All Manner of Precious Stones: Civic Discourse and the Construction of the Early Medieval City

This chapter concentrates on how early medieval authors instrumentalised the malleable connotations concerning stone and construction as part of their broader applications of civic discourse throughout the early medieval period. Over five sections, this chapter uncovers these important connections through a unique body of sources. It first concentrates on how late antique and early medieval exegetes correlated abstract conceptualisations of living stones of the heavenly city with explicit links to citizens in the terrestrial realm. With the link between the heavenly and terrestrial citizens established, the chapter then moves to an understudied liturgical rite in order to demonstrate how the bonds between these two bodies were emphasised in an effort to seek divine protection for a city on earth. The possibilities and limitations of the creation of sanctified space on earth through construction are then explored through two further bodies of evidence: the ideal construction of sanctified space on earth through the Vita s. Chrothildis and the problematic nature of this ideal in two ninth-century letters composed during the Carolingian period. Together, this analysis of these diverse sources illuminates the ongoing correspondence between medieval conceptions of civic space and civic bodies throughout each of these diverse texts.