Mark Lewis Tizzoni, Assistant Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies, has co-authored a new paper in The Palgrave Handbook of African Christianity from Apostolic Times to the Present. “Christianity in Roman Africa, I: Communities and Religious Movements,” provides an updated, post-colonial exploration of the development of Christianity in the late antique Maghreb (modern-day Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and western Libya).

 

The timeframe for this study is a “long late antiquity,” roughly 180-700 CE, including both the later Roman Empire and its aftermath. The essay focuses on the ways in which community, consensus, and identity were built despite–and often through–controversy and resistance. During late antiquity, membership within the Christian movement, and what that meant, remained fluid, and this work examines the ways in which ancient Africans negotiated their own complex identities in relation to each other and broader cultural, social, political, and religious communities. Of particular importance for understanding these negotiations, the works argues, are the cult (and community) of the martyrs and the impact and legacies of Roman colonization.

Mark came to Bates in 2020. His research employs Latin poetry to investigate the dynamic processes that shaped post-Roman cultural, social, and political landscapes, with a focus on the Maghreb and Iberia in the fifth through seventh centuries CE. He is particularly engaged with questions of social cohesion and identity–ethnicity, gender, and race–and the application of feminist and critical race lenses to a body of sources historically studied in non-theoretically critical ways. Forthcoming works examine the identity- and race-making efforts of the court poets of sixth-century Carthage and curricular transformation in seventh-century Iberia. He is also working on an open-access book entitled The Maghreb in Late Antiquity. 

Christianity in Roman Africa, I: Communities and Religious Movements,” with Eríc Fournier, in Handbook of African Christianity from Apostolic Times to the Present, edited by Andrew Barnes and Toyin Falola, pp. 377-97. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.