'Anglo-Saxon perceptions of the city of Rome: correspondence and exchange in the 7th and 8th centuries

My research examines Anglo-Saxon perceptions of the city of Rome gained by textual sources in the seventh and eighth centuries. At the beginning of the seventh century, a group of missionaries were sent from the City of Rome by Pope Gregory the Great in order to convert the Anglo-Saxon people to Christianity. The following two centuries witnessed a period of conversion and Christianisation as the Anglo-Saxons assimilated themselves to all aspects of Christian culture. Although British, Irish and Merovingian clergy all contributed to the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, it was the City of Rome which the Anglo-Saxons would look back on as the place to which they owed their conversion to Christianity. The physical landscape of the City of Rome had a strong impact upon the development of Christianity in Anglo-Saxon England. Those who built the first churches imitated the structure, style and dedication of those in Rome, and the City quickly began to attract pilgrims and those seeking aspects of Christian intellectual and material culture which could not yet be found in Anglo-Saxon England. Texts were frequently brought back to Anglo-Saxon England which had been written in Rome and often included descriptions of the City and events within it. These were amongst other written documents arriving from Rome, such as written accounts of travel and pilgrimage, and written correspondence sent from the Papacy to Anglo-Saxon recipients.
This thesis will examine this corpus of textual source material in order to understand the textual perceptions of the city of Rome gained by Anglo-Saxons. The texts under analysis include descriptions of the City found in narrative texts, some of which were written in and disseminated from Rome itself. Items of written correspondence such as Latin letters sent by the papacy to Anglo-Saxon recipients, provide another avenue of textual perception. Written records of travel made by Anglo-Saxon pilgrims and shared with those back in Anglo-Saxon England also provide a set of of textual sources. The textual perception of the City gained from these sources will be analysed in conjunction with a consideration of sociological and anthropological theories of 'perception of place', and theories of the Anglo-Saxons' understanding of their own geographical place in the wider Christian world. The surviving manuscript evidence of these texts will be the heart of my research. Analysis of the manuscript evidence will focus on the choice of script, writing material and the physicality of these texts, and the impact of this on the Anglo-Saxons who received and read them. This impact can be seen through their imitation of Roman scripts and the preservation and dissemination of certain texts, compared to the texts acquired from other centres such as those in Merovingian Gaul or Ireland. This thesis seeks to provide a new angle from which to approach this formative period in the development of Christianity as a religion and its influence on the culture of Anglo-Saxon England. This research will also consider whether it is possible to speak of a general textual perception, or whether this perception was varied depending on the medium and genre of the text, and the audience's pre-existing knowledge of the city of Rome.