Entangled Prosopographies: Connecting the “Prosopographies of the Later Roman and Byzantine Worlds” across the Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond, University of Edinburgh and Online, December 8–9, 2023
Edinburgh’s Centre for Late Antique, Islamic & Byzantine Studies, with generous funding support from the British Academy project ‘Prosopography of the Later Roman and Byzantine Worlds (PLRBW)’, is delighted to host the first PROSOPON workshop on 8 & 9 December 2023.
The workshop brings together a large number of current prosopographical research projects with a focus from the late antique to the late Byzantine periods and is dedicated to exploring ways of going forward, connecting projects and researchers. It offers ample opportunity to discuss the methods and practices of prosopographical research, to learn from each other, and develop closer ties of cooperation.
The ‘Prosopography of the Later Roman and Byzantine Worlds’ (PLRBW) project unites two Academy projects under one umbrella: the recently revived Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire (PLRE) and the Prosopography of the Byzantine World (PBW), which arose from the former. PLRE was originally published in three seminal print volumes between 1971 and 1992 (with a fourth volume including addenda and corrigenda explicitly envisaged but never realised) and covers the governing class of the Roman Empire from 260 to 641. The Connecting Late Antiquities project is now updating it and making it more accessible, beginning with digitising PLRE and making it freely available on the Cambridge University Press website. From its inception, PBW has been a pioneering project in the Digital Humanities and is published online (currently in the 2016 version), with the technical responsibility for the site being undertaken by King’s Digital Lab (KCL). The project aims to record every individual mentioned in Byzantine sources during the period from 1025 to 1204, and every individual mentioned in non-Byzantine sources during the same period who is ‘relevant’ (on a generous interpretation) to Byzantine affairs; currently, coverage is near complete into the 1180s.
The PROSOPON-International Research Network is a collaborative network of prosopographical projects with a focus on the Eastern Mediterranean, 300–1600. Based at the Austrian Academy of Scienes, PROSOPON brings together prosopography-related projects, connects them to other initiatives with a similar scientific scope, and promotes the dialogue between prosopographical projects and the broader scientific community with a variety of communication opportunities and platforms for the exchange of ideas and knowledge.
The workshop will be held in hybrid format.
Advance registration required.