25 IV 2024: Maya Maskarinec (USC) Property and Piety: The Houses of Saints in Late Antique and Early Medieval Rome

This talk examines the nexus between property and piety in late antique and early medieval Rome, and the repercussions that this had for sacred space in medieval Rome. Its guiding theme is a recurring claim that epitomized and legitimized a spiritual vision of a domestic Christian topography: that ecclesiastical spaces had formerly been the houses of saints. I will address both how, in the course of the 5^th–8^th centuries, in the form of hagiographical legends, many of Rome’s titular churches developed domestic associations related to the lives of their patron saints, and how, in subsequent centuries, as elite families wrestled to make Rome their own, monasteries came to be repositories of property and spiritual prestige.