Julia Hillner: Clerical Exile in Late Antiquity

Exile was the prime method secular and ecclesiastical authorities employed to address religious dissidence during late antiquity. This workshop proposes to shift the attention away from questions surrounding the legal forms of and motivations behind clerical exile, which have been well researched, to the period of exile itself. The papers in this workshop will apply established and innovative methods to show that events and social encounters during exile had a profound impact not only on the experiences of exiled clerics themselves, but also on the short- and long-term formation of Christian law, theological doctrine, literature and rituals, and hence on late antique society at large.
We propose three sessions: the first one (Hillner, Fournier, Rapp, Mawdsley) will concentrate on different methods to investigate both short- and long-term impact of clerical exile (including social network analysis, legal anthropology, spatial analysis, and comparative history); the second (Ulrich, Barry, Natal) and third one (Engberg, Heil, Vallejo) will investigate a series of iconic and less well-known cases of clerical exile in the light of the methods proposed. In this way, we will be able to trace the increased interaction between Christianisation and the legal penalty of exile around the late antique Mediterranean, as well as changes and continuities in the realities and representations of exile experiences over the course of the period. Cohesion to the workshop is provided by the AHRC funded collaborative project ‘The Migration of Faith: Clerical Exile in Late Antiquity' based at the University of Sheffield (http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/sites/clericalexile/).