Narrare il passaggio, guidare la transizione : strategie di comunicazione papale nella prima metà del secolo VIII

Abstract

From a rereading the Liber Pontificalis and papal letters of the first half of the eighth century, this study analyzes certain aspects of the communication the papacy used to legitimize its political leadership in Italy and to build a network with the Franks. The paper's focus is the emergence in the official documents of those years of the bonus pastor formula to describe the popes – a formula that enabled the pontiff to exploit pastoral semantics for political aspirations. Not only the documentary and narrative references, but also the monumental ones (the oratory of Saint Peter the Good Shepherd in the Vatican Basilica has been proposed to date to this period), have been analyzed and contextualized. The close relationship between the monumental and symbolic dimension of the Vatican, and its value to the communication strategies of the papacy, was thus emphasized. This is in relation to both the Franco-Papal alliance and the Italian and Roman context.