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Damasus and the derelict relics

This article considers the language of ‘mapping’ and ‘topography’ often invoked to describe the activities of Pope Damasus (366–84). Damasus, widely seen as an impresario of the saints, is credited with creating a systematic Christian topography around Rome. This article challenges this perspective, asserting instead that Damasus worked neither systematically nor holistically to transform landscape; his modest interventions relied upon forgotten cemeterial sites of little interest to Rome's dominant Christian power‐brokers. To see Damasus's activities as transformative of the Christian landscape, then, is to confuse later evaluations of his work and to ignore the complex political processes that ‘mapped’ Christianity onto the urban and suburban landscape of late fourth and early fifth‐century Rome.