Anician Saints and their Domestic Spaces in Medieval and Early Modern Rome

Ideology, Society and Medieval Religion seminar series

This talk presents one of the through-lines of my recent book, Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome, namely, the genealogies and domestic spaces engendered by the late antique Anicii. In the talk I will introduce the late antique Anicii and the reasons for their later fame, then explore how and why the early-12th-century Montecassino monk Peter the Deacon went about widening the Anician ‘family,’ and finally how this fed into the early modern identification of Gregory the Great as an Anicius and the discovery of St. Benedict’s cell in Rome. Starting in late antiquity and ending in early modernity, the fortunes of the Anicii reveal how elite families in Rome, secular and spiritual, wove themselves, materially, and eventually even genealogically, into Rome’s Christian past—and how changing notions of family and family property conditioned these new attitudes to, and interpretations of, bygone saints.

Maya Maskarinec is a historian of early medieval Europe and the Mediterranean with an emphasis on the city of Rome as an interlocutor across geographical, cultural and chronological divides. She is an Associate Professor of History and Classics at USC and the author of City of Saints: Rebuilding Rome in the Early Middle Ages (2018) and Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome (2025). Her research interests include urban history, hagiography and historiography, legal history, and the afterlife of Rome’s Christian and classical heritage.

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