The Roman Martyrs Project
The Roman Martyrs Project is dedicated to the study of the gesta martyrum, the anonymous martyr romances produced in the city of Rome in the fifth and sixth centuries. The Roman gesta martyrum are a group of little-known Latin hagiographical romances set by their anonymous early medieval authors in pre-Constantinian Rome, though the texts themselves seem to date from the fifth and sixth centuries at the earliest, and in some instances much later. These are texts which have both literary significance (as a 'missing link' between the ancient novel and medieval romance) and historical import, bearing clues to the relations of affinity among the Roman clergy and laity at the end of antiquity.
A mainstay of devotional culture across the early medieval West and a resource much-plundered by high and late medieval writers of both hagiography and romance, the gesta martyrum offer an important witness to the religious, social, and literary imagination of the early medieval church in both Rome and beyond.
Evocative as they are, however, the gesta should be approached with caution. Our goal is to equip scholars from a variety of fields with a reliable orientation to these hagiographical traditions and the relationships among them.
Over three years funded by the British Academy (1996-99), the Roman Martyrs Project established parameters, a working method, and a substantial body of documented research. We began in 1996-97 by establishing an annotated hand-list of some hundred and fifty hagiographical 'units' (individual saints or saints commemorated as a collectivity) that were venerated at Rome by the end of the sixth century. The hand-list cross-referenced the material available on each tradition from ancient and modern sources (such as the Liber Pontificalis and Krautheimer's Corpus Basilicarum) with the earliest text of each saint's passio according to existing scholarship. Given the number of traditions and the complex manuscript tradition attached to each, it was critical to establish a base-line of comparable treatment across the board. During late 1996-97 and 97-98, we prepared, for thirty of the saints in question, an in-depth hagiographical dossier including topographical, prosopographical, philological and narrative profiles of the relevant passio. For the third year of the project, 1998-99, we prepared a somewhat abbreviated dossier for each of the remaining martyrs covered by the project. We completed dossiers on this model for all the martyrs entered on our handlist, with the exception of the apostles and a number of gesta where the relationship between a name recorded (e.g. in the martyrologium hieronymianum) corresponding textual tradition could not be established with reasonable certainty.
During 2000-02, The Leverhulme Trust sponsored work by Dr. Clare Pilsworth on the manuscript tradition associated with these texts; this has resulted in important contributions to publications described below (Cooper [2000] and Cooper and Hillner [2006]).
More recently, the Project has been exploring the possibilities of digital technology for developing search tools to enable and encourage less experienced scholars to work with the Roman martyr material, and to enhance the ability of more experienced scholars to engage in comparative and synthetic work on the disparate traditions.
A number of resources and finding-aids have developed from the Project's work, including:
- The Roman Martyrs Database (web-searchable MySQL resource)
- The Roman Martyrs Handlist (Word document)
- The Roman Martyrs Dossiers (Word document)
A number of publications have developed from the Project's work, including:
- A special isssue of Early Medieval Europe 'The Roman Martyrs and the Politics of Memory' edited by Kate Cooper (EME 9:3 [2000]), offering an initial overview of the Roman Martyrs Project's work, and explains our methodology, whose starting-point is the idea that the texts tell us a great deal about the late Roman religious and cultural imagination, but offer very little direct evidence either about the religious institutions of the city, or about the date and circumstances of their own production.
- The following articles by Dr Kate Cooper:
- "The Virgin as Social Icon," in Mathilde Vin Dijk and Renée Nip, eds., Saints, Scholars, and Politicians: Gender as a Tool in Medieval Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2005; Medieval Church Studies 15), 9-24.
- "Ventriloquism and the Miraculous: Conversion, Preaching, and the Martyr Exemplum in Late Antiquity," in Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory, eds., Signs, Wonders, and Miracles (Studies in Church History vol. 41, Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2005), 22-45.
- "The Widow as Impresario: Gender, Authority, and Legendary Afterlives in Eugippius' Vita Severini," in Walter Pohl and Maximilian Diesenberger, eds., Eugippius und Severinus: Der Autor, der Text, und der Heilige (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2000), 53-64.
- "The Martyr, the matrona and the Bishop: Networks of Allegiance in Early Sixth-Century Rome," Early Medieval Europe 8:3 (1999), 297-317.
Currently in progress are the following publications:
- Religion, Dynasty, and Patronage in a Christian Capital: Rome, 300-900 , a volume of collected essays edited by Kate Cooper and Julia Hillner.
- The Early Saints of Rome , a volume of translated texts from the gesta martyrum, edited by Kate Cooper and Carole Hill.
- Passion and Persuasion: Gender, Conversion, and Martyr Narrative in Late Ancient Rome, a monograph by Kate Cooper