Читать книгу Amalasuintha - Massimiliano Vitiello - Страница 7

Author’s Note

I came to the idea for this book during my work on Cassiodorus’s letters for the new commentary and translation of the Variae (edited by Andrea Giardina, Giovanni Alberto Cecconi, and Ignazio Tantillo) and through the research for my recent monograph Theodahad: A Platonic King at the Collapse of Ostrogothic Italy (2014). I was surprised to find a dearth of scholarly literature on Amalasuintha. It seemed to me that this important figure would quite naturally stand at the center of a work on female power in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. My monograph on Theodahad had just appeared when I took courage again, and I decided to devote an entire book to Amalasuintha.

This book is not a companion to Theodahad. In addition to being a study of Amalasuintha’s life, it is an investigation of the idea of female power in the fifth and sixth centuries, and in particular of the experimental use of political models by a woman in power to solve the succession crisis following Theoderic’s death. The book is an effort to fill the very real need for a scholarly exploration of Amalasuintha and her political representation.