ABSTRACT
In September 1998, a group of experts in late antique and early medieval history met for a week-long workshop in the Villa Serbelloni on Lake Como, the historic villa now transformed into the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellaggio Center. Working on tables and benches arranged al fresco under shady trees, Barbara Rosenwein and I were among the twenty scholars who crafted a volume published in 2001 under the title Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages. Barbara invited us to think hard about how one site could have many meanings, and chose as her example Saint-Maurice d’Agaune.1 Only 110 miles (176 km) separate Bellaggio from Saint-Maurice as the crow flies, but the span encompasses the entirety of the Alps, from south to north, a long and arduous journey which would have taken the medieval traveler over the Mont-Joux Pass (the ancient pass of Mons Iovis, renamed the Great Saint Bernard Pass in the high Middle Ages). I have cherished Barbara’s friendship and support since the 1980s, and in tribute to her, will use recently discovered evidence to add to the complexities of SaintMaurice as Barbara herself outlined them in the paper she presented to us in Bellaggio.
