About

Jonathan P. Conant is an Associate Professor of History and Director of Medieval Studies at Brown University, with a focus on late antique and early medieval history, particularly in Northwest Africa and its connections across the Mediterranean and Sahara regions. His research examines questions of identity, sanctity, the body, violence, trauma, interfaith interaction, captivity, language, peasant society, and documentary culture during the period ca. 300–1000 CE. Conant's notable contribution includes his book 'Staying Roman: Conquest and Identity in Africa and the Mediterranean, 439–700,' which explores the fate of Roman identity in North Africa following the collapse of Roman imperial power, emphasizing how the idea of Romanness served as a cultural strategy to maintain Mediterranean connectedness despite political fragmentation. His work highlights the ongoing significance and evolving nature of Roman identity through the Vandal and early Islamic periods, analyzing political, cultural, and religious definitions of Romanness. Conant has also written extensively on the spread of Christian saints' devotion, literacy among North African peasants, Jewish experiences under Vandal rule, linguistic diversity, and the impact of violence and trauma on Christian sanctity. Currently, he is working on a monograph for the Cambridge History of Europe series covering cultural, social, and political developments from the late Roman period to the first Crusade, as well as a project on the psychological and emotional responses to violence in early medieval societies. His scholarly work includes editing volumes on North African history under Byzantium and early Islam, and numerous articles on related topics, reflecting his deep engagement with the interconnectedness of the late antique and early medieval worlds.

Research topics

• History
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Ancient history
• Art
• Classics
• Humanities
• Archaeology
• Social Science
• Art history
• Law
• Geography
• Ethnology
• Genealogy
• Literature

Selected publications

• The Donkey and the Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950–1180. By ChrisWickham. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2023. xl + 795 pp. £40/$55. ISBN 978 0 19 885648 1.

  Early Medieval Europe · 2025-02-12

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In his major new study, Chris Wickham contests the idea that the primary engine of economic change in the central Middle Ages was a ‘commercial revolution’, led by the Italian port cities of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, and fuelled by the trade in eastern spices, silks, and other luxuries. Rather, Wickham argues, between c.950 and c.1180, a Mediterranean-wide economy developed from the ground up, as distinct regional economies became increasingly complex. This process was centred as much (or more) on North Africa as it was on Europe, and it was driven above all by local demand for – and specialized production of – bulk goods, not luxuries (Chapter 1). Down to the Black Death of the fourteenth century, Egypt's economy was the most sophisticated anywhere in the Mediterranean. In the region of Būṣīr, between the Fayyum oasis and the Nile, local peasants may even have been so narrowly focused on commercial flax production that they had to buy their food in the market. Cash-cropping like this was rare in the Middle Ages, even in Egypt; but specialized production – especially in grain, flax, and linen, but also sugar, wine, paper, fine ceramic table wares, and other commodities – was wholly typical of the region. So was a market economy in which even peasants could participate (Chapter 2). Between the tenth and twelfth centuries, this same kind of ground-level complexity becomes visible elsewhere in the Mediterranean too, though always to a lesser degree than in Egypt. Wickham focuses on four other regional case studies: Tunisia and Sicily (Chapter 3), the Byzantine Aegean (Chapter 4), Islamic Spain and Portugal (Chapter 5), and north-central Italy (Chapter 6). As in Egypt, production in all of these regions became specialized to a significant degree; Wickham pays particular attention to linen, cotton, wool, and silk (a ‘semi-luxury’), as well as ceramic fine wares and amphora-borne products like wine. A hierarchy of cities and towns supported polyfocal exchange in all four regions too. Other than northern Italy, they were also all governed by centralizing, tax-raising ‘states’, with robust elite demand, for most of Wickham's period. The rents, taxes, and other fees extracted from rural cultivators varied from region to region, but in most of them, prosperous peasants had access to fine ware ceramics, and presumably to other goods as well. By c.950, these regional economies began to link up, as complex exchange relationships developed between Sicily, Tunisia, and Egypt. For a time, Jewish merchants based in the latter could even ship flax over 1,500 km west to Sicily, where it was woven into linen cloth and then re-imported back into Egypt. The Byzantine economy remained more self-contained, but here too seaborne trade connected the Aegean to imperial and former imperial territories in the Ionian and Adriatic Seas, including Venice. Far to the west, the economy of Islamic Iberia similarly remained highly integrated internally, but only thinly connected to other parts of the medieval world. When Italian merchants joined this system, in the mid-twelfth century, what they did above all was to unify the various pre-existing routes into a more or less coherent network that spanned the Mediterranean. Wickham concludes by summarizing these findings (Chapter 7), briefly also considering how transalpine Europe fits into the picture, and sketching out the Marxist theory that underlies his analysis (Chapter 8). For scholars interested in the emergence of a medieval Mediterranean economy, Wickham's macro-scale analysis of the process makes for a magnificent slow burn of a book. While future discoveries and ongoing research will doubtless continue to refine his interpretations, I suspect that economic historians will be working within the broad parameters that he outlines here for quite some time. Wickham's study is well grounded in a wide reading of the existing scholarship, and he is generous in his acknowledgement of where and how the insights of others have informed his own. One of his great strengths is his methodology, which focuses on regional case studies constructed less from the literary sources than from the practical documentation and archaeological data. Wickham tries as far as possible to use each of these kinds of evidence independently of the other, building up separate pictures of a region's economy from the written texts and from published archaeological field work, before synthesizing the two into a composite image. For many of his chosen regions, this work is itself an original and welcome contribution. That it results in a rich array of arresting and sometimes provocative insights is an additional bonus. Some of these are themselves methodological: Wickham is convincing, for example, that genizah documents (written in Arabic, but in Hebrew script), Arabic-script documents, and archaeology all let us see different aspects of an integrated Egyptian economy. His approach also allows him to intervene forcefully in a number of existing historiographical arguments. He rejects the idea that the Middle Ages saw the ‘failure’ of Islamic economies in general, and argues that Sicily in particular was, like Egypt, ‘one of the success stories of the Mediterranean’ (p. 268). He challenges the idea that peasant freeholders lost their lands to powerful Byzantine landlords over the tenth and eleventh centuries. Indeed, his emphasis on, and documentation of, the role of peasant demand in stimulating exchange across southern Europe and North Africa is another important contribution of this study. Perhaps most of all, though, Wickham compellingly argues that, for the expanding economies of the central medieval period, Mediterranean trade was not a zero-sum game, and that, at least down to c.1180, Italian merchants mostly added to its volume, rather than wresting it away from the control of others. The donkey and the boat of the title are metonyms for, respectively, overland and overseas trade. The book is not overly focused on actual donkeys or boats, or, for that matter, on the infrastructure or mechanics of intraregional trade. What Wickham does emphasize is that such trade was commercial, though it operated within a larger ‘feudal’ framework, which focused on taking surpluses away from labourers, rather than a capitalist one, which focused on paying them wages. Wickham is correspondingly – and rightly – sceptical of the idea of a central medieval ‘gift economy’ (p. 481, specifically of north-central Italy). But such scepticism should not blind us to the fact that in the Middle Ages economic transactions were also enmeshed within a larger complex of social relationships. Even when exchange was primarily commercial, it cannot always adequately be understood simply in terms of the classical economic categories of demand and supply. Occasionally, the book's analysis might have been enriched by keeping this fact closer to the surface. In Chapter 5, for example, we learn that the Umayyad capital of Córdoba has ‘the biggest set of ceramics kilns ever found in medieval western Eurasia’ (p. 398). With over 175 known firing ovens, production there was an order of magnitude greater than anywhere else in Europe. Moreover, down to c.1030, Córdoba probably enjoyed a monopoly over Andalusi production of a kind of fine white-glazed pottery, characteristically painted in green and black, and often with the Arabic word al-mulk (‘power’) integrated into the design. By the early eleventh century, pottery of this sort was already finding its way even to rural sites, a fact that Wickham – no doubt rightly – takes as a sign of peasant purchasing power. But one wonders if other factors might have been at play in its diffusion into the countryside too, like the symbolic projection of Umayyad power far deeper into Andalusi society than was typical elsewhere. This is a concept that Wickham floats (p. 399), but does not really explore in depth. That said, exploring questions like these would take space, and this is already a long book. The average length of the substantive Chapters 2–6 is about 120 pages each, meaning that the primary audience of the monograph is likely to be scholars rather than students. To be sure, the world needs scholarly tomes like this one. But a major factor in the success of the ‘commercial revolution’ model was Roberto Lopez's lively – and pithy – book of that name, which synthesized the concept for a wide readership. Similar synthesis for a lay audience would have intensified still further the impact of Wickham's study, and to good effect; for his important, stimulating, challenging counter-model deserves to be equally widely known.

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• North Africa under Byzantium

  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History · 2023-09-19

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  Abstract For over 150 years, western North Africa formed a valuable part of the East Roman or Byzantine Empire. In the 5th century, a Vandal army had conquered the Roman Empire’s African provinces and established an autonomous kingdom with its capital at Carthage. In 533–534, the Byzantine emperor Justinian (527–565) took advantage of political turmoil within Vandal Africa to invade and (re)conquer the region. In seeking to reintegrate this territory into the empire, Byzantine officials confronted both unrest among their own troops and resistance from autochthonous “Moorish” rulers. Imperial attempts to define Christian orthodoxy also sparked local opposition, although Africa’s Nicene Christian bishops were primarily concerned with consolidating their authority in the aftermath of what they perceived as Vandal “persecution.” Despite dwindling levels of overall prosperity, Byzantine Africa remained wealthy enough to sustain a building campaign focused on the renovation of churches and the fortification of strategic sites. Local wheat, olive oil, cloth, and ceramics also continued to reach markets across the Mediterranean, and changes in North African land- and cityscapes unfolded along lines that had been visible for centuries. At the end of the 6th century, the emperor Maurice (582–602) reorganized the region under an exarch, who combined civil and military authority. Shortly thereafter, the exarch Heraclius launched a rebellion that placed his son, also named Heraclius, on the imperial throne. Forty years later, a second exarch, Gregory, tried and failed to stage a similar military coup. In the mid-7th century, the Maghrib became a focus of the unfolding Islamic futūḥ or “opening,” and Gregory’s rebellion was ended by an invading Arab army. Similar armies or raiding parties were a persistent presence until 698, when the forces of Hassān ibn al-Nuʿmān captured Carthage, facilitating the conquest of the rest of North Africa.

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• Languages and Communities in Late Antique and Early Medieval North Africa

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Social Science
  • History

  Abstract The linguistic situation in western North Africa in the late antique and early medieval period was complex. In addition to autochthonous Amazigh (or ‘Berber’) languages, long-term histories of colonialism, imperialism, and overseas settlement had established Punic, Latin, and in some places Greek as important regional idioms. Between the fifth and eighth centuries, Vandal, Byzantine, Amazigh, and Arab conquests further reconfigured local linguistic landscapes, though language change in later Roman and post-imperial North Africa played out slowly over the course of centuries. Regional language use was fundamentally pragmatic. It could be a product of multiple factors, including region, class, occupation, and, with time, religion. Particularly important, however, was the association of certain languages with practical power, social advancement, and the control of wealth and property. Such an association was not the inevitable result of conquest, even when members of a new ruling class spoke a language other than that of the majority of their subjects. Nor were the associations of languages with power felt uniformly across the expansive landscape of western North Africa. Rather, such associations were always negotiations, worked out between multiple actors, including ordinary Africans as well as rulers and elites.

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• Latinity in Early Islamic North Africa

  Eranos - Acta philologica Suecana · 2022 · 15 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • History
  • Ancient history

  This paper explores the social function of Latin in the early Islamic Maghrib and the concerns of the local communities who continued to use the language beyond the Arab capture of Carthage in 697/98. By focussing on those Latin sources whose origins can be assigned to North Africa between the end of the seventh and the mid-thirteenth century, it considers evidence for the use of Latin as a language of Christian commemoration, worship, and education; the survival of Latin and then Romance as a spoken language in the medieval Maghrib; the role of Latin as at least a short-lived language of religious disputation between the region’s new Muslim ruling class and their Christian and Jewish subjects; and the use of Latin as a language of trans-Mediterranean communications. The language probably enjoyed a more robust afterlife in Islamic North Africa than scholars have sometimes imagined, yet the way in which Latin was deployed in mediating relationships overseas may ultimately have undermined sustained interest in the region by medieval European Christians.

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• The Vandals

  2022-03-22 · 1 citations

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• Ross Balzaretti, Julia Barrow, and Patricia Skinner, eds., <i>Italy and Early Medieval Europe: Papers for Chris Wickham</i>. (The Past &amp; Present Book Series.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv, 567; 23 black-and-white figures, 10 maps, and 6 tables. $110. ISBN: 978-0-19-877760-1. Table of contents available online at https://global.oup.com/academic/product/italy-and-early-medieval-europe-9780198777601?cc=us&amp;lang=en&amp;.

  Speculum · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Humanities
  • History
  • Classics
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• Be a Perfect Man: Christian Masculinity and the Carolingian Aristocracy. By Andrew J.Romig. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2017. viii + 253 pp. $65. ISBN 978 0 8122 4924 8.

  Early Medieval Europe · 2019-04-23

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• The Forgotten Transition: North Africa between Byzantium and Islam, ca. 550—750

  2019-01-01

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• Memories of trauma and the formation of a Christian identity

  2019-12-05 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Although the scope of imperial persecution of Christians was more limited in Late Antiquity than scholars long envisioned, it was nonetheless troubling and disruptive to those who lived through it. Indeed, the stories that Christians told themselves about the experience of state violence suggest that its rending of normative social bonds and social expectations could be as traumatic as the torture and execution of physical bodies. Focusing on late Roman Africa, Conant argues that the choices Christians made about how to remember the Great Persecution of 303–4 CE reinforced the trauma of that experience for generations to come.

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• Daily Life in Late Antiquity by Kristina Sessa

  Journal of late antiquity · 2019-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Daily Life in Late Antiquity by Kristina Sessa Jonathan P. Conant Daily Life in Late Antiquity Kristina Sessa Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. x + 250. ISBN 978-0-521-14840-5 Despite a flurry of scholarly interest in Late Antiquity in recent decades, until now no general study has systematically surveyed daily life throughout the Mediterranean world in this period. Kristina Sessa's engaging new study admirably fills that gap. Focusing specifically on ca. 250–600 ce, Sessa writes for students and general readers, and her text assumes no prior knowledge of ancient history. The book does not so much advance an argument as describe a layered and complex social world, at once strange and familiar, characterized by both dynamism and decay, which is of interest not just for its connections with the classical past or the medieval future, but in its own right. In this world, daily life moved primarily to the rhythms of the countryside, where most people lived. Across a territory as vast and varied as that of the later Roman empire, there was considerable diversity in the local organization of communities and the social networks that bound them together, but peasant cultivators everywhere focused on raising staples such as wheat, olives, grapes, [End Page 552] and pigs (Chapter 1). The empire's cities shrank in size, re-agglomerated around new sites of wealth and activity, saw the abandonment or repurposing of classical buildings, and struggled to greater or lesser degrees with warfare and urban violence. Yet they also continued to be centers of officialdom, hubs of economic activity, and the humming focus of public spectacle, bathing culture, prostitution, and religious cult (Chapter 2). Social and economic life everywhere centered on the household, understood at the time both as a physical space—the house, its properties, and furnishings—and as the community of relatives, slaves, clients, tenants, and even seasonal workers who inhabited that space, and whose daily concerns included cooking, eating, sleeping, human waste management, leisure, and domestic work (Chapter 3). Unlike in some pre-modern empires, the late Roman state was not distant and remote. It intruded into ordinary people's lives in a multiplicity of ways, benefitting and burdening them through the adjudication of disputes, the registration and taxation of property, the billeting of soldiers, and the provisioning of fodder for stations on the public post (Chapter 4). In Late Antiquity, as today, people's embodied experiences varied enormously with gender, wealth, status, and much else. Thus, for example, free men enjoyed much greater sexual license than did women, and they also had greater access to higher education. Disease disproportionately affected urban dwellers, because cities were cesspools of infection. The basic item of clothing for men and women, free and enslaved, rich and poor alike was the tunic, but with telling variations in quantity, quality, and accessories (Chapter 5). For "pagans," Jews, Christians, and Manicheans alike, religious rituals of various sorts were a part of daily life. Though monumental architecture could play an important role in communal religious life, everyday ritual practice continued to unfold primarily within the household, as it had in the Mediterranean for centuries. Lived religion also extended to practices of ascetic self-discipline, astrology, the casting of spells and curses, and the cultivation of relationships with the special dead (Chapter 6). Sessa's study succeeds at engaging students from a range of educational backgrounds and aptitudes. Each chapter begins with a profile of an individual, which serves both to draw readers in and to illuminate larger trends in late ancient society. Sessa has chosen these masterfully. Thus, for example, when Valeria Verecundia died in Rome at the age of thirty-four, her husband and daughter commemorated her in an epitaph as the best physician in the neighborhood. Her story introduces the discussion of body and mind. The role of the state is explored through the figure of Fl. Abinnaeus, who served in the army for thirty-three years before retiring and becoming a garrison commander in fourth-century Egypt. There, his daily concerns included provisioning his troops, handling personnel decisions, helping discharged veterans with their personal affairs, providing muscle to local tax collectors, and (together...

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