The Private Letter in Gregory the Great’s registrum epistularum. Form, Function, and Formatting of an Ecclesiastical and Political Instrument of Power

• Applicant: Dr. Tristan Spillmann
• Subject Area: Greek and Latin Philology ; Medieval History
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 546593983

In my project, I would like to analyse the private letters in the register of Pope Gregory the Great (590-604). Paradigmatically, I want to examine the formalisation of papal communication in an essential period of the institutionalisation of the papacy at the end of the 6th century. The private letter was a specific format in ancient epistolography. It functioned as a viable form of interaction in various communicative situations. One derivative of the private letter was the letter of friendship, which primarily dealt with the reciprocal amicitia and displayed it literarily in order to institute or renew the relationship between the sender and addressee. Furthermore, this particular form gave the opportunity to implicitly raise politically sensitive matters, to examine the respective (political) stances and to position oneself in the discourse at hand. These practices could determine the factual agency of the participants of the letter exchange and, depending on the respective relationship, even expand it. Bishops, including the bishops of Rome as popes, utilised the private letter to articulate their position outside their jurisdictional fields in ambiguous or asymmetrical communicative circumstances in order to establish or expand relationships and also to become active in church politics. Using selected fields of action from the pontificate of Gregory the Great, which are directly intertwined with the pivate letters themselves, I would like to analyse the linguistic configuration of papal actions, i.e. the communicative practices for asserting and enforcing apostolic authority and its coded identification. Moreover, the correspondence will be placed in its immediate cultural context. Due to the decentralised post-Roman topography and the lack of regulated forms of communication, the private letter offered the papacy diplomatic opportunities for the assertion of its own interests and political options. I want to focus on an essential consolidation phase of the papacy with regard to a particular communicative instrument, study the rhetorical design of the private letter and shed light on its institutional significance for the papacy of the Early Middle Ages. Additionally, I intend to formulate and test a praxeological epistolographic typology, with which I want to approach the problematic classification of papal communication and offer a suitable model for further analysis. Papal private letters were so far neglected as an epistolary genre by modern scholarship, an aspect that I also want to address with my project.

• DFG Programme: WBP Fellowship
• International Connection: Switzerland, United Kingdom
• Hosts: Professorin Dr. Carmen Cardelle de Hartmann; Professor Dr. Carlos Machado