The lecture examines six different communities in post-Roman Britain engaged in recycling old Roman ceramics and glass. We will learn something about each of these groups–the kinds of people they were, the recent histories of the places in which they lived, the strategies they developed for procuring old Roman pots and glass, and then about the ways they chose to use this material. We will thereby broaden the story of the transition from Roman to not-Roman to include not just politics, but the lived experience of people who were having to figure out how to be in a period of radical material loss.
Professor Fleming is a Professor of History at Boston College, and a 2013 MacArthur Fellow. Her books include Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400-1070 (2011), Kings and Lords in Conquest England (2004), and Domesday Book and the Law: Society and Legal Custom in Early Medieval England (2003). She has received grants or fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Harvard Society of Fellows; the Bunting Institute; the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University; and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is a fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Royal Historical Society, and the London Society of Antiquaries.
