DoSSE Project analyses domestic slaveholding practices, and in particular the vulnerability of people enslaved within the home to sexual exploitation, in the late Roman Empire and in its successor societies in Europe, North Africa, and the Near East, from the early fourth century to the early tenth century AD. The Project brings together a diverse team of researchers to engage in a comparative investigation into every available historical source from across the whole of the greater Mediterranean world. The goal is not merely to uncover a wealth of information about an important but understudied aspect of late ancient society, but also to demonstrate how the bodily vulnerability of domestic slaves impacted wider historical developments.
As late Roman society transformed into Latin Christendom, the Byzantine Empire, and the Islamic Caliphate, profound changes occurred to the ways in which people thought about themselves and others, the ways in which they related to one another, and the manner in which they reorganised themselves, household by household, into new societies. Domestic slaves formed an important component, conceptually and in practice, of the household; their presence shaped the household environment and its interpersonal dynamics, thereby directly influencing the social transformations that ended the ancient world. The Project will propose an enriched understanding of the transformation of the late Roman Empire that foregrounds the impact of domestic slaveholding practices in that dynamic process.
Late Antiquity proved to be formative in the development of the three monotheistic faiths that remain with us today, as it witnessed the rise of the Christian Church, the consolidation of rabbinic Judaism, and the emergence of Islam. All three religions developed their ethnical and social teachings within a slaveholding society in which domestic slaves were vulnerable to sexual exploitation as part of a wider system of honour and hierarchy. As slaveholding fades from view in contemporary societies, its imprint on those ethical teachings becomes more difficult to see, yet no more significant. By developing an understanding of this practice as a shared inheritance from the late Roman world, DoSSE Project opens new avenues for dialogue and for critical reflection on the role of tradition and the responsibility of developing an informed understanding of authoritative religious texts.
