Tag: bishops

Corsi and Morvillez on Hospitality

Two articles on hospitality have been published:

Cristina Corsi, ‘”Strangers on the way”: hospitalité, identité et défis lors des voyages à la fin de l’Antiquité’, in: Fauchon-Claudon and Le Guennec 2002, 303-20.

Éric Morvillez, ‘Louer l’hospitalité des évêques dans l’Antiquité tardive en Gaule: entre traditions et nouvelles exigences chrétiennes’, in: Fauchon-Claudon and Le Guennec 2022, 87-103.

These items are included in the conference proceedings Hospitalité et régulation de l’altérité dans l’Antiquité méditerranéenne, edited by Claire Fauchon-Claudon and Marie-Adeline Le Guennec, Scripta Antiqua 156, Bordeaux: Ausonius, 2022.

Becker on the Power of Humility

Audrey Becker writes on ‘The Power of Humility: Fifth-Century Gallic Bishops in Negotiations with Barbarian Kings’ in the latest thematic issue of Studies in Late Antiquity.

Abstract. This essay examines the diplomatic efforts of Gallic bishops with barbarian kings, in the tense period after 406 CE and during the raids of Attila in Gaul in 451. The first part of this essay seeks to understand the narrative strategies at work in five late antique Gallic hagiographies. Written decades after the events narrated in them occurred, under different political circumstances, these texts re-imagined and re-interpreted these diplomatic encounters, bolstering claims of episcopal authority. The second part of this essay contextualizes the hagiographic claims of Gallic bishops’ involvement in diplomacy, paying particular attention to the role of episcopal humility in diplomatic encounters. It shows that this humility was not only a topos but also a useful diplomatic and religious tool.