Sukanya Raisharma: Social trust and early Gallic monasteries

My paper seeks to explore why social trust was fundamental to the early monastic communities in Gaul. I will study the community of nuns at Saint-Jean at Arles as well as the nunnery Faremoutiers in northern Gaul in the sixth and seventh centuries. Instead of focussing on the authority of abbesses or the institutional framework of these two monasteries, I aim to explore how the internal dynamics of the communities affected the evolution as well as the longevity of the monasteries. My paper is an attempt to examine trust as a historical phenomenon, and rooted in time and space. There have been many studies of trust in the fields of sociology, economics, anthropology and philosophy but historians of late antiquity and early Christianity - apart from a few - are still far behind in fully utilizing trust as a concept to track historical change. Trust, like power, is ubiquitous throughout human history, and although never directly visible, is crucial in understanding how past societies work - from trade and commerce to faith and belief. Rather than covering the whole gamut of trust networks in late antiquity, my paper will test how crucial trust was for two late antique Gallic monastic communities.