My work at Tübingen predominately focuses on the oaths sworn during interactions between groups who held to different cultural norms and beliefs in the late-antique Mediterranean (fourth-seventh centuries CE). Such oaths featured on both micro and macro scales: mobile workers undertaking frontier labour routinely swore in confirmation of their employment, just as representatives of political leaders concluded treaties by offering pacts on behalf of their respective groups. Crucially, not only is there a significant yet underexplored corpus of material preserving the details of these oaths, but this data reveals the flexibility inherent in these promises, which changed in response to the mobile parties involved. By examining the development of these relatively formulaic agreements over the longue durée of Late Antiquity, the impact of mobile groups, and the ideas and rituals they brought with them, can be traced across a range of social contexts. This research is primarily geared towards the completion of a chapter of my book, on the swearing of oaths in Late Antiquity.

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