Agnès Molinier Arbo & Massimiliano Vitiello
Biography - Agnès Molinier Arbo
Agnès Molinier Arbo is a professor of Latin language and literature in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Strasbourg. Her speciality is late Greco-Latin literature (3rd-5th centuries), particularly historiography, at the juncture between Christianity and paganism.
She studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris (1990-1994) and holds a joint bachelor's degree in classics and history, a master's degree and a DEA, and lastly a doctorate in Latin studies, obtained in 1999 from the Paris-Sorbonne University. After working as a lecturer at the École normale supérieure from 1994 to 1997, she was a temporary research associate at the University of Franche-Comté from 1997 to 1999. She was appointed a senior lecturer there in 1999, before joining the University of Strasbourg in 2005. In 2011, she obtained her habilitation to direct research (HDR). She became a professor in 2018, and currently directs the Center for Analysis of Religious Rhetoric of Antiquity (CARRA).
Agnès Molinier Arbo is the author/co-author/co-editor of books, editions/translations and articles on Late Antiquity. In the field of historiography, the texts she has specifically studied in recent years are Herodian's History of the Empire, the Historia Augusta, Eusebius of Caesarea's Ecclesiastical History, the History of Pseudo-Hegesippus and, in the field of poetry, the Virgilian Centon of the Christian poetess Proba, which is one of the sources of her interest in the relationship between women and religion in Late Antiquity.
Professor Molinier Arbo's interest in Antiquity began at a very early age, when she accompanied her grandfather to archaeological sites in the south of France. But it was her thesis supervisor, Jean-Pierre Callu, director of research at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE – PSL) until 1998, who, besides steering her research towards Late Antiquity, taught her that attention to detail can produce discoveries.
Fellowship 2024
Dates - 01/09/2024-31/12/2025
Biography - Massimiliano Vitiello
Massimiliano Vitiello is Curators’ Distinguished Professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City (UMKC), USA. During his USIAS Fellowship, he will be hosted by his co-fellow Agnès Molinier Arbo at the Center for the Analysis of Religious Rhetoric of Antiquity (CARRA).
Professor Vitiello is a Roman historian whose research stretches from the Late Roman Empire to the barbarian kingdoms and the Early Middle Ages (ca. 200-700 AD). He received his BA and MA in Italy at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” and his PhD at the University of Messina. From 2002-2006, he was a researcher in Germany at the University of Münster, where he was also Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He then moved to the University of Toronto (Canada) as Fellow of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, where he earned the postdoctoral License in Mediaeval Studies. In 2010, he joined the University of Missouri–Kansas City, where he was granted early promotion to associate professor in 2015 and early promotion to full professor in 2019. In September 2022 the University of Missouri System awarded him the distinction of Curators’ Distinguished Professor.
Massimiliano Vitiello is the author of four monographs, including a biography of the Gothic king Theodahad and a biography of Queen Amalsuintha. He also co-authored with M. Festy an edition of the Anonymus Valesianus 2 for the Collection des universités de France - Collection Budé, and he is a regular participant in the Historiae Augustae Colloquia. His deep love for Antiquity goes back to his childhood in Rome and in Pompeii, where he developed an early passion for numismatics and archaeology. He is deeply grateful for the research opportunities he has had in many different parts of the world, and especially for the extraordinary scholars he has met along the way. No matter where he finds himself, Professor Vitiello trusts that fairness and integrity will always provide the compass to navigate the sea of the Academy.
Project summary
THE LAST PAGAN WOMEN OF ROME
This project investigates the society of the last pagan women of Rome between the late 3rd and early 5th century AD. While many important investigations have been undertaken of Christian women in late antiquity, the world of the pagan women has so far not been the subject of any extensive study. Yet, these women’s experiences are a critical component of the social history of the city that was the epicentre of the bitter conflict between paganism and Christianity. Our investigation explores central themes and issues related to pagan women in late antique Rome. What were their socio-cultural profiles? What cults did they favour? Did they remain pagan by conviction, or did they conform to a family model? We aim to answer these questions by drawing on literary sources, inscriptions, iconographic and numismatic materials, and artistic evidence.
We will engage in several intertwined lines of inquiry, including a prosopographical investigation to examine the marriages of prominent pagan senators, and also to determine when women of the leading senatorial families of Rome converted to Christianity. We will consider the presentation in literature of traditional virtues in the pagan and Christian environments of Rome, as well as the portrayal of motherhood and the model of the ideal wife. We will also investigate the representation of imperial power, considering in parallel the images and propaganda of the pagan and Christian empresses, who traditionally represented female models for the women of their society. This will be contextualized inside a broad examination of the question of Rome’s shifting religious and cultural traditions during the 4th and the 5th centuries AD.
Our research will generate a co-authored book on the subject. We also plan a conference entitled “The Worlds of Christian and Pagan Women in Late Antiquity” in Fall 2025 at the University of Strasbourg, the contributions to which will be published as a volume of collected essays. We hope this research will serve as the springboard for new investigations pertaining to women’s lives and the history of religion in late antiquity.
