James Burns

By James R. Burns This blog post contains some brief thoughts on how late antique literary sources show female slave owners exploiting the bodies of...

Update (21/5/2025): We have filled our spare paper slot – Broderick Haldane-Unwin (University of Oxford) will be presenting on ‘Captivity and Credit: Gregory the Great...

By James R. Burns DID YOU KNOW that Theodoric the Great, ruler of the Ostrogoths (c. 475-526), was the son of two slaves? Well, he...

By James R. Burns (Limoges, France, the home of Pelagia.) ‘Since the pressures of the world weighed heavily on a woman, not least on a...

By James R. Burns Last week, I went to the Silk Roads exhibition at the British Museum. It situated slavery in wide-ranging Eurasian commercial networks,...

(James C. Scott, 1936–2024. Photo credit: Yale.) By James R. Burns Even if one accepts that the serf, the slave, and the untouchable will have...

By James R. Burns At this year’s International Congress on Medieval Studies at West Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Sheida, Seth, and I gave our papers...

By James Burns and Seth M. Stadel James: I have been reading Seth’s new book on Syriac exegesis, the abstract of which is below. When...

The new article in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (copyright: Cambridge University Press). By James Burns I have published an article in Transactions of...

A Merovingian sword (Metropolitan Museum of Art). Surrounded by his enemies, the sixth-century prince and rebel Merovech handed his blade to Gailen, and asked him to...

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