Welcome to ‘The Migration of Faith: Clerical Exile in Late Antiquity’!

We are an international interdisciplinary research project investigating how the banishment of hundreds of Christian clerics to a myriad of places all around the Mediterranean during the religious controversies of late antiquity shaped the institution of the Christian Church in this period and beyond. Applying both quantitative and qualitative analysis to a wide range of sources – histories, hagiography, laws, letters, treatises, epigraphy and papyri – we are working on compiling a free online prosopographical database of banished late antique clerics and their socio-spatial networks, as well as on books, articles and further events. Our project is a collaboration between the Department of History at the University of Sheffield, the HRI Digital at the Humanities Research Institute, the Faculty of Theology at the University of Halle (together with the Patristische Arbeitsgemeinschaft at the Humboldt University of Berlin), the Department of Culture and Society at Aarhus University, the Abteilung Byzanzforschung at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the German Historical Institute in London, and is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council from August 2014 to October 2017.