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

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.

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’.