Prof. Dr. Jamie Wood

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 unnamed and enslaved individuals.

since 2013
Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Associate Professor, Professor, University of Lincoln, UK

• 2023. As editor. With D. Fernandez and M. Lester. Rome, Byzantium, and the Visigothic Kingdom of Toledo: Imitation, Reinvention, and Strategic Adoption. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
• 2023. With M. Eisenberg. "The Business of Bishops: The Ecclesiastical Economy of Visigothic Iberia." In Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean 35(3): 388–408.
• 2023. "Narrating religious processions in Visigothic Iberia: a sociology of saintly power." In Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 15(2): 217–39.
• 2021. "Military manuals, masculinity and the making of Christian soldiers in late antiquity." In Journal of Early Christian History 11(1): 88–128.
• 2020. As editor. With K. Cooper. Social Control in Late Antiquity: The Violence of Small Worlds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• 2019. "Building and Breaking Episcopal Networks in Late Antique Hispania." In Episcopal Networks in Late Antiquity. Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte, edited P. Gemeinhardt and C. Cvetovic, 227–47. Berlin: De Gruyter.