DoSSE at IMC 2025!

DoSSE project members will be presenting at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds, this coming July. Here, we set out what we will be presenting on, as well as the contents of our sponsored-panel on ‘The Ethics of Slaving’.

Session 113: Sex Education in the Long Late Antiquity, c. 300-900, I. Monday 7 July, 11:15-12:45, Esther Simpson Building 2.08.

Sheida will be presenting on ‘Early Islamic Sexual Taboos: The Boundaries of Permissibility in al-Ṭabarī and al-Ṭabarānī’s Narratives’.

This panel has been organised by Grace Stafford (Universität Wien) and Becca Grose (University of St. Andrews). Sheida will also be joining their roundtable on ‘Sex Education in Long Late Antiquity‘ on the same day in the same room from 19:00-20:00.

Session 716: Ireland, England, and Francia in the Early Middle Ages: Connections and Correspondences – A Session in Honour of Clare Stancliffe. Tuesday 8 July, 14:15-15:45, Newlyn Building 1.01.

Erin will be presenting on ‘The Holy Queen Balthild and Other Slave Women from “Across the Sea”‘:

Balthild was one of several women who rose from the status of ‘slave’ to that of ‘queen’ within Frankish society. Her origins, as someone taken ‘from across the sea’, locate her early life and her subsequent journey within an identifiable context of enslaved migration commonly attested within the source material. This paper uses both Anglo-Saxon and Frankish source materials to reconstruct that wider context of slavery, captivity, and the distinct vulnerabilities faced by people enslaved within the households of elite families during the early Middle Ages, in order to better understand how Balthild became a queen and, ultimately a saint.
 

Erin’s panel has been organised by Catherine Cubitt (UEA) and Alan Thacker (Institute of Historical Research). Our Leicester colleague Jo Story will be talking about her exciting work into early medieval manuscripts on the same panel.

The DoSSE project will be sponsoring Session 1304: Morality and the Economy, IV: The Ethics of Slaving. Wednesday 9 July, 16:30-18:00, Newlyn Building, 1.07:

The last decade has seen increasing scholarly interest in both medieval slavery and the medieval moral economy. This panel brings these historiographies into conversation, situating slavery within the broader economic and religious history of the Middle Ages. There was no slavery abolition movement in the early medieval period, and ecclesiastical institutions had numerous slaves and dependents. Indeed, churchmen prescribed enslavement as penance for immoral crimes. Yet ecclesiastics also sought to ransom and redeem war captives facing unfreedom. The mode of slaving, the identity of the enslaver, and the background of the enslaved person all had the potential to shape the contemporary perception of enslavement as legitimate or illegitimate. Slaving practices, then, bring into focus the boundaries and interactions between the moral and immoral economy in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

Team member James will be presenting on ‘Bandits, Slavers, and Bishops: Agents of the Immoral Economy in the Late Antique West’:

The hagiographies of the early Middle Ages refer to encounters of saints with robbers (latrones) interested in snatching away both goods and persons. Suffused with biblical tropes, these stories nonetheless envision an immoral and illicit economy, which holy men and women try to thwart. Ancient historians (e.g., Brent Shaw, 1984) have argued for the reality of banditry in the Roman world, and it would be odd if there was no continuity with Late Antiquity. But how far can we push the evidence for illegitimate slaving by bandits into the early Middle Ages? And were the economies of bandits and of bishops as far apart as our sources usually imply? The evidence for latrocinium and slaving brings into focus both how ecclesiastics defined certain economic exchanges as immoral and how their own behaviour provided a market for those exchanges.
 
James will be joined by Broderick Haldane-Unwin (University of Oxford) and Eduard Visintini (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz).
 
Broderick will be speaking on ‘Captivity and Credit: Gregory the Great and the Cost of Liberation in Late Antique Italy’.
 
Gregory the Great’s Dialogues include accounts of saints who voluntarily enter captivity to secure the release of others—acts framed through the lens of Christ’s sacrifice. Early medieval hagiography often echoes this model, portraying bishops and saints as central to the liberation of captives, and modern scholarship has largely followed suit. Gregory’s Letters, however, reveal a more complex picture. These correspondences are more concerned with managing the economic fallout of captivity, including the repayment of debts and negotiation with creditors. They show that the Church was deeply involved in, but did not monopolise, the practice of redemption, and reveal the involvement of a wider range of actors and entanglements that blur the boundaries between redemption and exploitation. Moreover, redemption itself could generate new forms of dependency, binding freed captives into enduring obligations. This paper argues that captivity functioned not just as a moral problem but as an administrative and economic one, and the Church’s role was shaped as much by economic realities as by theological ideals. It calls for a reassessment of who participated in the liberation of captives and at what cost, highlighting the ambiguous position of the Church within the overlapping moral and ‘immoral’ economies of late antique Italy.
 
Eduard’s paper is entitled ‘The Merovingian Church and Captivity: Between Moral Redemption and Immoral Bondage’:
 
This paper showcases how Church actors redeemed captives of war and raiding, but could equally bind these to themselves and their institution in asymmetrical relations of power as a result. Ecclesiastical sources portray the redemption of captives as one among the Church’s greatest missions; one entirely guided by piety and the desire to save both the captured persons and their souls from a life lived in unfreedom and related risks, such as that of forced apostasy. Captivity is a usual trope of hagiographical texts and the Gallic synods sanction the use of Church wealth for these acts of redemptio captivorum. Yet the evidence in dispositive legal texts, such as the extant testaments of Church actors, suggests that these freed captives could once more be bound in resilient bonds of patronage to their ecclesiastical benefactors, or their institutions, akin to what scholars like Stefan Esders (2010; 2021) have studied regarding fully enslaved persons freed in churches. The paper studies this phenomenon, both in the internal logic of the sources, as well as in the context of the great economic growth, taking place for the Merovingian Church in the sixth and seventh centuries in particular (Peter Brown, 2012 and Ian Wood, 2022).
 
Jamie Wood (University of Lincoln) will be moderating the panel and co-organised it with James.
 
With Roy Flechner (University College Dublin), Jamie and James have also helped organise the previous three sessions in the Morality and the Economy strand, which will all take place in Newlyn 1.07:
  • Session 1004 (9:00-10:30): Rethinking the Economy of Early Medieval Europe, featuring Jaqueline Bemmer (KU Leuven) on female inheritance and the late antique moral economy; Isabela Alves Silva (Universidade de São Paulo) on the alienation of ecclesial goods in Visigothic Spain; and Marcelo Cândido da Silva (Universidade de São Paulo) on whether there was such thing as Carolingian ‘economic man’.
  • Session 1104 (11:15-12:45): Distributive Justice across Modern Theory and Medieval Practice, featuring Roy Flechner on redistribution and the Papacy; Katharine Sykes (University of Birmingham) on the Alfredian knowledge economy; and Simon Yarrow (University of Birmingham) on the Cistercianism and the moral economy.
  • Session 1204 (14:15-15:45): Immoral Earnings in the Late Antique and Early Medieval Church, featuring Bronwen Neil (Macquarie University) on monks and prostitution; Rory Naismith (University of Cambridge) on shady dealings in the tenth-century Fenland; and Robert Wiśniewski (Uniwersytet Warszawski) on priests and bankers.
On Wednesday evening, James will be joining Jamie Wood’s roundtable on Namelessness in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (session 1403), in Maurice Keyworth 1.33, 19:00-20:00.
 
Last but by no means least, our new project member Daniel Alford will be giving a paper entitled ‘From the Council of Shahapivan to the Shah’s Prison: Structuring the Biographies of Rebellious Armenian Christian Lords, c. 444-451’. This will be part of Session 538: Digital Late Antique Prosopography, I: Between Fragmented Knowledge and Formal Methods (Tuesday 8 July, 9:00-10:30, Esther Simpson Building 1.01). He will also be joining the roundtable on prosopography (session 938), taking place in the same room on the same day, 19:00-20:00.
 
See you all in Leeds!
 
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