426 Sessa
There is no questioning the significance of past scholarship or the continu-
ing interest of scholars in high political approaches to late Roman church
history. However, assumptions underlying some of these studies should
give us pause. The idea that the Roman church ‘rose’ during the Ostrogothic
period only to ‘fall’ during the Justinianic era smacks not only of over-
schematization but also of a teleological perspective, which sees the late
ancient Roman church as the breeding ground of the later medieval papacy.
Walter Ullmann’s scholarship is the most infamous in this regard (and has
been duly critiqued precisely for this flaw), but there is a lingering exceptional-
ism in late ancient papal studies, which uncritically posits the Roman church
as different from other major sees in light of its claims to Petrine authority and
which perceives Rome’s bishops as especially efficient engineers of a more uni-
fied, centralized church.5
Moreover, approaches that emphasize a rising papal authority, high poli-
tics, and/or diplomatic engagement between East and West and Rome and
Ravenna can uncritically reproduce the discursive biases of the sources.
During the Ostrogothic era, two important documents were produced to this
precise effect: the Liber Pontificalis (ca. 535 and later) and the Collectio Avellana
(ca. 556–60). Both project complementary visions of the Roman church and
its bishops. While the Liber Pontificalis, a series of papal biographies beginning
with Peter, presents a narrative of the papacy’s steady institutional progress,
the Collectio Avellana, an epistolary corpus containing 244 letters and treatises
from Damasus (366–84) to Vigilius (through 553), singularly highlights high-
level exchanges between Roman bishops, emperors, kings, and prominent
clerics.6 Fortunately, more quotidian papal documents have survived, but their
underrepresentation contributes to the privileging of high political approaches
to the Roman church. Indeed such approaches can skew the main preoccupa-
tions and interests of Rome’s bishops during this time. As Noble stressed, “the
routine business of papal government, and the duties of the pope as an Italian
metropolitan, always took preference over everything else”.7
Consequently, this chapter will emphasize newer approaches and interests
in the social, cultural, and discursive matrices of the Roman church and its
bishops during the ‘long’ Ostrogothic period from 476 to 554. Beginning with
the groundbreaking studies of Charles Pietri and P.A.B. Llewellyn on the aris-
tocracy and its social and economic relations with Roman clergy, scholars have
5 Critiques include Richards, Popes and the Papacy, pp. 1–5; Costambeys, “Property, Ideology”;
and Delogu, “Il passagio”.
6 See especially McKitterick, “Roman Texts” and Blair-Dixon, “Memory and Authority”.
7 Noble, “Theodoric and the Papacy”, p. 398.