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Politics and Tradition Between Rome, Ravenna and Constantinople: A Study of Cassiodorus and the <EM>Variae</EM>, 527-554 (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought: Fourth Series)

Politics and Tradition Between Rome, Ravenna and Constantinople: A Study of Cassiodorus and the Variae, 527-554 (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought: Fourth Series)

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Dr M. Shane Bjornlie
Cambridge University Press, 11/22/2012
EAN 9781107028401, ISBN10: 110702840X

Hardcover, 386 pages, 23.2 x 15.8 x 2.6 cm
Language: English

The Variae of Cassiodorus have long been valued as an epistolary collection offering a window into political and cultural life in a so-called barbarian successor state in sixth-century Italy. However, this study is the first to treat them as more than an assemblage of individual case studies and to analyse the collection's wider historical context. M. Shane Bjornlie highlights the insights the Variae provide into early medieval political, ecclesiastical, fiscal and legal affairs and the influence of the political and military turbulence of Justinian's reconquest of Italy and of political and cultural exchanges between Italy and Constantinople. The book also explores how Cassiodorus revised, updated and assembled the Variae for publication and what this reveals about his motives for publishing an epistolary record and for his own political life at a crucial period of transformation for the Roman world.

Part I. The Variae as Windows onto Painted Curtains
Introduction
1. Cassiodorus and Italy in the fifth and sixth centuries
Part II. Cassiodorus and the Circumstances of Political Survival
2. The age of bureaucracy
3. The reign of Justinian
4. Voices of discontent in Constantinople
5. The Anicii between Rome, Ravenna and Constantinople
6. The memory of Boethius in the Variae
Part III. Reading the Variae as Political Apologetic
7. Literary aspects of the Variae
8. Antiquitas and Novitas
the language of good governance in the Variae
9. Natura and Law in Justinian's Novellae and the Variae
10. Reading good governance in the Variae and the De anima
11. The Variae as apologetic narrative
12. Conclusion
innovative traditionalism and its consequence
Bibliography.