Review of Ravenna, by Judith Herrin, pub. Penguin 2021

This is a history of Ravenna between the fifth and eighth centuries, focusing on its troubled relationship with both Rome and Constantinople and its consequent role as a sort of fulcrum of early Christianity. It is well illustrated, with maps, a comparative chronology, notes and index – in fact a proper, scholarly history. 

The book does face one major difficulty, which the author admits in the introduction: historical records from the time have mostly not survived well, and those that do were invariably written by clerics who naturally prioritised their own concerns. The result is that while sources like Agnellus obligingly provide us with endless lists of bishops and their works, plus the kings and emperors they quarrelled with, it is, in Herrin’s words, “extraordinarily hard to work out how people lived then”. This book will tell you all about the various churches of Ravenna; it won’t tell you how they related geographically to each other, how people got from A to B and what they would have seen on the way. I assume Ravenna was built around two main streets, one running north-south and the other east-west, because that’s how most Roman towns worked, but even that is not certain because Ravenna, rather like Cork, was built for defensive reasons in a marsh, and in such terrain, the location of streets is often determined by where the watercourses happen to be. There is no map of how Ravenna itself was laid out at the time, and I assume this is because it would be guesswork, though even that might have helped.

Herrin does her best with this problem; there are sections on “living in Ravenna” at various time points, but they mostly consist of records of people’s donations of land and property to the church (it sometimes seems as if the only purpose of lay people in Ravenna was to furnish income for the clergy). The few times we do hear about the life of lay people are fascinating – there is an absorbing chapter about a sixth-century doctor and another about eighth-century gang warfare between different districts; “these local residents went out of the city on Sundays to fight each other […] using slingshots, throwing stones and beating each other with sticks”. By then, it was actually rather a relief to know that at least some inhabitants did not spend the entire day in church.

Essentially then, this is a political and religious, rather than social, history, and very interesting it can sometimes be, particularly when the participants come alive as individuals (Galla Placidia, Attila, Theoderic). It throws light on a society whose priorities were often hugely different from our own; most readers will feel baffled that, with Arab troops practically at the gates, Rome and Constantinople were still arguing and issuing edicts on whether Christ should be portrayed in painting and mosaic as a young man, or an older one with a beard. Seemingly it mattered at the time.

So in order to get the best out of this, you need to have a real interest in the political and religious development of Constantinople in the east and Rome and Ravenna in the west, and the complex relationships between the three. For those who can enter into this, it is a most thorough and well written study. And if at some points it does read rather like a list of bishops, there are still the sort of glimpses that bring history alive. The most telling for me, as a writer, was Archbishop Felix, decreeing in his will that all his works should be burned, because, being now blind, he could not edit them and preferred them to be destroyed altogether rather than risk them surviving with copyist’s errors. I mean, we all hate typos, but really…

Review of Ravenna, by Judith Herrin, pub. Penguin 2021

This is a history of Ravenna between the fifth and eighth centuries, focusing on its troubled relationship with both Rome and Constantinople and its consequent role as a sort of fulcrum of early Christianity. It is well illustrated, with maps, a comparative chronology, notes and index – in fact a proper, scholarly history.

The book does face one major difficulty, which the author admits in the introduction: historical records from the time have mostly not survived well, and those that do were invariably written by clerics who naturally prioritised their own concerns. The result is that while sources like Agnellus obligingly provide us with endless lists of bishops and their works, plus the kings and emperors they quarrelled with, it is, in Herrin’s words, “extraordinarily hard to work out how people lived then”. This book will tell you all about the various churches of Ravenna; it won’t tell you how they related geographically to each other, how people got from A to B and what they would have seen on the way. I assume Ravenna was built around two main streets, one running north-south and the other east-west, because that’s how most Roman towns worked, but even that is not certain because Ravenna, rather like Cork, was built for defensive reasons in a marsh, and in such terrain, the location of streets is often determined by where the watercourses happen to be. There is no map of how Ravenna itself was laid out at the time, and I assume this is because it would be guesswork, though even that might have helped.

Herrin does her best with this problem; there are sections on “living in Ravenna” at various time points, but they mostly consist of records of people’s donations of land and property to the church (it sometimes seems as if the only purpose of lay people in Ravenna was to furnish income for the clergy). The few times we do hear about the life of lay people are fascinating – there is an absorbing chapter about a sixth-century doctor and another about eighth-century gang warfare between different districts; “these local residents went out of the city on Sundays to fight each other […] using slingshots, throwing stones and beating each other with sticks”. By then, it was actually rather a relief to know that at least some inhabitants did not spend the entire day in church.

Essentially then, this is a political and religious, rather than social, history, and very interesting it can sometimes be, particularly when the participants come alive as individuals (Galla Placidia, Attila, Theoderic). It throws light on a society whose priorities were often hugely different from our own; most readers will feel baffled that, with Arab troops practically at the gates, Rome and Constantinople were still arguing and issuing edicts on whether Christ should be portrayed in painting and mosaic as a young man, or an older one with a beard. Seemingly it mattered at the time.

So in order to get the best out of this, you need to have a real interest in the political and religious development of Constantinople in the east and Rome and Ravenna in the west, and the complex relationships between the three. For those who can enter into this, it is a most thorough and well written study. And if at some points it does read rather like a list of bishops, there are still the sort of glimpses that bring history alive. The most telling for me, as a writer, was Archbishop Felix, decreeing in his will that all his works should be burned, because, being now blind, he could not edit them and preferred them to be destroyed altogether rather than risk them surviving with copyist’s errors. I mean, we all hate typos, but really…