourse in non-urban contexts, including how they conceptualized the interior construction of an individual's mind and soul as a fortified citadel, how they praised ecclesiastical and secular leaders as city structures, and how they extended civic terminology to the preeminently non-urban space of the monastery. The article then examines how personified cities spoke to their citizens and how citizens could join their cities in song through urban procession. Civic encomia and invective further illustrate how medieval authors sought to unify the virtuous conduct of citizens with the ultimate fate of the city's security. The article concludes with a historical and epigraphic case study of two programs of mural construction in ninth-century Rome. Ultimately, this article argues that the repeated and emphatic exhortations to civic virtue provide access to how late antique and early medieval authors sought to intertwine the fate of the city with the conduct of her citizens, in order to persuade their audiences to act in accordance with the precepts of virtue.
This article explores the use of civic discourse in Gildas ’ De Excidio Britonum. It argues that such language and imagery functioned within a larger dialectical argument that exhorted readers to choose virtue over vice. Gildas assigned the Britons collective moral agency by styling them citizens (cives) of a shared homeland (patria) defined by cities (civitates). Due to the citizens’ moral failings, however, this urban landscape had been compromised: enemies had destroyed the patria’s cities, rendering it a place of desolation. Only a return to virtue could save the Britons from ruin and grant them access to heavenly Jerusalem.
Sometime during the second half of 791, the Carolingian Queen Fastrada received by letter a detailed account of a three-day litany organized by Charlemagne and his collected clergymen on the eve of battle with the Avars. 1 The letter details how all those present in the Frankish camp were asked to abstain from wine and meat throughout the three-day rite unless prevented by illness or age; those who still wished to partake in wine were required to pay. 2 As the gathered laity either fasted or gave alms, priests performed a special mass (missam specialem), while the clergy sang fifty of the psalms together and recited the litanies, all whilst barefoot. 3 At the beginning of his detailed description, Charlemagne, the sender of this letter, laid bare the rationale for the marathon liturgical venture: 'that He would vouchsafe to grant us peace and safety and victory and a successful expedition and that in His mercy and goodness He would be our helper and counsellor and defender in all our difficulties'. 4 Charlemagne concluded his letter by requesting that Fastrada, together with unnamed fideles in Regensburg, would organize litanies within the bounds of the Carolingian kingdom qualiter ipsa letanias, if she was in good health herself. 5 Considered the only surviving personal letter from Charlemagne himself, this epistle is remarkable for a host of reasons. 6 It is, for instance, the only extant letter addressed to Queen Fastrada. Behind this single epistle lay an unknown series of exchanges, as indicated by Charlemagne's concluding complaint that Fastrada had not written more often since he last saw her, and his subsequent demand for more letters. More significant is the meat of the missive itself: namely, the litanies that Charlemagne and his itinerant court orchestrated and those that Fastrada and her court organized in the kingdom in Regensburg. Around the same time that this letter was composed and received, Fastrada's nomen appeared in another text, the so-called Montpellier Psalter, which ends with the earliest extant Carolingian laudes regiae. 7 Dated to the third quarter of the eighth century, the laudes regiae in the Montpellier Psalter comes as an addition at the end of the manuscript. 8
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