In late nineteenth-century Rome the synergies and contrasts between past and present, antiquity and the Bible, were vexed. Occasionally, the tensions spawned by these dualities erupted on to the surface of the city as material excrescence. Perhaps the most conspicuous manifestation of this was architecture. The case of St Paul’s Within-the-Walls – the spectacular High Victorian church designed for the American Episcopal Church in Rome by the famous English architect George Edmund Street – is a prime example. The church’s incumbent, the Rev. Robert Jenkins Nevin, sought to mark the building as a symbol of liberty and modernity in what he and his congregation perceived as the ancient corruptions of Papal Rome. Themes concerning history, religious politics, architecture, and the city were marshalled and mingled in an effort to make plain the distinction between conservative and progressive culture in the ‘new’ Italy. In this contested milieu the historic figure of St Paul was appealed to as a precursor to the inherent liberalism of bible-oriented Protestantism, with the religious liberty it enshrined posited as the only possible future for religious order. This essay explores these themes and their concomitant tensions and contradictions through the politics surrounding Nevin’s vision for this landmark building in the city of ‘Popes and Caesars’.

Service is not always a virtue. It can be a drudgery, or an enslavement if not physical or legal, then economic. But Paul inverted this meaning to illustrate the greater commitment of the believer to God, a virtue that levels social divisions and asserts a broader community of faith. This chapter examines the ways that Shakespeare adopts or reshapes Paul’s use of service elevating it as a community virtue where one serves another, often toward no gain for oneself in order to support a greater good. Two plays illustrate this focus of Shakespeare’s, King Lear where service, though more poignant, is more brittle and precarious, and Cymbeline, a play that revels in the necessity of collective service to establish an enduring peace.

Chapter Three studies ‘the word’ by merging two fields of association: first, the agglomeration of human labours, social practices, cultural values, and codified grammatical systems that made possible and supported the acquisition of Latin; second, the inhuman order of the ‘verbum Dei’. Each of these fields of association has, as its ultimate aim, the transformation of individual lives. It is under the rubric of this shared objective that I bring them together here. The first half of the chapter explores aspects of the medieval Latin grammatical tradition and its early modern afterlives. My goal is to make some seventh-century wranglings on the subject of the Latin case system serve as a point of entry into later fashions of prose style, and into the pedagogical disciplines of systematic imitation that were developed to teach Ciceronian Latin to schoolboys. The second half of the chapter explores a range of texts associated with St Paul, St Augustine, and Martin Luther in order to characterize the linguistic and spiritual stakes of medieval and early modern Britain’s absorption into Rome.

The “Holy Heads” of Peter and Paul, attested in the 11th century within a secondary altar of the Laurentius-Oratory in the Patriarchium Lateranense and later on inside the main altar of the Sancta Sanctorum, increased their status exponentially after having been transferred by Pope Urban V (1368-70) into the Lateran Basilica. Embedded in two huge, lavishly decorated anthropomorphic reliquaries they were enclosed high up in the new tabernacle above the main altar of the Cathedral of Rome. The new mise-en-scène emphasized their role as symbols of the double apostolicity of Rome and of the Roman Church restored after the return of the Papacy from Avignon. In the late 14th and15th Century the Capita apostolorum became one of the most prestigious relics in Rome in competition with the Veronica at the Vatican. The skulls of Peter and Paul in their precious containers – displayed only few times a year – attracted not only pilgrims, but also thieves. A lost fresco cycle in the transept painted shortly after the attempt to steal some jewels and gems from their reliquaries at Easter 1438 should have deterred potential thieves with its representation of the cruel punishments inflicted on the alleged culprits.