Annual Institute for Medieval Studies and Classics research seminar: Erin Dailey

The paper is entitled 'Domestic Slaves, Sexual Desires, and Vulnerable Bodies in the Late Roman Empire and Its Successor Societies: Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Households at the End of Antiquity'.

About the paper

The households of the late antique world each represented a microcosm of wider society, in which social hierarchies were produced, refined, and exported. For all of their variety, these domestic spaces shared a common dynamic: their inhabitants negotiated the asymmetrical relationships between free and slave, parent and child, man and woman, citizen and foreigner. It is crucial to recognised how the vulnerability of slaves to sexual exploitation, and the politics of sexual desire, shaped the daily interactions that reinforced (or undermined) the social status of all involved, and thus the social makeup of the greater Mediterranean world. This paper will focus on the how the authors and audiences of our historical sources thought with domestic slavery foremost on their minds, and how such dynamics impacted late Roman attitudes and the process of social transformation that gave rise to a new and discernibly medieval landscape.

About the speaker

Erin Dailey did his PhD in the Institute for Medieval Studies at Leeds. He worked in academic publishing for several years before taking up a lectureship at Leicester University in 2018. He researches the Mediterranean world during the late Roman Empire and its early medieval successors. His book Radegund: The Trials and Tribulations of a Merovingian Queen came out in 2023. He is currently the Principal Investigator for a five-year European Research Council Consolidator Grant exploring 'Domestic Slavery and Sexual Exploitation in the Households of Europe, North Africa, and the Near East, from Constantine to c. AD 900 / AH 287’.

Find out more about the Institute for Medieval Studies and Classics at the University of Leeds.

How to attend

This seminar will be held in room 1.08 of the Parkinson Building.

Alternatively, you are welcome to attend online. If you wish to do so, please register on this Microsoft Form (no Microsoft account required) and you will be sent the Zoom link shortly before the seminar begins.

Image credit.

Abraham sending away Hagar and Ishmael: Abraham holds forth a vessel as Hagar and Ishmael stride before him, from the series 'The Story of Abraham' by Georg Pencz, German, c. 1543. Public domain.