Funded by a Leverhulme Trust International Fellowship, this project runs from September 2024 to June 2025.
As labourers, messengers and servants, enslaved individuals played a pivotal, yet largely overlooked, role in the making of the early medieval Church. A key reason for this neglect of the Church’s servile labour is that the sources very rarely mention their names, rendering them near-invisible to researchers. Building on training in slavery studies and social network analysis at the Universities of Bonn and Lisbon and viewing the lack of names as an opportunity rather than a challenge, this project uses Iberia from 400-700 as a case study for examining the social and economic roles of unnamed and enslaved individuals.
The fellowship will involve working with colleagues at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies and the Centro de Estudos Clássicos (Lisbon). It will feed directly into a new module, Slavery in Late Antiquity, which will be running for the first time in early 2025 and provide the seed for a broader project on slavery and the making of the Church in the Early Middle Ages.
Dissemination
Jamie has presented elements of this research at various workshops and conferences over the past year, including the following:
- “Unnamed and Unfree: Cataloguing the Ecclesiastical Enslaved in Visigothic Iberia“, Biografía i Prosopografia a l’Antiguitat Tardana, Facultat de Geografia i Història, University of Barcelona (January 2024) [slides]
- “Braulio of Zaragoza’s Social Networks: Insights from his Letter Collection”, GIS Applications and Religious Networks Analysis in Antiquity, University of Málaga (March 2024) [slides]
- “Unfreedom and the making of the Church in late antique Iberia”, 59th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo (May 2024) [slides]
- “What’s in a name? Slavery and the making of the Church in late antique Iberia”, Cambridge Late Antiquity Network, University of Cambridge (May 2024) [slides]
- “Freeing the slaves of churches in Visigothic Iberia: theory and practice”, 31st International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds (July 2024) [slides]
- “Slavery and freedom in the sixth-century Iberian canons”, Seventeenth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, University of Kent, Canterbury (July 2024) [slides] (funded by a Royal Historical Society Workshop Grant)
- “Named and unnamed intermediaries in the making of the Church in late antique Iberia”, The Connected Past: Religious Networks in Antiquity, University of British Columbia – Vancouver Campus (October 2024) [slides]