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The Pagans and Christians source directory offers a finding aid to help students familiarize themselves with the primary source material on which scholarly understanding of the process of Christianization is based. Where copyright allows, we have included extracts from key primary sources in English translation, accompanied by bibliographical information for further research.
This resource offers a web-searchable narrative, prosopographical, and topographical index to the texts indexed by the Roman Martyrs Project.
The Roman Martyrs Project is dedicated to the study of the gesta martyrum, the anonymous martyr romances produced in the city of Rome in the fifth and sixth centuries. The Roman gesta martyrum are a group of little-known Latin hagiographical romances set by their anonymous early medieval authors in pre-Constantinian Rome, though the texts themselves seem to date from the fifth and sixth centuries at the earliest, and in some instances much later. These are texts which have both literary significance (as a ‘missing link’ between the ancient novel and medieval romance) and historical import, bearing clues to the relations of affinity among the Roman clergy and laity at the end of antiquity.
This project is driven by a concern to retrieve the interaction between "secular" and "religious" institutions through a social history of the gift in Rome in the formative period from the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire to the rise of the Carolingians. By compiling a relational database of patronage, the project seeks to make visible the historical agents and networks involved in the process still vaguely described as 'Christianization'.