This book explores the cultural and intellectual stakes of medieval and renaissance Britain's sense of itself as living in the shadow of Rome: a city whose name could designate the ancient, fallen, quintessentially human power that had conquered and colonized Britain, and also the alternately sanctified and demonized Roman Church. Wallace takes medieval texts in a range of languages (including Latin, medieval Welsh, Old English and Old French) and places them in conversation with early modern English and humanistic Latin texts (including works by Gildas, Bede, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Bacon, St. Augustine, Dante, Erasmus, Luther and Montaigne). 'The Ordinary', 'The Self', 'The Word', and 'The Dead' are taken as compass points by which individuals lived out their orientations to, and against, Rome, isolating important dimensions of Rome's enduring ability to shape and complicate the effort to come to terms with the nature of self and the structure of human community.
Author(s): Andrew Wallace
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 350
Cover
Half-title page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
List of
Figures
Preface
Acknowledgements
Note on Texts and Translations
List of
Abbreviations
Introduction
The Fact of Rome
Roman Soil
Chapter 1 The Ordinary
Entanglements: Gildas, Bede, and the Anglo-Saxon Rome
The Order of the Ordinary
The Ordinary in History: Two Anglo-Saxon Case Studies
Stones and Eggshells
Chapter 2 The Self
Looking at Rome
‘At Rome in their hearts’
The Escape from Rome
The Escape from the Self
Chapter 3 The Word
Grammar, the Self, and the Vocative of Ego
The Words of Others
The Word and the Road to Rome
The Fact of Romans
Chapter 4 The Dead
‘Non in caelo, sed in terra’
The Dead Boy’s Latin
Prayers for the Dead
Under the Eyes of The Dead
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
