| Summary: | <p>This thesis has two main aims. The first is to examine the intellectual development of the later ninth-century papacy in its Roman context, including its engagement with the outside world and the remarkable levels of ‘papal myth-making’ prevalent in later ninth-century Rome. It examines the careers of some of the key figures in this ‘myth-making’, namely Anastasius Bibliothecarius, John the Deacon, Gauderic of Velletri and Formosus, and investigates the linkages between this ‘myth- making’ process and the papacy’s involvement with the outside world. It also briefly charts the decline of this remarkably lively and energetic intellectual culture, and looks at Rome’s descent into aristocratic in-fighting at the end of the end of the ninth and beginning of the tenth centuries, symbolised most obviously by the disputes over the papacy of Formosus and the legitimacy or otherwise of episcopal transfer.</p>
<p>The second main aim of the thesis is to examine how the ‘myth-making’ in Rome affected the papacy’s international engagement during the later ninth century. It does this by investigating the papacy’s involvement with the conversions of Bulgaria and Moravia during the later ninth century, which were both notable for developed, detailed and sustained involvement from the papacy and from Roman clerics more generally, and for centring around a glorious figure from the papal past - Gregory I in the case of Bulgaria, and Clement I for Moravia. The thesis argues that these conversions were an obvious consequence of the ‘myth-making’ in Rome at the end of the ninth century. It also contrasts this extensive papal involvement with the relatively low-level papal involvement in the conversions of Bohemia and Poland in the tenth century, and suggests some reasons for this connected to the decline of intellectual culture in ninth-century Rome.</p>
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