This article examines how antiquarians in Rome used archaeological evidence—a site excavated from under the church of San Martino in Monti in 1636—to argue that Pope Sylvester (314–335) exercised spiritual and temporal authority over the Roman Empire. The document which had formed the bedrock of papal sovereignty, the Donation of Constantine, was shown to be a forgery in the early modern period. Protestant reformers pointed to the document’s contradictions to dismantle the Catholic Church’s claims that its preeminence originated in the privileges bestowed on Sylvester by the Emperor Constantine. I use archival materials and a history of the site published in 1639 to describe how antiquarians claimed that they found the house church of Sylvester, which he converted into a church after Constantine’s baptism and then used to host a Roman Council in 324 (before Nicaea). I offer a new perspective on Catholic confessional historiography by observing how antiquarians used material evidence to provide a foundation for early papal power in the Roman Empire, thereby bypassing the need for spurious documents such as the Donation. This new tradition, which lives on today despite modern archaeological critiques, illustrates the malleability of Catholic epistemologies and historiography in the wake of textual criticism.
Nostalgia for Christian antiquity drove patrons in the post-Tridentine period to search for the bodies of ancient Christian martyrs under Rome’s churches. This chapter examines the strategies used to authenticate the relics discovered at five churches between 1599 and 1634. Through this period, antiquarians increasingly sought to show that their relics were authentic by appealing to current empirical shifts in intellectual culture; the grounds for identification, they said, came not from inherited histories but rather from carefully examining the antiquity of the burial site, fragility of bones, and subterranean objects. Archival records, however, reveal that the certainty of these identifications was forged, and discoveries were often motivated by the desire to dispel rival claims to the same relics in order to bolster devotion at the given church. The forging of relic-hood outlined in the case studies of this chapter provides a lens into how the Catholic church negotiated confessional polemics by appealing to shifting conceptions of truth and authority in early modern Europe.
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