The Cambridge Late Antique Network Seminar (CLANS) invites abstracts for a one-day workshop on religion, space, trade, and their interaction in the late-antique Mediterranean and beyond. This workshop, entitled ‘The Trade in Religious Imagination in Late Antiquity’, seeks to explore how people across the expanses of the Roman and Sasanian Empires, and those at their borders, engaged with religion. We are especially interested in moving beyond current narratives of coexistence or simplified contestation, inviting participants to think of theoretical approaches to the problems of understanding religion and identity in this period. The workshop will take place on Friday 24 April.
We would like to reflect on how the networks associated with religious activity might change how we view our case studies in different regions. How did different areas and communities learn about, consume, and interpret religious material from elsewhere? We are interested in the formation of religious identities that jar against or were dominated by hegemonic ideas and practices – thus, in turn, how dominant cultures absorb and contain antagonistic identities beyond oppression or acceptance. The idea of ‘trade’ is of central importance to this workshop. We are interested in religious ideas contextualised in space and through movement – how premodern societies responded to and accessed mobile spiritual offerings that were not just available but sold and consumed. We want to link space to power, asking how established trade routes – Roman or otherwise – allowed some religious communities to form while precluding others from flourishing.
We welcome contributions of 20 to 30 minutes. We give participants the opportunity to discuss a set of primary sources and critically engage with one or two pieces of recent scholarship rather than delivering a traditional argumentative paper. We hope that this will create an open and interdisciplinary discussion challenging current narratives of religion in the first millennium. We also strongly encourage early-career researchers to send in proposals in order to generate stronger discussions across a range of expertise. The workshop will be held at the University of Cambridge.
Interested applicants are invited to submit a short proposal of around 300 words outlining how their current research interacts with the themes of this workshop, and indicating which materials and topics they would contribute to the workshop. Please send proposals to clans@classics.cam.ac.uk by Friday 13 March 2026. Participation in the one-day workshop will be free, but we will unfortunately not be able to provide or refund accommodation.
Note: this is not a Classical Association event – please contact the organisers directly with any enquiries.