Connecting Late Antiquities

Connecting Late Antiquities (CLA) is an ambitious project using new digital methods to transform our understanding of social relationships at the end of the ancient world. Late antiquity, spanning roughly the third to seventh centuries AD, was a time of dramatic change, especially with the growth of Christianity and its ecclesiastical organisation and the replacement of the political structure of the Roman empire with a number of independent successor kingdoms. The vitally important field of prosopographical scholarship has traditionally focused on the privileged few who constituted the social and political elite, paying little attention to the rest of society who, although not as well represented in the surviving sources, have nonetheless left behind evidence of their lives, particularly in inscriptions and papyri. Previous projects that sought to catalogue late-antique people omitted these sub-elites, as well as separating the 'secular' sphere of government from the 'religious' sphere of the Church, thereby exacerbating a notion of them as distinct realms whose contacts sometimes led to tension and conflict. Such an approach therefore runs the risk of imposing modern distinctions on a much more fluid and interconnected world.

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 both in academic circles and more widely. We will begin by digitising and updating the monumental three-volume Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire (focused on members of the imperial government and currently only available in print) and making this and its underlying data publicly available via the Cambridge University Press website. An online version has long been desirable, but recent circumstances have underlined the importance of this task. Our other major digital output will be a central CLA electronic resource, constructed according to up-to-date standards for linked data, which will combine the PLRE data with new entries drawn from prosopographies of the Church and surviving evidence for sub-elites in Britain. This will allow us to complete 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 and relationships with their communities; the second, on late-antique Britain, moves beyond the highest echelons of society to explore interactions with sub-elites and the degree of mobility they enjoyed.

This new CLA 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 make it much easier for users to access the wealth of material that is currently 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, as well as a number of online museum catalogues, in order to demonstrate the utility and added value of this approach.