Commemorating the Dead in Early Byzantium

Death was the one transition that every Byzantine experienced, but it is a topic which awaits systematic study. My thesis will offer the first examination of early Byzantine burials, grave goods, and practices for remembering the dead (4th-7th centuries). This is important because beliefs surrounding death function as a kind of litmus test that allow us to examine the importance of tradition, kinship structures, beliefs about the afterlife, the way religion is used to structure interaction with absence, and the role of material goods in commemorating the dead and the construction of social memory. In the early Byzantine world, these beliefs also allow us to dissect the relationship between traditional pagan practice and emerging Christian culture. Although a recent study on death and the afterlife has examined related areas within later Byzantine thought (Marinis 2017), work on the early period consists primarily of archaeological
reports on specific burial sites (e.g. el-Khouri 2010), rather than examinations of varying ideological and cultural understandings of death.

This study implements a cross-disciplinary methodology and builds upon my specialist training in a broad range of sources and methodologies (including gender). Exploiting textual and material evidence, I investigate grave goods and funerals to explore early Byzantine rituals of death and the transition of the soul into the next world. At the centre of this project is an analysis of how this transition was marked and experienced across all socio-economic groups in a number of regional contexts.

My MA dissertation examined magic and apotropaic Byzantine objects, which provided the requisite research skills for PhD research. This augmented my strong language skills which include Byzantine Greek, which I will continue to develop by attending the Byzantine Greek summer school in 2019, as well as relevant modern European languages (French and German).