This wide-ranging volume of essays grew out of a 2016 seminar at the University of Helsinki, part of the Finnish Symposia of Late Antiquity series. Organised in four thematic sections, the fourteen chapters are deliberately eclectic, employing multiple disciplinary approaches to a diversity of sources, ranging from documentary and epigraphical evidence to literary works and codes of law. Many of the chapters deliver the reader to geographic regions on the edges of the Roman Empire and beyond, including Ireland, Iberia and Arabia. Some authors situate their contributions in the context of wider discussions of the history of slavery and profitably engage issues in the comparative study of slavery; others do not. Chris de Wet's Introduction aptly describes the individual contributions as case studies. By focusing on source material that is delimited both geographically and chronologically, de Wet proposes, ‘actual continuities and changes [can] be studied, and then comparisons (between time periods, locations, or cultural spheres) can become meaningful’ (11). Many of the chapters do indeed showcase the advantages of what might be termed microhistories; given the structure of the anthology, drawing thematic connections among the chapters is largely left to the reader.
Part I broadly addresses ‘Moral and Symbolic Values of Slavery’. Pieter Botha's opening essay ‘Masters and Slaves in Early Christian Discourse’ casts a wide net, from the apostle Paul to Augustine. Botha draws theoretically on Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus to explain the persistent intertwining of Christian discourse with the Roman institution of slavery. In ‘Slavery and Religion in Late Antiquity: Their Relation to Asceticism and Justice in Christianity and Judaism’, Ilaria Ramelli largely reprises arguments she has made elsewhere. The thinness of her engagement with relevant secondary literature diminishes the impact of her argument for a strong connection between philosophical asceticism and principled rejection of slavery. Arkadiy Avdokhin examines figurative uses of slavery and debt bondage in ‘(Il)Legal Freedom: Christ as Liberator from Satanic Debt Bondage in Greek Homilies and Hymns of Late Antiquity’, demonstrating that Christ could metaphorically be seen as destroying debt records, and yet at the same time as inaugurating ‘a mystically reformed system of divine bureaucracy’ (86). After a brief discussion of the dimensions and contours of cross-border slave-trading in Late Antiquity, Maijastina Kahlos considers ‘Late Roman Ideas of Ethnicity and Enslavement’, and particularly the ugly question of whether some ethnic groups were considered more suited to slavery.
Part II, ‘Slavery, Cultural Discourses, and Identity’, opens with Chris de Wet's strong contribution, ‘Slavery in Euphemia and the Goth’. Set in late fourth-century Edessa, Euphemia and the Goth circulated in both Syriac and Greek. De Wet draws on this hagiographical fiction to frame questions about slavery as both discourse and practice, while gesturing towards larger scholarly and activist discussions of slaving, including contemporary work on human trafficking. In ‘What Was Jewish about Jewish Slavery in Late Antiquity?’, Catherine Hezser focuses on ‘late antique Palestinian rabbinic views that developed in the context of Roman-Byzantine society’ (130), an approach allowing her to highlight distinctive dimensions of rabbinic reasoning — for example, acceptance of self-sale into slavery — while raising questions with broader relevance to the lived realities of bondage in far-flung corners of the Empire. Hezser's readings of rabbinic sources over against the Codex Theodosianus are particularly illuminating. In ‘Divining Slavery in Late Ancient Egypt: Doulology in the Monastic Works of Paul of Tamma and Shenoute’, Christine Luckritz Marquis addresses the difficulty of identifying the activities of ‘actual enslaved individuals’ (149) in the wealthy monastic communities that flourished in late ancient Egypt. Part II closes with ‘Rural Slavery in Late Roman Gaul: Literary Genres, Theoretical Frames, and Narratives’, Uiran Gebara da Silva's assessment of the methodological challenges of drawing on literary sources for evidence of exploited agricultural labourers.
Part III groups essays on ‘Slavery, Social History, and the Papyrological and Epigraphical Sources’. A member of the team responsible for publishing an important dossier of papyri from Petra, Marja Vierros provides a helpful analysis of references and possible references to slaves and former slaves in those sources in ‘Slaves in Sixth-Century Palestine in the Light of Papyrological Evidence’. Many (but not all) of the documents April Pudsey and Ville Vuolanto cite in their chapter ‘Enslaved Children in Roman Egypt: Experiences from the Papyri’ are likely to be familiar to students of Roman slavery, but this hardly diminishes the significance of their contribution. Pudsey and Vuolanto's systematic, data-driven approach leads to measured judgments on enslaved children within households, the sale of enslaved children and the conditions under which enslaved children laboured and learned. Mariana Bodnaruk's study of ‘Late Antique Slavery in Epigraphic Evidence’ is notable for its deployment of intersectionality as an analytic tool crucial for understanding the complex oppressions associated with gender, class and ethnicity.
Part IV focuses on ‘Social and Religious Histories of Slavery on the Borders of the Empire and Beyond’. In ‘Slavery among the Visigoths’, Noel Lenski advances a detailed and convincing case for the importance of slaveholding in the Visigothic kingdom, yet he achieves still more than that. Visigothic and Roman slave systems differed in significant regards. In the Visigothic kingdom, for example, penal slavery seems to have been so extensive as to turn ‘the judicial system into something of a slave mill’ (264); some recognition was accorded to slave marriages; and slaves increasingly played military roles. In the comparative study of slavery, Roman categories and laws have often set the terms for defining the parameters of slavery. Lenski helps readers whose understanding of slavery has been shaped by Roman norms to appreciate the Roman system as one among many, rather than the standard against which other systems should be measured. Judith Evans Grubbs joins other scholars in seeing the writings of the fifth-century writings of St Patrick, especially his Confessio, as valuable evidence for how one former slave made sense of his experience of enslavement. In ‘Sinner, Slave, Bishop, Saint: The Social and Religious Vicissitudes of St Patrick’, she shows how Patrick could interpret his own enslavement as ‘just recompense for sin’ (295) while arguing strongly against the enslavement of Christians, with particular concerns for the sexual peril endured by Christian women forced into servitude and for Christians enslaved by Picts and other unbelievers. The volume concludes with Ilkka Lindstedt's ‘Slave Boys in Paradise? The Text of the Quran and Its Later Exegetes’. Lindstedt focuses on medieval Islamic interpretation of an intriguing verse from the Quran, which was widely taken to suggest that those in paradise will be attended by slave boys.
As with many edited volumes growing out of conferences, it is easy to imagine lively conversations about recurring themes and questions, including, inter alia, the relationship of debt bondage to chattel slavery; difficulties in identifying enslaved persons in the extant documentation — and what that might suggest about social relations and identities in late antiquity; slavery as discourse and as practice; and an aversion — from Ireland to Iberia to Palestine — to seeing members of one's religious tradition enslaved to outsiders, an anxiety that speaks specifically to the complex and interconnected world of Late Antiquity.
