PUBLIC LECTURE on 20 May by Niall Ó Súilleabháin

Hosted by the DoSSE project, Niall Ó Súilleabháin (Université de Poitiers) will be giving a public lecture at the University of Leicester on the subject of:

 

 

Date: 20 May (Tuesday) 2025

Time: 16:00–17:30

Location: Fielding Johnson Building, Room L66

(Directions: from the Law entrance, veer left instead of entering the Law reception doors, then follow signs to upstairs.)

 

With a virtual component available through the link provided below.

 

The public lecture will include a Q&A. There will be wine and snacks available.

 

In the lecture, Dr Ó Súilleabháin will examine slaves, serfs and others who were legally unfree throughout most of the Middle Ages, and who were not captured or trafficked from distance lands, but who were members of the local population, born and raised alongside their free neighbours. This lecture will explore the social realities of the internal reproduction of a system of servitude through the prism of a series of previously unexplored documents from the monasteries and churches of Northern France in the centuries around the turn of the first millennium. It will examine how the institution of marriage was used to ensure a continuous supply of unfree dependents, how unfree status was passed down through children and how family solidarity was expressed, whether in resistance to the demands of lords, or even through the accumulation of inherited offices and wealth within the system of servitude. Finally, it will tackle the broader ideologies used by churchmen to justify their domination over their unfree dependants: the concept of the ecclesiastical familia, a household in which both clerics and dependants symbolically shared. By carefully disentangling the nuances of this concept and its implications, the lecture will shed light on what it really meant to be unfree within a saintly household.

 

Niall Ó Súilleabháin is a social and economic historian of medieval Europe, with a particular focus on social hierarchies in modern-day France from the ninth to the twelfth centuries. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre d’études supérieurs de civilisation médievale (CESCM) in Poitiers (France), a joint research institute of the Centre nationale de la recherche scientifique and the Université de Poitiers. He received his doctorate in medieval history from Trinity Collage Dublin in 2020 and his work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Viator, Early Medieval Europe, and French History.

 

In addition to the primary, in-person component to the event, a hybrid option is available via the following link:

 

Meeting ID: 340 538 646 925 3

Passcode: oJ2rm6Q2

Thank you very much for your interest in the talk.