Matron, Meretrix, Madonna: An archaeology and urban history of the Subura Valley and Cispian Hill in Rome from the Republic through the early Middle Ages

The Subura in Rome was notorious in ancient literary testimony for seedy street life, but it has lacked a systematic study of the material record to nuance these texts. This dissertation is the first comprehensive examination of the archaeology and social history of the Subura valley and Cispian hill in Rome. Based on new fieldwork and reexaminations of previous documentation, it presents the material evidence for the Subura\u27s development and largely elite occupation from the Republican through early medieval periods and analyzes its physical and functional transformations amidst the broader historical and cultural changes that Rome experienced during this timeframe. It considers the development during each period of the residential and monumental landscapes together, revealing a relationship between them and the active, but overlooked role that the residents played in constructing the broader significance of the valley. Despite dramatic religious shifts and a significant reconfiguration of the topography from the Roman to the Christian period, an ideology of feminine virtue as a civic value persisted in the Subura\u27s monuments and landscape. In the Roman period, the sanctuary of Juno Lucina, which commemorated the pious Sabine women and their act of bearing heirs to Rome\u27s founders, anchored a network of cults and monuments associated with womanhood spanning the valley. In the late empire, however, the Subura\u27s residents became more religiously heterogeneous, until Christianity emerged as the predominant religion of the empire. In Late Antiquity, the Roman concept of feminine virtue was recast within a Christian framework centered on the figure of Mary as an intercessor. The early fifth-century papal basilica of S. Maria Maggiore on the Cispian, the first Marian church in the West, anchored a new Christian topography that emerged throughout the Subura, while, in the early medieval period, Marian processions through the valley to the basilica imbued the landscape with the notion of Mary as the bearer of Christ the Savior. This study of the Subura thus illustrates not only the mutability of an urban fabric within shifting historical and cultural contexts, but also the persistence in the landscape of deep-rooted social and religious ideologies over the longue durée