RURAL CHRISTIANITY IN LATE ANTIQUE AND BYZANTINE SICILY, 5th-9th CENTURIES AD: AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

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The late Roman to early medieval period witnesses the rise and expansion of the Church across the Mediterranean and Roman world, and is marked by the progressive emergence of churches as new foci for religion, community, and administration. Yet our picture of this major transformation of space and mentality is very much urban-oriented and the Church's impact in the landscape is less well understood in terms of chronologies, influences, and patronage. This project will study evidence of Christian churches and communities in rural Sicily from the fall of the Roman West in the late 5th century until the Muslim conquest in 827. I will ask key questions with regard to the physical, excavated, material and documentary sources: when do these churches appear and how did they fit in the landscape? What forms do they exhibit and what do these tell us of patrons and the communities they served? What role did churches play in landholding and administration? What does archaeological evidence disclose about church development, especially during the 7th-8th centuries, when many are considered to have been abandoned? Finally, how does Sicily fit into wider Mediterranean discussions concerning the impact of Christian institutions on rural life?This thesis will analyse evidence of Christian churches and communities in rural Sicily from the 5th to 9th centuries with particular focus on surviving rural monuments. Given its geographical position at the crossroads of Mediterranean maritime interfaces, Sicily formed a highly important province of the Byzantine Empire. However, archaeological and textual evidence for Christian communities in Sicily has remained understudied. Existing scholarship on rural Christianity here is extremely limited; the only systematic study dealing with rural churches dates to the late 1990s (Carra 1999). More recent research has focused more narrowly on micro-regional analyses (Wilson 2011), while historical studies have mainly focused on the texts of Pope Gregory of the late 6th century (Rizzo 2008). My research, drawing on published and unpublished evidence and archive data, will fill this gap; I have undertaken field surveys in 2016-18 at several rural churches in Sicily to already start this important task. Combining archaeology, architecture, and primary sources I will: -Create a new database of rural churches and generate a diachronic open-source distribution map. -Shed light on the processes, agents, and chronologies behind the continuity/discontinuity in rural churches and Christian communities between 5th-9th centuries. -Produce a new historic-archaeological image of Byzantine rural Sicily. Regarding the methodology, I aim to conduct fieldwork for 8 weeks per year at sites where archaeological investigation is lacking. The general methodology is based on non-intrusive and non-destructive techniques, which combine field-surveys with examination of artefacts, recording of structures by means of GPS, drawings, and drone imagery.My doctoral project will benefit other scholars on many levels. Via attendance of conferences, I will improve scholarly understanding of Christianity in this period and develop greater recognition of possible evolutions of sacred landscapes from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages in a wider Mediterranean context. My research will also impact on modern Sicilian public perceptions of their post-classical heritage. This region boasts several archaeological groups of amateurs, with some of whom I have collaborated, and whom I will involve in cleaning monuments, and organizing annual meetings. By improving the knowledge of these monuments, I will promote greater awareness of the physical remains of these early medieval structures, with potential for extending boundaries of cultural heritage conservation, traditionally focused on classical remains.