Connected Clerics

Building a Universal Church in the Late Antique West (380-640 CE)

About Us

Late antiquity was a period of immense change in Europe. The Roman Empire, which up until the fourth century stretched from modern-day Scotland to Iraq, was divided into two parts in 395. Soon after, different peoples started settling in the western half, and by the end of the fifth century Roman rule had disappeared in this territory, substituted by new independent kingdoms.


This context of fragmentation affected the incipient Catholic Church. Clerics from different regions often enacted different ecclesiastical laws, held different ideas about the nature and organization of the church, and used different strategies to advance their power over their fellow churchmen. And yet, despite this internal diversity, western clerics still portrayed themselves as representatives of a ‘universal’ institution, frequently resorted to common ecclesiastical laws to defend their positions, and appealed to the Pope or other distant bishops to resolve their conflicts.

How did late antique clerics build a supra-regional Church in such a context of political fragmentation?

This ERC-funded project will adapt existing network analysis and GIS software to explore how connections among distant clerics contributed to disseminating common ecclesiastical laws, visions of the church, and patterns of clerical behaviour, which ultimately strengthened shared ecclesiastical institutions.


Church of Saint Ambrose Milan

More About Us

Our Database, Funding Body, Host and Partner Institutions
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Our Database

The Database we adapted and use for our research is OpenAtlas

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Our Funding body

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 757860

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Our host Institution

We are located at Royal Holloway, University of London.

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OEAW

The Austrian Academy of Sciences.

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ACDH

The Austrian Center for Digital Humanities

Our Team

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Becca Grose
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Christie Pavey
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Amal Shehata
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Sapfo Psani
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Alice Hicklin
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Christoph Hoffmann
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Bernhard Koschicek
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Victoria Leonard
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Asil Cetin
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Alex Watzinger
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David Natal

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Adress

Royal Holloway, University of London
Egham Hill
Egham, TW20 0EX
United Kingdom

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