Call for papers for session/strand at the International Medieval Congress, 7-10 July 2025:
The Reach of Politics, 5th-7th centuries
How far did active participation in politics spread in late antiquity?
Can we avoid dichotomous ‘top-down’ versus ‘bottom-up’ ways of thinking by conceiving of politics as a form of circuitry wherein the political flows discursively down (or out) from the governmental core, upwards from the lowest participating rungs of society, or inwards from the peripheries (what counts as a periphery?), or around within and between groupings of roughly equal political standing?
How far down the social scale did participation reach? In what ways and at what points could the circuitry be ‘shorted’? What changes can be traced over time? What dynamics can be detected?
‘Laboratories’ within which we might examine these issues might include:
· Taxation: Discussions of its levels and legitimacy, its collection, resistance by, and representation of, taxed groups.
· Military service: Who should do military service, and who should not be allowed to participate? How did the extraction of such duties illustrate the flows of political discourse and the reach of participation in politics?
· The law: How did the working of the law illustrate the reach of politics, and the nature of political circuitry, its ‘switches’ and ‘resistors’?
· Assemblies: who attended? At what social or geographical level? What actual role did they play? What happened if they went ‘off-script’? (Obviously some assemblies are incorporated in discussions of the extraction of surplus, the law, assemblies of the army, and so on).
· Information: What information did governments collect about its citizens and what use did they make of it? What information flowed in the other direction and how?
· Public works: How – if at all – did late antique governments provide for the welfare of their subjects, whether in the provision of entertainment or spectacle, public health, poor relief (is there more to be said here after Peter Brown’s Through the Eye of a Needle?), and so on?
· ‘Citizenship’: How did contemporaries conceive of membership of a polity?
· Archaeology: Are there archaeological as well as documentary historical ways of investigating these issues
If you have a 20-minute paper to offer on any of these issues – or others that I haven’t thought of – using material from the last century of the western Roman Empire to the end of the seventh century, please contact me at
Professor Guy Halsall
Honorary Research Professor in the Department of Archaeology, Durham University
Corresponding Member of the German Archaeological Institute
