The admission of former slaves into churches and monasteries: reaching behind the sources

Religious institutions in early medieval Europe were both recipients of former slaves and instigators of manumissions. By drawing on recent work concerning the admission of former slaves into churches and monasteries, the present paper identifies dominant strands in the historiography from Marc Bloch to the present, which are then re-evaluated in light of a close examination of core sources. The paper argues that while the contention that such institutions were the primary beneficiaries of manumissions can indeed be sustained, there are also important moderating nuances to take into account. These include slaves of churches who were freed but continued to live on the churches' lands; alternatives to ‘formal' manumission; distinctions between churches and monasteries in regard to the admission of former slaves; convergences between Roman law and canon law; and, in the sixth century, the direct involvement of both the papacy and the imperial court in establishing a regulating template for admitting former slaves.     

Praxis and theory in the writing of American historical geography

The use of primary sources in the writing of American historical geography is a relatively recent practice, and one which warrants more attention than it has been accorded. Of immediate appeal to historical geographers when they finally turned to primary sources were contemporary travel accounts, topographies and geographies. Because they were, and still are, much used, and because they reveal in simple and direct fashion the difficulty of encountering past “reality”, these kinds of material are the focus here. To turn from these essentially qualitative sources to more quantitative sources neither resolves nor avoids the issue we wish to raise, the problem of subjectivity. There are two sides to the problem of subjectivity; the first concerns the contemporary as observer and recorder of facts; the second concerns the latter-day scholar as observer and recorder of facts. The old conception of the geographer as an impersonal observer is no longer acceptable. In the quest for an understanding of the geography of the past, it may well be that “objectivity is the fruit of genuine subjectivity”, and that what is required is a collective effort of subjective scholars engaged in a continuing dialogue.