In the Middle Ages, narratives of Christianisation were constructed mainly based on written accounts and the foundation of the highest ecclesiastical institutions, thus creating a narrative of the secular and ecclesiastical elite, which makes it easy to tell a story about rulers, bishops, and “first foundations”, and much harder to say anything solid about how conversion worked for ordinary communities. RELIC starts from a simple point: if we want to understand Christianisation as a historical process, we have to treat non-elite practice and local structures as central evidence, not as background. The project’s objective is therefore a comparative study of Christianisation across East-Central Europe that integrates archaeological evidence with a systematic, source-critical corpus of local church and clergy-related primary evidence, supplemented into a comparative network analysis of socio-institutional proxies of both the elite and the commoners connected to elite structures. Nevertheless, RELIC does aim to replace current narratives, but to create models of these processes involving the evidence linked to the everyday people. We aim to compare and test these models against the state of art, and refine it using a broader and better structured evidence base, resulting in a more comprehensive picture.
The expected impact is twofold. Scientifically, RELIC provides a model for historical research on how a synthetic, comparative spatial approach can connect a variety of micro-level evidence to macro-level interpretations across regions. Secondly, RELIC demontrates the potential in the often-discarded historical-archaeological evidence, that is rarely examined as individually, they have little information. A synthetic, comparative investigation of such data, is, however, the way to discover more about the majority of the society, of whom traditional sources remain largely silent. A significant foundation of both of these are how the project is anchored in the humanities and social sciences, useing digital and spatial methods as a way to sharpen historical reasoning, not to bypass it. Finally, beyond these main goals, and beyond academia, it offers a more grounded account of a heavily politicised medieval process, through an open, traceable research infrastructure and methodology, rather than opaque narratives and unclear sources.
