Research
My current project, 'The Making of Atlantic Christianity: Asceticism and Organisation in Far-Western Europe, AD 300-900', aims to reinterpret key aspects of the history of Christianity in Europe by focussing on the regions of the Atlantic seaboard, from Portugal and Galicia in the south, through Aquitaine and Brittany, to Cornwall, Ireland, and Iona in the north. I am interested, firstly, in the links these regions maintained with the cultural and religious ferment of the Mediterranean world, including the Byzantine Empire, and the ways in which this connectivity shifted as the Roman power abated in the west. Secondly, I want to explore the distinctive way in which monasticism - and monastic structures of pastoral administration - developed across the Atlantic regions, particularly in those areas little (or rather atypically) marked by the structures of urban government which characterised Roman and post-Roman rule elsewhere. Indeed, by looking from the (perceived) margins, I hope to revise received ideas on the nature and development of such fundamental Christian institutions such as the monastery, the parish, and the diocese, demonstrating that paradigms developed for the former heartlands of the Roman Empire or the new heartlands of the Carolingian realm, tell us only part of the story.
My doctoral research, which is soon to be published as a monograph, explores the nature of religion and power in the Suevic and Visigothic kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula. I show that the growth of Christian authority cannot be adequately understood through an institutional lens – that is, one which focuses only on the capital-C ‘Church’, with its hierarchy of offices, body of canonical norms, and structures of governance. I focus instead on evidence for informal lay power in the religious sphere, and for the porousness of the boundaries that existed between clerics, professional ascetics, and laypeople. In doing so, I draw on insights from the growing field of the Anthropology of Ethics in order to elucidate the way moral authority was wielded and contested by those who claimed religious authority. What emerges is a more fragile picture of Christian power in the post-Roman world, rooted in the social dynamics of local communities rather than ecclesiological or legal abstractions.
Alongside my doctoral research, I worked extensively on issues in Iberian textual history, particularly the origin and transmission of the martyr passions in the so-called 'Pasionario Hispánico' and the sermons of the 'Homiliae Toletanae'. I have also worked on the transmission of Greek monastic texts to the Iberian Peninsula.