Recent scholarship has done much to resituate the post-Roman / early medieval European kingdoms within their wider, Mediterranean context; increasingly globalised approaches to the period now take developments in, and connections to, Asia and Africa into account. Yet while this research has drawn attention to the potential importance of the papacy as a connecting node between these worlds, much foundational work remains rooted in older paradigms of “East vs. West”, “Byzantine captivity”, the “emancipation” of Rome, or papal Ostpolitik. The significance within Rome of its Greek and Syrian popes has been argued up and down, and outstanding multi-generational research has revealed the importance of Mediterranean migrant communities, religions and cultures in the city. Legal and diplomatic scholars have shown how written communications bounced back and forth between Roman bishops and those in Asia, Africa and the Balkans throughout the first millennium – many only extant now because north-western ecclesiastics copied and cited them, sometimes centuries after the fact. But the degree to which any of this impinged upon wider thinking about the meaning, function or significance of the papacy in the early middle ages has not enjoyed sustained attention or critical reflection.

Thirty years after T.F.X. Noble criticised papal historiography for its ‘morbid’ linearity, tracing the realisation of a fixed papal ‘idea’ along a ‘series of political-diplomatic encounters’, a renewed set of questions for approaching the early medieval, trans-Mediterranean papacy has yet to take its place. Despite excellent individual studies, the master narrative of eastern- and southern-facing papal history still trudges along its morose path, from pope to pope, from schism to schism, heading inevitably towards 1054. We can probably do better than this.

THIS WORKSHOP aims to bring together works-in-progress on diverse texts documenting and memorialising the role of first-millennium papal Rome within its widest Mediterranean context, in an effort to generate new research approaches. Its focus is chiefly (if not exclusively) on written communications and their later tradition, and on representations of the papacy outside Rome. How might different societies have thought of Rome’s bishops as points of contact with the wider Mediterranean world, and to what degree could this have been integral to the see’s appeal? How might we understand this through the lens of recent work on the post-Roman west’s polities as ‘kingdoms of the empire’, and what changed through subsequent centuries? What can the relatively well-documented record of the papacy’s cross-Mediterranean communications reveal about other, now more obscure connectivities in this period? And how was this later received? – i.e., what can later collections, copies, even forgeries, of Mediterranean-spanning papal texts tell us about those audience’s expectations about Rome and its outer orbit, or their ‘mental map’ of a world beyond Latin western Europe?

Participation from researchers across all fields, at all levels, is welcome and encouraged. Please contact Dr Savill or Prof. Esders to register your interest, just so we have a good idea about numbers in advance.