Empowering the Sacred Spaces
"Subverting Objects, Values, and Ideas: Material Transformations of the Cult of Saint in Late Antique Afro-Eurasia" by Adrien Palladino
As remarked by Peter Brown, the “passing of secular opulence into the opulence of churches […] was a privileged moment in the alchemy of wealth,” highlighting “[…] how treasure on earth became treasure in heaven.” (Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, p. 300). This moment deeply impacted the new ideas, monuments, and artifacts linked with the cult of saints and their relics which flourished around late antique Afro-Eurasia from the fourth century CE onwards. Precious objects were replaced and removed from the system of exchange and ostentation for which they had been designed to be used within a new cult focused around sacred spaces dedicated to the special dead. At the same time, the symbolic and material values of the ancient Roman world were subverted by Christians. This applies, for example, to objects made of gold, ivory or silver, materials notably favored for ostentatious gifts, ornamental, and cosmetic uses among the aristocracy, which now went to the saints. In this lecture, I propose to analyze some remarkable surviving texts and artifacts which, from Prudentius to Augustine, help us to understand the modalities of this subversion and its social and cultural parameters.
Dr. Adrien Palladino earned his PhD in art history from the universities of Fribourg (CH) and Brno (CZ) in 2019. He went on to become post-doctoral research fellow and subsequently assistant professor at the Masaryk University in Brno. His monograph Inventing Late Antique Reliquaries. Reception, Material History, and Dynamics of Interaction (4th–6th centuries CE) published in 2022 investigates how vessels adorned with Christian images acquired meaning and power, exploring the dynamics of transformation that accompany both the creation of these objects and their long history of reuse, marginalization, and rediscovery.
"An Ifrīqiyyan Inventio: Gesturing toward North African Sacred Space with a Messenger’s Tomb" by Adam Bursi
In a corpus of stories set during the first centuries of Islam, Muslims discover the ancient tombs of holy persons—such as scriptural prophets and martyrs—scattered throughout the lands that the Islamic armies had conquered, such as Syria, Yemen, and Persia. Adapting the late antique Christian phenomenon of relic invention, these Islamic narratives about the discoveries of long-lost prophets and martyrs share in the much wider late antique literary and cultural pattern of creating sacred space through the unearthing of holy persons’ remains. This paper will examine one example of such an early Islamic inventio, in which an ancient holy person’s tomb is discovered in the province of Ifrīqiyya. Found in various versions in some of the earliest historical/biographical collections on Ifrīqiyya, as well as in collections from further east, this story draws North Africa into the sacred history of places that had been visited by ancient monotheistic prophets and messengers. At the same time, we will see that the ambivalences surrounding the veneration of holy bodies, and around Ifrīqiyya’s place in scriptural history, seemingly complicated this effort at creating a North African sacred space.
Dr. Adam Bursi received his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Cornell University, and has held research and teaching positions at the University of Tennessee, the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, and Utrecht University. He has published several articles on late antique and early Islamic history and religion, as well as the forthcoming book Traces of the Prophets: Relics and Sacred Spaces in Early Islam (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), which examines the role of relics and holy tombs in the emergence of Islam.
