Fifth-century Church Historians: Social network analysts before their time?

One of the main aims of our project is to investigate whether clerical exile, and the related mobility and need to find alternative and often more informal sources of support outside institutional infrastructures, had the potential to lead to a particularly fertile environment for the diffusion of theological ideas, and other cultural products. In this […]

Second Advisory Workshop in Sheffield, 8th of January 2016

Our second advisory board workshop took place here at the Humanities Research Institute in Sheffield on the 8th of January. As with last year, we were pleased to host a number of distinguished scholars, working on databases, the late antique clergy and/or social network analysis from countries such as Austria, Denmark, Germany, Poland, Spain and […]

Cherchez la femme: Visiting ‘Egypt. Faith After the Pharaos’

Yesterday I visited Egypt. Faith after the Pharaos, an exhibition at the British Museum curated by the brilliant Elisabeth O’Connell, who is, of course, also a member of our advisory board. Elisabeth came up to Sheffield to our second advisory board workshop recently (on which more soon), and I realised then that the exhibition will be […]

The Clerical Exile Database and the ‘Imaginary User’

We haven’t blogged in a while, but that doesn’t mean that our project hasn’t made any progress! Quite the contrary: Jörg, Jakob and I have signed a contract with Peter Lang to publish the contributions to our workshop at Oxford Patristics 2015 in an edited volume that will appear in the series Early Christianity in […]

Oxford Patristics Conference August 2015

The Seventeenth International Conference on Patristic Studies was hosted in Oxford in August 2015. Our research group presented the Clerical Exile project in the afternoon workshops on three consecutive days in the Examination School. Our workshop presenters (Jennifer Barry, Jakob Engberg, Eric Fournier, Uta Heil, Julia Hillner, Harry Mawdsley, Hiltrud Merten, Dirk Rohmann, Jörg Ulrich, […]

Interview with our PI

Our PI, Dr Julia Hillner, has been interviewed by Dr Richard Flower from the University of Exeter about crime and punishment in the Roman and late Roman world (including exile). You can listen to the interview here.    

Forced Ascetic Conversion and Ascetic Networks in Late Antiquity

[This is a paper delivered by Julia Hillner at IMC 2015, Leeds, on 7 July 2015; altered and amended for this blog post]   This paper looks at a momentous change in the late antique penal landscape that occurred in the course of the sixth century: the introduction, into written legislation, of the penalty of […]

Mapping Exile

[This blog was written by Harry Mawdsley, PhD student on the project.]   Last Wednesday I gave a paper at the Sheffield PGR showcase, an event organised by the History Department where 1st year PhD students were invited to speak about their research. I’ve recently become very interested in the topography of exile; in particular, […]

Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity XI

The biennial „Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity“ is the largest conference for the history of Late Antiquity in North America. This year’s meeting, the eleventh of its kind, took place at the University of Iowa at Iowa City, IA. Iowa City is perhaps a fairly unusual place to host a big conference, but the University […]