The Saint and the Citizens: Scripting Civic Behaviour in Early Medieval Hagiography

Abstract

This contribution explores Christian thinking about the city and the citizen in the post-Roman West. It takes as a case-study the early sixth-century hagiographical text known today as the Commemoratorium Vitae Sancti Severini, an account of the activities of the holy man Severinus in the Roman frontier province of Noricum (modern Austria), written down by his follower Eugippius after the community had been forced to resettle in Naples. It will be argued that Eugippius wrote for a diverse sixth-century audience of fellow monks, Italian citizens, and Mediterranean ecclesiastics. Tapping into a rich and ambivalent ancient civic heritage, Eugippius used his account of the saint’s activities in Noricum to develop a model of post-Roman community that combined biblical civic imagery with the language and participatory norms of Roman citizenship. His Commemoratorium celebrated the ideal of a heavenly fatherland while stressing that becoming a citizen of that caelestis patria required a committed performance on earth, by the individual but above all by the community as a whole.