Bronwen Neil: "Letters of Gelasius (492-496): A new model of Crisis Management?"

This paper brings together in a wider setting a wealth of previous research on episcopal strategies for dealing with individual crises of various kinds. Using Latin and Greek letters written between 410 and 500CE, I analyse the strategies adopted by bishops of Rome managing the many crises that impinged specifically on the city of Rome in the fifth century. Within this corpus of some 300 letters, those of Gelasius stand out as offering a markedly different approach. Bishop of Rome at the end of the tumultuous fifth century, Gelasius had to deal with the Acacian schism with Constantinople, as well as the recent transition of Italy to Gothic rule.  I use Roman episcopal letters along with other sources -histories, inscriptions, vitae and the Liber Pontificalis, among them – to establish who or what failed to register in the episcopal record. By studying Roman epistolary sources in this way, we can determine whether class, or simply wealth, was an influential factor in episcopal management of crises in fifth-century Rome.