Jamie Wood, Professor of History and Education, School of Humanities and Heritage, has been awarded a prestigious Leverhulme Trust International Fellowship for a project, “The Unnamed: Slavery and the Making of the Church in Late Antique Iberia”, 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.
Jamie has already presented preliminary work on this project at the University of Barcelona (January 2024) and the University of Málaga (March 2024), and will be giving papers over the summer in Kalamazoo, Cambridge, Leeds and Canterbury on various aspects of this work. The Canterbury presentation is part of a one-day workshop on ‘Present and Precedent in the Church Councils of Late Antique Iberia’, funded by the a Royal Historical Society Workshop Grants for 2024, and coordinated by Jamie and Dr Graham Barrett (more details here).
Jamie will be working with colleagues at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies and the Centro de Estudos Clássicos (Lisbon) during the fellowship. 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.
