Connecting Late Antiquities

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Julia Hillner
• Subject Area: Ancient History
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 508354349

Connecting Late Antiquities will use new digital methods to transform our understanding of social relationships at the end of the ancient world. Late antiquity (c.300-c.700) was a time of dramatic change due to the growth of the Christian Church and the replacement of the political structure of the Western Roman empire with independent successor kingdoms. Although a comprehensive prosopography of this period was planned in Germany before the war, historical developments mean that it never came to fruition and smaller prosopographical projects emerged in the UK and in France imposing artificial distinctions on an arguably interconnected world. As a result, prosopographical scholarship has traditionally focused on the privileged few who constituted the elites of this period, paying little attention to the rest of society and the traces of their lives, particularly in inscriptions and papyri. Previous projects have also separated the 'secular' sphere of government from the 'religious' sphere of the Church, thereby exacerbating a notion of them as distinct realms whose contacts led to tension. Our project builds on recent scholarship that challenges these categorisations, while also demonstrating the potential of linked data to enrich the understanding of past societies. We will begin by digitising and updating the monumental Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire (focused on members of the imperial government and only available in print) and making this and its underlying data publicly available via the Cambridge University Press website. Our other major digital output will be a central electronic resource, constructed according to up-to-date standards for linked data, which will combine the PLRE data with information drawn from prosopographies of the Church and surviving evidence for sub-elites in Britain. This resource will support research on two case studies of specific western regions of the later Roman empire: the first, on North Africa, explores the movement of local elites into the clergy and the roles played in their careers by social networks; the second, on late-antique Britain, explores sub-elites social interactions and the degree of mobility they enjoyed. This new resource will also become a framework for linking to other information about late-antique people contained in a variety of online repositories, including biographical dictionaries, databases of statues, inscriptions and papyri, and museum catalogues. This central hub will facilitate access to the wealth of material that is fragmented across a great number of disparate sites, thereby breathing new life into completed digital projects and providing a stable base for new ones. While this work will be ongoing after the end of the funded period, we will be prioritising the linking of projects which are directly relevant to our case studies, including the databases of Migrations of Faith: Clerical Exile in Late Antiquity (325-600) and the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Partner Organisation: Arts and Humanities Research Council
• Cooperation Partners: Dr. Gabriel Bodard; Professor Dr. Richard Flower; Dr. Charlotte Tupman