Syriaca.org director Daniel L. Schwartz will present on “The Social Context of Religious Change in Late Antique Syria” at the conference Faith and Community around the Mediterranean in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages at the New Europe College in Bucharest, Romania.
Abstract of the paper is as follows:
The unprecedented scale allowed by recent developments in digital prosopography make possible for the first time the integration of a broad set of data on elite and subaltern actors. Syriaca.org’s SPEAR project (Syriac Persons, Events, and Relations) provides an important tool for analyzing the social context of historical change that extends beyond merely the elite actors who appear most frequently in our narrative histories. This paper will introduce SPEAR and use data from the letters of Severus of Antioch to demonstrate the utility of the project for understanding religious developments in Late Antiquity.