The British School at Rome is pleased to share the publication of Rome in the Tenth Century: A History in Art by John Osborne, the third and final volume in a landmark series exploring the history of early medieval Rome (700–1000 CE) through its material culture.
Published by Cambridge University Press as part of the British School at Rome Studies.
This is the third and final volume in a series examining the history of Rome in the early Middle Ages (700-1000 CE) through the primary lens of the city’s materiai culture. The previous volumes examined the eighth and the ninth centuries respectively. John Osborne uses buildings (both religious and domestic), their decorations, other works of painting and sculpture, inscriptions, manuscripts, ceramics, metalwork, and coins as ‘documents’ to supplement what can be gleaned from more traditional written sources such as the Liber pontificalis.
The overall approach is particularly appropriate for tenth-century Rome, which has traditionally been considered a ‘dark age’, given recent research on standing monuments and the large amount of new materiai brought to light in archaeological excavations undertaken over the last four decades. This magnificent and beautifully illustrated volume provides a triumphant conclusion to a series which will be indispensable for all those interested in early medieval Rome.
John Osborne is Distinguished Research Professor at Carleton University, Ottawa, and Associate Fellow of the Pontificai Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto. He is a cultural historian specializing in the cities of Rome and V enice in the early Middle Ages. Rome in the Tenth Century is the third and fìnal volume of a series that weaves together written texts and the evidence of materiai culture, integrating the disciplines of history, history of art, and archaeology. Rome in the Eighth Century (Cambridge, 2020) won the 2021 Margaret Wade Labarge prize of the Canadian Society of Medievalists, while Rome in the Ninth Century (Cambridge, 2023) was awarded the Premio Daria Borghese for the best book on the city of Rome written by a non-Italian published in 2023.
