The theme of safe-guarding, accidents and death is demonstrated by reference to the bishops’ advice regarding the protection of babies, and the necessary measures to be taken in case of illness and death, including emergency baptism and Caesarean section. Accidents often occurred, especially to children, and this might lead, in more fortunate cases, to healing and even revival by means of a miracle. Miracle accounts are balanced by coroners’ accounts which record the details of death, often by misadventure, as in the case here of a young woman scalded to death by falling into a brewer’s vat.

A series of unique ordines discussing particular ceremonies are compared. It is shown how the texts were most likely redacted and spread by Arn of Salzburg, the first archbishop of that city and of Bavaria. Arn made use of the texts to shore up, define and defend his legitimacy as metropolitan. The ordines all assumed a stational framework, showing how the appropriation of this system legitimised Frankish episcopal power over the city. The role of Arn of Salzburg in the confection of a new ordo for the ordination of a bishop is established via a manuscript in Vienna. This was the first detailed account of Frankish ordination practices. In the manuscript, it is revealed as part of Arn’s programme to establish himself.

Chapter 7, “Matters of Faith: Catholic Intelligentsia and the Church,” asks how Catholics behaved in Warsaw and why. Roman Catholicism was the religion of the majority of Varsovians and had played an important role in the development of the Polish national project. In the absence of a Polish government, the Church provided a potential locus of authority for Poles. Warsaw’s priests drew particular negative attention from the Nazi occupation for their potential influence and they were viciously persecuted, imprisoned, and often sent to the concentration camp at Dachau. Nevertheless, leaders of the Church, from the pope in Rome to local bishops, were hesitant to provide guidance, support Nazi occupation, or encourage opposition to it. Despite the lack of a top-down Catholic policy, this chapter argues that individual priests and lay Catholic leaders were motivated by their religious faith to form everything from charities to a postwar clerical state. Crucial among Catholics was the question of the developing Holocaust and the role of Polish Jews in Polish Catholic society, which sharply divided them.

Along with the destinations Bishop traveled to and lived in for a time – Key West, New York, Brazil, Mexico – Paris holds a key place. Her extended periods of time there where she studied the French language, met fellow artists, and immersed herself in the culture, became a wellspring for her poetic development. While it is her earlier poems where she incorporates her experience of Paris most directly, even later work reflects her continuous interest in those French poets whom she most admired. Bishop frequently refers to those writers: Baudelaire, especially, and the symbolists and surrealists who follow him. Bishop did not adhere to any one poetic school; however, her poems and stories reflect her engagement with many traditions, including her reading of modern French poetry and poetics. This chapter traces Bishop’s relationship to Paris and French poetry, biographically and aesthetically, focusing on the city’s impact on her work.

Contrary to common belief, Christian bishops did not simply continue practicing traditional euergetism in Christianized form in cities of the late Roman Near East. From the late fourth century onwards, they had to answer for their use of church resources to an ideologically significant special interest group known as the ptōchoi. Entitled to church resources called the poor fund (ptōchika), this constituency was often comprised not only of the urban poor but of local monastic leaders who had close connections with influential lay donors. This chapter examines the details of three early fifth-century allegations of episcopal lithomania (excessive construction of church buildings) to date the historical emergence of this urban constituency and show how it pressured bishops to spend funds in their interest. It argues that the pressure exerted by this group was crucial in ensuring that episcopal budgets would be spent not just on monumental vanity projects but on philanthropic institutions and services. Hence these ptōchoi were actively involved in the politics that changed the urban landscape of the Roman Near East.

This chapter explores the literary use to which the bishop Ambrose of Milan (d. 397) put two of his female relatives: his sister Marcellina, who was a consecrated virgin in Rome, and their ancestor the martyr Sotheris. I will argue that Ambrose exploited the meanings conveyed by these two women to justify his past as an imperial officer, strengthen his legitimacy as bishop, and depoliticise his interventions in imperial politics. Ambrose’s discourse relied on long-established Roman and Christian notions of femininity that depicted women as domestic and vulnerable objects of pity. At delicate moments during his episcopate, however, Ambrose reinterpreted these traditional images and narratives in original ways and used the symbol of his female relatives to foreground a distinctively Christian model of authority, which differed from aristocratic rule and imperial bureaucratic structures.

Aleksei Shakhmatov proved over a century ago that the Rus Primary Chronicle combines two separate traditions about Prince Vladimir’s conversion: one about a Greek philosopher who travels to Kiev and another about the prince’s baptism following the siege of Cherson. The problem that Shakhmatov never treated, however, was why these two passages were redacted together in the first place. Chapter 5 examines this problem and argues that the redactions were made for liturgical reasons so that the chronicle would show Prince Vladimir establishing Christianity in Kiev much like the Byzantine rite shows ‘the apostle Constantine’ establishing it in the Roman Empire. The prince does precisely those things that the sainted emperor does in the hymnography: he converts because of a miracle and conquers his enemies with the ‘image of the Cross’. A detailed parsing of the liturgical elements reveals, moreover, that Vladimir imitates the deeds of Constantine in a rather unexpected way: he performs the liturgical roles prescribed for a bishop during the celebration of the divine liturgy. This discovery allows for the provocative new hypothesis that the Rus Primary Chronicle—when understood in its native liturgical context—actually depicts Prince Vladimir as the first bishop of Rus.