Reclaiming the Roman Capitol: Santa Maria in Aracoeli from the Altar of Augustus to the Franciscans, c. 500–1450

This book deals with S. Maria in Aracoeli, the headquarters of the Franciscan Order in Rome, built on the Capitoline hill by the Friar Minors soon after they took over from the Benedictines in the mid-thirteenth century. The approach is to work from the monument as a whole outwards to broader questions concerning the Franciscans' physical and theoretical appropriation of the past, the adaptation of an ancient site by a 'modern' religious order, the relationship between deployment of spolia and Mendicant beliefs, the contribution of the Roman Franciscans to the development of Marian devotion, and to the transmission and reception of ideas across time and space.