Networks, Women, Bishops, Early Middle Ages, Late Antiquity
This essay brings together results from two research projects based at the University of
Sheffield, The Migration of Faith: Clerical Exile in Late Antiquity (325–c. 600), and Women,
Conflict and Peace: Gendered Networks in Early Medieval Narratives. The Migration of
Faith uses quantitative approaches, such as social network analysis, to illuminate the role of
late antique exiled clerics in disseminating ideas and practices through their personal and
ecclesiastical networks. One outcome of this approach has been the identification of a far
more prominent role for women, especially elite women, in these clerical networks than has
heretofore been acknowledged. While this is an important observation, new approaches
championed by the Gendered Networks project, in particular analysis of narrative networks
created by literary texts, help to refine our understanding of this phenomenon further and to
identify its rhetorical potential for late antique and early medieval authors. This essay examines
how and why different stories about two high profile exile cases, Liberius, a fourthcentury
bishop of Rome, and Wilfrid, bishop of York (c. 634–709/10), highlight and change
the roles of female characters in the networks they describe.