The dissemination of North African Christian and intellectual culture in Late Antiquit

This dissertation examines the means by which the classical and Christian culture of North Africa was transmitted to Europe in the period between the death of Augustine in 430 and the Muslim conquest of Carthage in 697. After the fall of Carthage, North Africa was essentially cut off from Christian Europe, but its cultural legacy was preserved through texts that traveled to Europe before this rupture. This rich and transitional period in Africa has, until recently, been largely neglected by modern historians. Specifically, the movement of late antique literary and religious culture from North Africa to Europe during this period has not yet been examined in detail. My research seeks to shed more light on this important movement, by which almost all textual evidence about late antique North Africa was preserved on the opposite side of the Mediterranean through late antique and medieval manuscripts.;To examine the movement of people, books, and cults systematically, the dissertation is organized into five chapters, the first of which is an overview of the historical connections already binding Africa to the Roman world by the year 430, as well as how those contacts change during the Vandal regnum and Byzantine reconquest. The following four chapters look at the places at which African learning arrived in Europe during Late Antiquity, and are organized according to different types of evidence: letter collections, saints' cults, the genre of the De viris illustribus, and textual transmission. Each of these groups of material illustrates a different context in which people and texts traveled, and reveals points of contact across the Mediterranean in Late Antiquity. These contacts followed trade routes, pilgrimage routes, written communications among scholarly and religious communities, and the correspondence of imperial, papal, and ecclesiastical administration.;The evidence of letter collections, saints' cults, and African authors in De viris illustribus lists serves as a fitting prelude to the evidence of manuscripts: not only does the evidence of Chapters Two, Three, and Four support the broad patterns outlined in Chapter Five, but, fundamentally, these preliminary chapters all deal with the transmission of texts through manuscripts, if only indirectly.