Slavery in the Late Antique World, 150 – 700 CE

Chris L. de Wet is Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Studies at the University of South Africa and Honorary Research Fellow at the Australian Lutheran College. He is the author of Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity (2015) and The Unbound God: Slavery and the Formation of Early Christian Thought (2018). Maijastina Kahlos is Research Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki. She is the author of Debate and Dialogue: Christian and Pagan Cultures, c. 360-430 (2007), Forbearance and Compulsion: The Rhetoric of Tolerance and Intolerance in Late Antiquity (2009), and Religious Dissent in Late Antiquity (2020). Ville Vuolanto is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at Tampere University. He has published extensively on children and family in the Roman and Late Antique periods. His publications include Children and Asceticism in Late Antiquity (2015) and Children and Everyday Life in the Roman and Late Antique World (ed. 2017, with C. Laes).

I. Moral and Symbolic Values of Slavery: 1. Masters and slaves in early Christian discourse Peter J. J. Botha; 2. Slavery and religion in Late Antiquity: their relation to ascetism and justice in Christianity and Judaism Ilaria Ramelli; 3. (II) Legal freedom: Chris as liberator from satanic debt bondage in Greek literature of Late Antiquity Arkadiy Avdokhin; 4. Late Roman ideas of ethnicity and enslavement Maijastina Kahlos; II. Slavery, Cultural Discourses, and Identity: 5. Slavery in Euphemia and the Goth Chris L. De Wet; 6. What was Jewish slavery in Late Antiquity? Catherine Hezser; 7. Divining slavery in Late Ancient Egypt: doulology in the monastic works of Paul of Tamma and Shenoute Christine Luckritz Marquis; 8. Rural slavery in Late Roman Gaul: literary genres, theoretical frames and narratives Uiran Gebara da Silva; III. Slavery, Social History, and the Papyrological and Epigraphical Sources: 9. Slaves in the sixth century Palestine in the light of papyrological evidence Marja Vierros; 10. Child slaves in Roman Egypt: experiences from the papyri April Pudsey and Ville Vuolanto; 11. Late antique slavery in epigraphic evidence Mariana Bodnaruk; IV. Social and Religious Histories of Slavery on the Borders of the Empire and Beyond: 12. Slavery among the Visigoths Noel Lenski; 13. Sinner, slave, bishop, saint: the social and religious vicissitudes of St. Patrick Judith Evans Grubbs; 14. Slave boys in paradise? The Evidence of the Quary and its later exegetes Ilkka Lindstedt.