The Peasant Rusticus: Life near Paris in the Time of Clovis
With that final sentence of her essay on Bodo, a Carolingian-era peasant near Paris, Power announced the arrival of the common man on the scene of popular historiography, a genre that was then dominated by examinations of famous men and their deeds. 2 Among medievalists, Power needs little introduction. Medieval People, her most famous and popular work, has had ten editions and numerous reprints since its original publication in 1924. 3 The first of its profiles was titled, ―The Peasant Bodo: Life on a Country Estate in the time of Charlemagne,‖ and remains a common fixture on the reading lists of history undergraduates. Bodo was an unlikely revolutionary. A dutiful serf on an ecclesiastical estate, the most rebellious thought Power attributes to him is a wish that ―the [estate] house and all its land were at the bottom of the sea,‖ expressed as he ―shivers and shakes the rime from his beard‖ while plowing the abbot’s fields on a midwinter morning. 4 It was in expressing such feelings at all, if only through the speculations of an historian writing eleven centuries later, that Bodo became an early standard bearer for the masses of so-called ―ordinary people‖ and their ―everyday lives‖ that have so thoroughly occupied generations of social historians since Power’s time. These efforts have benefited modern readers by giving new illumination, color, and depth to narratives that were once rendered in flatly political, military, or economic hues. The study of Late Antiquity, which has sought to shed additional light on the transition from the world of classical antiquity to that of the Middle Ages, has reaped particularly large benefits from the rise of social historiography. Indeed, it does not seem unreasonable to claim that without the social perspective, Late Antiquity might not exist as a separate field of study (a distinction for which it must
The Blackwell history of the Latin language
Preface. 1 Latin and Indo-European. 2 The Languages of Italy. 3 The Background to Standardization. 4 'Old' Latin and its Varieties in the Period c.400--150 BC. 5 The Road to Standardization: Roman Latin of the Third and Second Centuries BC. 6 Elite Latin in the Late Republic and Early Empire. 7 Sub-Elite Latin in the Empire. 8 Latin in Late Antiquity and Beyond. Glossary. Appendix: The International Phonetic Alphabet. Bibliography of Reference and Other Works. Index.
The Provincial Centre at Camulodunum: Towards an Historical Context
Present assessment of the provincial enclosure at Camulodunum, more particularly how far it can be compared to the standard picture of similar centres elsewhere, is inevitably constrained by the limited evidence at our disposal. With no numismatic sources to draw on and in the absence of a single record of the provincial priesthood — a striking void that calls for comment — documentary testimony is restricted to what can be made of two passages in the literary authorities. The first, a notorious sneer in Seneca's Apocolocyntosis (VIII.3), tells only that a temple of some sort was associated somehow with the emperor Claudius. The second text, an obscure allusion in Tacitus, is at first sight no more enlightening but, on closer analysis, the phrase templum Divo Claudio constitutum (Ann. xiv.31) yields the invaluable inference that the temple was to the deified, not the living Claudius; in which case construction must have been begun in a.d. 54 or later. Archaeological data throw no light on the origins of the temple or of the precinct in which it stood but exploration has steadily enlarged our knowledge of the site itself, and understanding of the remains has now reached the stage at which, for all its puzzling lacunae, the centre is as well known in some ways as the triple-tiered complex at Tarraco, the provincial enclave of Hispania Citerior. We have arrived at the point where the British sanctuary and its counterparts on the Continent can be mutually illuminating.