Skip to main content

The Roman Household in Late Antique Church Conflicts

Dr Karl Dahm (Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Classics and Ancient History)

While much attention has been paid to the Christological controversies during late antiquity, their impact on the Roman family has so far been largely neglected. Focusing on the contrasting social milieus of Cwonstantinople and the Near East, this project will reshape our understanding of the role that the Roman family played during the intra-Christian divisions between the fourth and the early seventh century CE. Generously funded by the Leverhulme Trust, this project aims to demonstrate that the shift of dogmatic conflicts into the household constituted a driving factor in the disintegration of the traditional Roman family and Rome’s transformation into an early medieval society.

The phenomenon of intra-Christian division within families can be found across different social strata and cultural spheres and presents us with a complex landscape of social norms, gender, and authority. The household of a simple peasant or a wealthy aristocrat were equally affected, and even the imperial family could become a dogmatic battleground. So far, initial studies have explored the domus as a physical space which could serve either as a shelter for publicly persecuted ‘heretics’ or as a venue for private expressions of piety outside episcopal institutions. An investigation of the dynamic nature of the domus as a tightly knit social group of a core family, their dependants, and wider associates is still missing. 

As the essential building block of late antique and early medieval society, the domus permeated the literary discourses on and documentary evidence of ecclesiastical divisions. Historiography, hagiography, and imagined dialogues offer idealised images of how contemporaries envisioned the clash of familial and Christian piety. Legislation, council acts, catechism manuals, and the intimate communication between friends and relatives in letters, on the other hand, refer to specific cases and thus offer us valuable insights into the mechanics of real-life families and the opportunity to investigate the social realities of divided households. The complex interplay between social realities and rhetorical representation, found in the source material, forms a central aspect of this project.

As part of the project, a freely accessible online database exploring the role of family and household in church conflicts will be created. The collected data includes the specific constellation within each family or household, their connection to the wider community, the legal and social status of their members, their religious affiliation, the geographical location of each case, and its final outcome (conversion, split of family, ‘crypto-orthodoxy’, …). This data will allow not only for the visualisation of geographical and chronological distribution patterns as well as the analysis of social relationships via network-graphs, but also for trend-mapping the dynamics driving these conflicts. The database offers the potential for extension to include also religiously divided families of other pre-modern societies allowing for comparative studies of the same socio-cultural phenomenon through entirely new diachronic, transcultural, and interregional perspectives.