Already out!
My first book, published with Cambridge University Press, is already out there! The description from the publisher:
As the Roman Empire in the west crumbled over the course of the fifth century, new polities, ruled by 'barbarian’ elites, arose in Gaul, Hispania, Italy, and Africa. This political order occurred in tandem with growing fissures within Christianity, as the faithful divided over two doctrines, Nicene and Homoian, that were a legacy of the fourth-century controversy over the nature of the Trinity. In this book, Marta Szada offers a new perspective on early medieval Christianity by exploring how interplays between religious diversity and politics shaped post-Roman Europe. Interrogating the ecclesiastical competition between Nicene and Homoian factions, she provides a nuanced interpretation of religious dissent and the actions of Christians in successor kingdoms as they manifested themselves in politics and social practices. Szada’s study reveals the variety of approaches that can be applied to understanding the conflict and coexistence between Nicenes and Homoians, showing how religious divisions shaped early medieval Christian culture.
Chapters
Marta Szada, and Jamie Wood. ‘Succession Crises in Sixth-Century Iberia: Dead Bishops, Greedy Clerics, and the Council of Valencia in 546’. In Lincoln Readings of Texts, Materials, and Contexts, edited by Graham Barrett and Louise J. Wilkinson, 29–62. Supplementum to Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Sources. Leeds: ARC Humanities Press, 2024. https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/93577.
During the mid 540s, the east of the Iberian Peninsula saw efforts to establish ecclesiastical government, perhaps in cooperation with the Visigothic monarchy, through a series of Church councils, including a council of the provincial church of Carthaginiensis that met at Valencia in 546. This article offers a translation and extended discussion of the conciliar acts from Valencia, which deal with the order of liturgical services, how to define and administer different kinds of property, especially in the context of a vacancy in the episcopal office resulting from a bishop’s death, and ecclesiastical disci-pline, particularly as it related to clerical mobility. The article situates the indi-vidual canons within the broader history of canonical regulation and eccle-siastical practice in sixth-century Iberia. It argues that the council’s rulings should be understood as part of a sustained effort by the bishops present to manage the disruption that was caused within local communities, especially among the urban clergy, when bishoprics were left vacant for an extended period of time. The solutions proposed included oversight by the metropoli-tan and neighbouring bishops, as well as the keeping of records and calls for increased vigilance that regulations were being followed.
Articles
Szada, Marta. “Christian Community and the Barbarians in the Life of Severinus of Eugippius.” Journal of Medieval History 50, (2024). https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2024.2353134
Eugippius’ Life of Severinus is a text in which society is described through the dichotomy between Romans and barbarians. In this paper, I examine how exactly Eugippius imagines this polarity and to what rhetorical and persuasive ends he employs it. In particular, I focus on his complex portrayal of the barbarians which reveals his views on what place they might occupy in the Roman and Christian vision of history and politics. By examining the social and political ideas in the Life of Severinus we can trace how the hagiographer perceived the disintegrating societies of the West in the fifth and sixth centuries and what attitudes he advocated that could help de-escalate violence and overcome divisions. Finally, I discuss the extent to which Eugippius’ representation of the relationship between Romans and barbarians corresponded to the interests and anxieties of his Italian audience living under Ostrogothic rule.
Szada, Marta. “Basil of Caesarea’s Biblical Readings in the Address to Young Men on Reading the Greek Literature.” Revue d’Etudes Augustiniennes et Patristiques 68, no. 1 (January 2022): 25–44. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.REA.5.133190.
Basil of Caesarea’s Address to Young Men is a text of considerable celebrity that has been attentively read by generations of scholars. They usually focused on Basil’s use of pagan literature and saw in the Address one of the most important expressions of the Christian attitude to Greek pagan culture. In order to illustrate his argument by which he defends the moral utility of school education, Basil introduced in the Address a series of biblical references. Through mentions of biblical figures and paraphrases, creatively responding to pagan parallels, Basil laid out how the form of critical reading that he advocates should work in practice. The Bible appears cloaked in a Hellenized form and in this process the Hellenized form is vindicated. Thus, the work of reformulation and harmonization does not question the superiority of the Christian discourse but rather emphasizes its powers of assimilation of foreign elements.
Szada, Marta. “The Missing Link: The Homoian Church in the Danubian Provinces and Its Role in the Conversion of the Goths.” Zeitschrift Für Antikes Christentum 24, no. 3 (2021): 549–84. https://doi.org/10.1515/zac-2020-0053.
Frequently, studies focusing on the fourth-century Trinitarian controversy stop at the 380s and emphasize the importance of the Council of Constantinople and the Council of Aquileia in 381, and the end of Italian rule of the last Homoian emperor, Valentinian II. In very common interpretation, these events mark the virtual end of the Latin Homoianism—its final extirpation. This thesis mightily influenced the modern thinking about Christianization of the Goths and other barbarian peoples. The process was conceptualized as an “ethnic switch” —the people of non-Roman ethnicity embraced the religion while the Romans completely abandoned it. Thereby, the disavowed Roman heresy changed into the creed able to preserve ethnic difference under the Roman pressure of acculturation. In the present paper, I challenge this interpretation. I argue that the Latin Homoian Church survived long into the fifth century and had an active role in the process of converting the Goths into the Homoian Christianity. I also call into question the role of Wulfila as the Apostle of the Goths directly involved in their Christianization in the 370s, the controvertible image created by the fifth-century church historians. By these means, I aim at dismissing a vision of Christianization of the Goths relying on the solitary mission of a single person. The Goths did not cling to Homoianism because it kept them apart from the Roman neighbours and let preserve their traditions. Quite opposite, in the era of the emperor Valens it was an act of political loyalty to the Roman Empire which later under the formative influence of the Latin Homoian Church transformed into the religious identification founded on the concept of Catholicity—quality of being universally right in the matter of faith—and not on ethnic exclusivism.
Szada, Marta. “The Debate over the Repetition of Baptism between Homoians and Nicenes at the End of the Fourth Century.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 27, no. 4 (2019): 635–63. https://doi.org/10.1353/earl.2019.0054.
Among the differences that separated the Nicenes and the Homoians, their approach to converts baptized in another church was one of the most evident. This article argues that their adherence to contrary opinions on heretical baptism was not a consequence of a straightforward inheritance of two incompatible theologies of the past, but a direct result of the fourth-century debates over rebaptism that took place in the last phase of the Trinitarian controversy. A careful examination of those discussions makes it possible also to assess the role of such aspects as innovativeness, custom, and tradition in the forming of orthodoxy.