Leverhulme International Fellowship Success in Medieval Studies

Jamie Wood, Professor of History and Education, School of Humanities and Heritage, has been awarded a prestigious Leverhulme Trust International Fellowship for a project, “The Unnamed: Slavery and the Making of the Church in Late Antique Iberia”, which he will hold from September 2024 to June 2025.

As labourers, messengers and servants, enslaved individuals played a pivotal, yet largely overlooked, role in the making of the early medieval Church. A key reason for this neglect of the Church’s servile labour is that the sources very rarely mention their names, rendering them near-invisible to researchers. Building on training in slavery studies and social network analysis at the Universities of Bonn and Lisbon and viewing the lack of names as an opportunity rather than a challenge, this project uses Iberia from 400-700 as a case study for examining the social and economic roles of enslaved individuals.

Jamie will be working with colleagues at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies and the Centro de Estudos Clássicos (Lisbon) during the fellowship. It will feed directly into a new module, Slavery in Late Antiquity, which will be running for the first time in early 2025 and provide the seed for a broader project on slavery and the Church in the Early Middle Ages.

Learn more about the Leverhulme International Fellowship scheme here: www.leverhulme.ac.uk/international_fellowships.

Story submitted by Jamie Wood
jwood@lincoln.ac.uk