Climate, Disease, and the End of Rome?
New findings and old debates in the environmental history of Late Antiquity
6th of March 2019

Environmental change always played a significant role in the discussions on the causes for the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in modern scholarship. This has become even more true against the background of the debate on present-day climate change, as also reflected in the recent bestselling monograph of Kyle Harper (“The Fate of Rome. Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire”, Princeton 2017). The book, however, has found rather mixed reception within the community of environmental historians of Late Antiquity, which has emerged on the basis of a new cooperation between humanities and natural sciences during the last years.
The presentation will provide an overview of the state of the debate and the underlying methods and data across disciplines, covering a “Long Late Antiquity” from the crisis of the 3rd century CE to the 9th century CE within the Mediterranean and beyond. Besides climatic changes, epidemiological phenomena (such as the “Justinianic Plague”), “short-term catastrophic events” (such as earthquakes or floods) and the reactions of past societies to these challenges will be discussed.
Dr. Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, Institute for Medieval Research/Division of Byzantine Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences (member of the “Climate Change and History Research Initiative” – CCHRI/Princeton)
Book your FREE tickets here: https://bit.ly/2HZDgQ9
Moore Auditorium, 6th of March 2019, from 18.15 to 20.15
Royal Holloway, University of London
Egham Hill, TW20 0EX
Egham, Surrey
Networked!
An Introductory, Hands-on Workshop on Network Analysis in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
07 March 2019

Networked! An Introductory, Hands-on Workshop on Network Analysis in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Social Network Analysis is one of the most vibrant and rapidly growing methodologies in the social sciences and humanities today.
This workshop will introduce the basic principles of this methodology, explore its potential for analysing social phenomena, and discuss the pitfalls of the approach.
You will also experiment with network software and learn to visualise and analyse connections.
This workshop assumes no previous knowledge and is designed to provide a general foundation for everyone interested on the topic, from undergraduates to experienced researchers.
Dr Johannes Preiser-Kapeller is Senior Researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
WETTONS-B Annex
Date: Thursday, 07 March 2019
Time: 11:00-14:00
This is a FREE event and lunch will be provided.
Register and let us know your dietary requirements by emailing Sapfo.Psani@rhul.ac.uk
Dr. Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, Institute for Medieval Research/Division of Byzantine Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences (member of the “Climate Change and History Research Initiative” – CCHRI/Princeton)
Environmental change always played a significant role in the discussions on the causes for the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in modern scholarship. This has become even more true against the background of the debate on present-day climate change, as also reflected in the recent bestselling monograph of Kyle Harper (“The Fate of Rome. Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire”, Princeton 2017). The book, however, has found rather mixed reception within the community of environmental historians of Late Antiquity, which has emerged on the basis of a new cooperation between humanities and natural sciences during the last years.
The presentation will provide an overview of the state of the debate and the underlying methods and data across disciplines, covering a “Long Late Antiquity” from the crisis of the 3rd century CE to the 9th century CE within the Mediterranean and beyond. Besides climatic changes, epidemiological phenomena (such as the “Justinianic Plague”), “short-term catastrophic events” (such as earthquakes or floods) and the reactions of past societies to these challenges will be discussed.
Decoding the Past
Digital Tools for the
Analysis of Historical Data
21-22 February 2019

Date 21 February 2019 from 11.00 AM to 5.25 PM and 22 February 2019 from 9.00 AM to 3.45 PM
Type Workshop
Venue Room G21A, Ground Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
Description
Over the last decades the number of digital approaches to History, Classics, and other fields in the Humanities have grown considerably. Digital databases of texts and images now provide quick access to social, spatial, linguistic, and cultural data on an unparalleled scale. New techniques such as distant reading, GIS, and social network analysis also offer new ways and scales of interrogating the data. These digital collections and methods have been the product of considerable intellectual effort and research funding, and they have greatly contributed to advancing our knowledge on their specific domains. Nonetheless, many of these projects have operated in relative isolation from each other, being often only known to specialists, which has curtailed their heuristic and explanatory potential across disciplines as well as their relevance to the wider public.
This interdisciplinary workshop brings together scholars and software developers from a number of recent and on-going digital projects within the fields of Classics an Ancient and (early) Medieval History, with a particular emphasis on digital prosopographies. The aim is to present the projects and to exchange and compare experiences. Among the topics we hope to discuss are Sharing and opening data to non-specialist users; and using databases with Network Analysis and GIS.
The workshop is open, but as the number of places is limited, you are requested to register beforehand with Sapfo Psani (Sapfo.Psani@rhul.ac.uk).
David Natal Villazala, Royal Holloway
Onno van Nijf, Royal Holloway/University of Groningen
Networking Person-data: Interchange and collaboration
Gabriel Bodard, Institute of Classical Studies
The SNAP:DRGN project (Standards for Networking Ancient Prosopographies: Data and Relations in Greco-Roman Names) began as an infrastructural project (funded by the AHRC in 2014–15), which aimed to recommend standards for the use of Linked Open Data to interchange person-data between online prosopographies, onomastica, catalogues, and other databases containing information about people from the ancient world. SNAP also created and hosted a triplestore containing RDF data about a few sample person-databases (Trismegistos, LGPN, PIR², BM catalogue, VIAF), and a web-facing presentation of the approximately 700,000 individual records in the collection. A “cookbook” of guidelines for submitting new data in the SNAP format has been published alongside these preliminary collections.
In this presentation I shall discuss the objectives of the original SNAP project, including some assumptions about the modelling of person-data, and outline the state of play. Our current thoughts about the nature and availability of funding for large, relatively abstract or infrastructural projects such as the original plans for this work lead us to a new strategy. We now aim to take forward the essential work of establishing linked data standards, web services, infrastructure support and community engagement through a series of collaborative projects. To this end we are working on proposals with several partners who are developing applications for prosopographical, onomastic or biographical databases, for which the SNAP standards and infrastructure will be an essential component. We shall conclude with some discussion of the features of SNAP to which such collaborative funded projects could contribute, and will welcome suggestions and offers of cooperation.
Gabriel Bodard is the Reader in Digital Classics at the Institute of Classical Studies. He has a background in Greek religion and epigraphy, and worked for most of the last two decades in digital humanities, especially in the development of EpiDoc standards for the encoding of epigraphic and papyrological editions in XML. He leads the SNAP:DRGN project, bringing together multiple online prosopographical collections using linked open data, and is active in several other projects in the area of linked ancient world data.
Detecting and Analysing Gendered networks in Early Medieval Narratives.
The Leverhulme Trust-funded project Women, Conflict and Peace: Gendered Networks in Early Medieval Narratives analyses how historians and hagiographers in the early Middle Ages (fourth to eighth centuries) incorporated women and their networks into stories of conflict and peace-building, during a period marred by warfare and religious conflict. This paper will discuss the challenges involved in identifying and classifying such gendered networks in a selection of early medieval sources.
Máirín MacCarron is Senior Researcher on the Leverhulme Trust-funded project Women, Conflict and Peace: Gendered Networks in Early Medieval Narratives. She has published on women in medieval society, the development of chronology and computus in the early middle ages, and applying network science to medieval sources. She is co-editor of Maths Meets Myths: Quantitative Approaches to Ancient Narratives (Springer: Cham, 2017).
‘Where are the Proxenoi? Presenting and Analysing Proxeny Data for the Ancient World (proxenies.csad.ox.ac.uk)
Towards a Prosopography of the Lascarid Period (PLAS): Challenges and chances
Christina Williamson Bio
Onno van Nijf Bio
Onno van Nijf is professor of Ancient History at the University of Groningen, and currently a British Academy visiting fellow at Royal Holloway and the Institute of Classical Studies. He is currently directing a Research Project on Hellenistic Festival Connectivity www.connectedcontests.org
Pelagios: LOD for the ancient world
Pelagios is an international digital humanities project, currently funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It aims to facilitate the creation, visualisation and exploration of connections among historical digital resources, mainly based on their common geographical references. Pelagios’ free tools, Recogito and Peripleo, exploit the power of Linked Open Data to make historical documents more accessible and to offer new keys to investigate them. The online tools support collaboration, and help lowering barriers for researcher that are less familiar with formal machine languages (such as RDF, XML, Geo-JSON).”
This paper will briefly present Trismegistos (www.trismegistos.org), which aims to be a comprehensive portal providing easy access to the sources of the ancient world (between roughly 800 BC and AD 800). It will focus on three things: 1) the prosopographical section TM People; 2) our SNA-experiments and TM Networks; and 3) the new website which focuses more on accessibility and user-friendliness.
Mark Depauw is a professor of ancient history at KU Leuven, and has formerly worked in Brussels, Oxford and Cologne. Trained as a classicist and egyptologist, his sympathy for the underdog led him to make Demotic his speciality. The idea to set up a platform to facilitate access to less-known languages and scripts eventually resulted in the platform Trismegistos (www.trismegistos.org), of which he is currently the director. As a digital humanist his focus is on relational databases and to a lessor degree networks.
Creating a Digital Prosopography of the Roman Republic.
The paper will introduce the recently completed digital prosopography of the Roman republic, DPRR, which was developed by a team at King’s College London, outlining the aims of the project and as well as the various technical and academic challenges it faced.
Participants in the seminar may explore the online resource at romanrepublic.ac.uk
Henrik Mouritsen is professor of Roman history at King’s College London. He has published widely on topics ranging from Pompeii, Latin inscriptions, Roman Italy, slaves and freedmen and politics in the Roman republic. Between 2013 and 2017 he led an AHRC funded project in collaboration with Digital Humanities at King’s aimed at producing a digital prosopography of the Roman republic. The database which includes all known members of the Roman republican elite was launched April 2017 and can be explored via the public search page romanrepublic.ac.uk.
Connected Clerics (CONNEC). An Online Database of Late Antique Ecclesiastical Networks
The late antique Catholic church consolidated as a supra-regional institution with increasingly formal regulations at precisely the time when the western Roman Empire disintegrated into a mosaic of independent kingdoms. This project studies how ecclesiastical offices developed in such a context of political fragmentation. We will test the hypothesis that, despite considerable regional diversity, informal relationships among distant clerics were key in the dissemination of common ecclesiastical laws, visions of the church, and patterns of clerical behaviour.
An essential component of this project is the construction of a database that will store prosopographical and relational data of late antique clerics. We are using OpenAtlas (www.openatlas.eu), an application that facilitates the analysis and visualisation of social relationships and geospatial data. CONNEC’s database will allow online access and usage of the stored data, thus contributing to current and emerging projects in the area such as ‘The Late antique Presbyters’ and ‘The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire’.
David Natal
Personal profile
Before joining the department at Royal Holloway, I was postdoctoral researcher at the University of Limoges and at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. I also taught modules on Roman, late antique, and early medieval History at the Universities of Manchester and Salamanca.
Research interests
My research has focused on the social history of late antiquity, with special attention to the western, Latin-speaking part of the Roman Empire.
In my first monograph, I used sociological theories to analyse the impact of Christian asceticism and personal charisma in the construction of clerical authority. Ever since, my interest in bringing the contributions of other Social Sciences into historical analysis has largely shaped my research agenda.
My early postdoctoral research focused on conflict management and revealed the cohesive effects of social competition, which sometimes forced late antique individuals to look for new alliances beyond their existing connections.These results led me to explore network theory and software as tools for analysing social dynamics.
My current project analyses how a ‘universal’ late antique Church was constructed despite the context of political fragmentation that precipitated the end of the Western Roman Empire and its division into smaller polities. I head a team comprising five researchers and three software developers. During the next five years (2018-2022), we will adapt existing network analysis and GIS software and will explore how informal relationships among distant clerics contributed to disseminating common ecclesiastical laws, visions of the church, and patterns of clerical behaviour, which ultimately strengthened a supra-regional ecclesiastical organisation. This project is funded by the ERC-Starting Grant scheme (€1,465,316) and hosted at Royal Holloway, University of London and at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities (Vienna).
Victoria Leonard
Victoria Leonard is a postdoctoral researcher in late ancient history, as part of the ERC-funded project ‘Connected Clerics. Building a Universal Church in the Late Antique West (380-604 CE)’, at Royal Holloway, University London and the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities (ACDH-ÖAW), Austrian Academy of Sciences (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften).
Victoria’s role within the project involves compiling data on clerical connections and using adapted digital tools to examine and visualize evolving clerical networks in the late ancient and early medieval western Mediterranean.
Victoria’s research focuses on four main areas: i) social network analysis and digital humanities; ii) ancient and early medieval historiography; iii) ancient religion, particularly conflict and coercion; iv) and gender, sexuality, and theories of the body in antiquity.
Her monograph, In Defiance of History: Orosius and the Unimproved Past, is under contract with Routledge. The work explores Paulus Orosius’s historiographical approach to the deconstruction and reconstruction of a narrative of the past through the prism of Christianity. Victoria has published articles in Vigiliae Christianae and forthcoming in Studies in Late Antiquity and Gender and History.
Victoria is also a Research Associate at the Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. She is a founding member, former co-chair, and steering committee member of the Women’s Classical Committee (UK). She teaches across the disciplines of ancient history, archaeology, and religious studies. She has convened modules in material approaches to the ancient world and ancient religion, and has held teaching positions at Bristol and Cardiff universities.