Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome

FAIN: FEL-267547-20

Maya Maskarinec
University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA 90089-0012)

Research and writing leading to a book on how prominent families in late medieval and early modern Rome appropriated Christian saints and hagiography into their own histories to further their moral and political authority.

This project investigates the "domestication" of Christian sanctity in medieval and early modern Rome. In the course of the Middle Ages, there developed a pronounced sense that churches and their saints belonged to specific regions, neighborhoods, and even families. This "emplacement" of medieval families and medieval saints, coupled with a resurgent interest in Rome’s Christian antiquity and a heightened attentiveness to noble lineages, culminated in Roman families weaving themselves, genealogically and materially, into Rome’s Christian past. Saintly lineages blossomed, as did the identification of churches as the former residences of early Christian and late antique saints—cementing presumed links between place, descent and moral worth.

Associated Products

The Genealogies and Domestic Spaces of Early Christian Saints in Early Modern Rome (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: The Genealogies and Domestic Spaces of Early Christian Saints in Early Modern Rome
Author: Maya Maskarinec
Abstract: This talk considered the genealogies and domestic spaces of early Christian saints in early modern Rome to demonstrate how intimately connected these were with contemporaries' interest into Roman antiquities and illustrious Romans of antiquity.
Date: 02/19/2022
Conference Name: The Classical Tradition and the Making of Knowledge, USC EMSI/Huntington Library

Saints for All Occasions in Early Medieval Rome (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Saints for All Occasions in Early Medieval Rome
Author: Maya Maskarinec
Abstract: This talk examined how saints and their cults could serve as role models for individuals and communities, and to what degree their usage as such reveals aspects of the cultural connectivity of the Mediterranean.
Date: 06/10/2022
Conference Name: Exempla docent. Significance of Paradigmatic Conceptions for the Function of Mediterranean Societies during the 4th–8th Centuries, University of Zurich (Switzerland)

Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome (Book)
Title: Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome
Author: Maya Maskarinec
Abstract: Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome explores the creative efforts of some of Rome’s most prominent noble families to weave themselves into Rome’s Christian past. Maya Maskarinec shows how, from late antiquity to early modernity, elite Roman families used genealogy, architecture, and the urban fabric to appropriate the city’s saints for their own, eventually claiming them as ancestors. Over the course of the Middle Ages, there developed a pronounced sense that churches and their saints belonged to specific regions, neighborhoods, and even families. These associations, coupled with a resurgent interest in Rome’s Christian antiquity as well as in noble lineages, enabled Roman families to “domesticate” the city’s saints and dominate the urban landscape and its politics into the early modern era. These families cultivated saintly genealogies and saintly topologies (exploiting, for example, the increasingly prolific identification of churches as the former residences of early Christian and late antique saints), cementing presumed connections between place, descent, and moral worth. Drawing from sources spanning the fourth to the late sixteenth century, Maskarinec brings into conversation saints’ lives, documentary evidence, family genealogies, monumental and domestic architecture, and medieval and early modern guidebooks, sources not often studied together. Bridging the divide between secular and sacred histories of Rome, Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome repositions these materials within a new story, of how Romans made the city’s classical and Christian past their own and thereby empowered and immortalized their families.
Year: 2025
Primary URL: https://www.pennpress.org/9781512827026/domesticating-saints-in-medieval-and-early-modern-rome/
Primary URL Description: Publisher's link.
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781512827019
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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