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This chapter discusses the ‘Prosopography of the Byzantine World’ (PBW), which appears in many pages of this book. It is a British Academy project that is largely funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The chapter also introduces the concept of prosopography, and mentions several conclusions that PBW drew from the papers and from extensive discussions that occurred in the framework of the colloquium.

Administration produces documents. In that respect Roman administration does not differ from its modem counterparts. An identifying mark of Roman administration is the libellous, submitted to the emperor or to an official by a petitioner-even when the petitioner presents himself in person before the emperor, as so many embassies and legates of cities did. All appointments to senatorial and equestrian offices were made in written form, by codicilli, letters of appointment, although we can be sure that governors of the great military commands, if setting out from Rome (or from the emperor's place of residence at the time) received their commission personally and orally from the emperor. However, all this material, with some unique exceptions outside Egypt (and a few other localities in the Roman Near East), has vanished completely. To reconstruct the working of Roman administration from what has survived is difficult and only in part possible; if we persist against the odds in trying to do so, we are bound to stumble continuously against the limits of the available evidence and of our knowledge alike. This chapter discusses the administrators and prosopographical material; and the contested existence of rules governing patterns of promotion.

This chapter uses a prosopographical approach to explore the course of English politics between 994 and 1066 from a new perspective. It reconstructs the careers of Ealdorman Leofwine and his descendants, earls Leofric, Ælfgar, Eadwine, and Morcar. This was the only family which retained comital power throughout this period: so what accounts for this family's political persistence? It is argued that the family made some wise political choices, and enjoyed its fair share of good fortune. A corrective to the literature is offered, which has tended to focus on the course of ‘national’ or ‘court’ politics, the house of Godwine, and on consensual unity. The chapter shows that there was an important local dimension to political development, and stresses the importance of factional rivalry.

In an attempt to elucidate the social and political environment in which Josephus composed his works, this chapter tries to determine the extent to which the Judean writer was ingratiated with the imperial court and the local aristocracy at Rome. Prominent in their investigation is the hitherto unidentifiable Epaphroditus to whom Josephus’ final three compositions were dedicated. After parsing the relevant literary and epigraphic evidence, the identity of Josephus’ patron remains problematic. He cannot, with confidence, be identified as Nero’s a libellis (freedman in charge of petitions) or with the freedman M. Mettius Epaphroditus mentioned in the Suda, despite the fact that he was a grammarian and literary critic. The chapter argues that Josephus was excluded from the inner circles of the Roman elite during the first century CE, especially in the second half of his literary career under the Emperor Domitian.

This chapter begins with a description of the history of Pythagorean societies after the death of Pythagoras. It then considers the criteria used by Aristoxenus in compiling his list of Pythagoreans. Compared with those applied in modern works, it is argued that, beyond a critical approach to the sources, we enjoy no special advantages over the first historian of Pythagoreanism. This is followed by a discussion of the prosopography and chronology of the Pythagoreans.

Work on the Table Talk for its own sake is a fairly recent development in the latter third of the twentieth century. Scholars before that time were interested in looking at the essays as literary imitations or preoccupied with the reality of the dinner parties and their participants. Jones' research contributed a strong, prosopographical foundation for the study of Plutarch, his literary output and his time. Teodorsson continued the descriptive trend in his thorough, directory-style commentary, including an additional focus on authenticity, or literal truth. As more modern interpretive concerns took hold, Harrison analysed Table Talk as a literary work, and tried to explain a lack of structure as a hidden structure. And finally, some current scholarly approaches – Klotz and König are examples – have begun to study the Table Talk in multiple contexts, using a range of analytic techniques, such as considering the audience as “active readers,” or borrowing from new historicism, and positing a new, unbounded unity from the text's rich diversities.

This chapter discusses Armenian sources, which can be divided into two categories: historical compositions and other sources, such as prosopographical data. Each category of Armenian sources is discussed and examined in detail. The chapter determines that Armenian sources appear manageable in the context of prosopography. Aside from providing records of the history of Armenia, these sources can supply useful and sometimes unique information about eleventh-century Byzantine history.

This chapter provides an overview of sources in Arabic. It studies medieval Arabic narrative sources that deal with the period 1025–1204, and presents a survey of medieval Islamic prosopographical material, which includes autobiographical and biographical literature. An analysis of the present state of research on Islamic prosopography is also included. Certain ancillary sources, i.e. inscriptions, are mentioned here. Ancillary sources are considered to be useful prosopographical tools.

This chapter discusses Byzantine prosopography and several Latin sources that come from the archives of Genoa, Pisa, Venice, and Barcelona. It attempts to show in what respects Byzantine prosopography for the twelfth century can be enriched thanks to deeds, which are able to provide information on ambassadors and merchants. Deeds can also show the Latins who settled either permanently or temporarily in Constantinople, or in the provincial cities of the Empire. The information gathered from each archive is discussed separately.

This chapter discusses the extant sources that are relevant to Byzantine prosopography. The sections in the chapter are divided according to the various political entities. The first section is on the Byzantine provinces, followed by the former territories of Byzantine between 1071 and 1204, the Lombard principalities, and the Duchies of Naples, Amalfi, and Gaeta and southern Latium.

This chapter discusses the origins of the project, the historian's concepts of database entities, ‘humanities computing’, and the new dynamics of collaboration. Prosopography in the sense of biographical compendia of exemplary males, especially office-holders in the service of the state, or church, grew out of those. As other papers in this volume show, an electronic database offers huge potential advantages over the old handwritten card-index methods of assembling a prosopography. This model, of standards adoption and standards building, is no less relevant to projects such as PASE, PBE, and other prosopographical projects. It holds out the realistic prospect, for example, of creating a compendium of all Anglo-Saxon materials, whether historical, literary, linguistic, visual or archaeological.

The Prosopography was very much A. H. M Jones's project. He raised and managed the finances; he organized accommodation and generally exercised control, though with a loose rein. Already in 1966 he was planning to bring one of his former pupils, Dr Mustapha Abbadi, over to Cambridge to work for the Prosopography. However, the death of Jones came as a devastating blow. That it was all sorted out so quickly and efficiently was due in very large part to Moses Finley and the British Academy, which adopted the Prosopography as one of its major research projects, as well as to the goodwill towards Jones and the project among many leading scholars.

This chapter reflects on the contribution of prosopography to Byzantine studies during the second half of the twentieth century. To get it right, the set of identities has to be comprehensive, each identity has to be complete and correct, and its points of contact with other identities have to be clearly visible. Prosopography retrieves and labels the bits, then it boxes the kits, from which past identities are assembled and interpreted scientifically. While it may not be committed to delivering finished solutions, it lays out the steps by which they are reached, through its absolute commitment to the principles which make it a distinct form of historical science: that every piece of historical data should be related to an identifiable historical person, that multiple identities should not be confused, single identities should not be multiplied and collective identities should always be defined in terms of connections between individuals.

For certain periods of the middle Byzantine era, seals, especially lead seals (molybdoboulla), played much the same role as do inscriptions for the Roman epoch. This chapter begins by stressing the impressive size of the epigraphic material. The number and importance vary through the centuries, but even from the most casual glance, one gets the impression that in two respects, both important to prosopography, developments reached their summit in the eleventh century: the number of seals, and the data that they offer. Working with such material involves at least three steps: reading, dating and interpretation.

This chapter examines Trajan's accession in terms of political deals and putting the chosen candidate in charge of the nearest army. On the evidence of prosopography, Trajan's military and political career was much less distinguished than the official story suggests. He was not the obvious best man for the job. Pliny, in the Panegyricus, does what he can, and affirms that Trajan was persuaded to take supreme power only because his country so urgently needed him. If anyone was engaged in discussing government by ‘adoptive’ monarchy, as a way of combining dynastic stability with the choice of the most appropriate successor, such discussions had no effect on the accession of Trajan. Even his formal adoption by Nerva was minimized, for he kept his biological father's name.

The most informative sources for personal names at Heraclea Pontica are the stamps engraved on the neck of amphoras manufactured in the workshops of this city and the external inscriptions mentioning Heracleots abroad, whereas the local epigraphic crop is rather poor. The name-stock is predominantly Greek, with a quite marked Megarian stamp. Although the evidence for the non-Greek onomastic stock is scarce, it is possible to identify some Iranian, Bithynian, Paphlagonian and Phrygian names, as well as some Lallnamen, which the author tries to classify and to comment on. Among the bearers of non-Greek names there is no person of high standing. It is surprising that there are only a few Bithynian and Paphlagonian names. Therefore, nothing that might individualise the name-stock of the Mariandynian hinterland is to be found.

This chapter discusses the biographical dictionary’s indebtedness to a long tradition in Arabic letters of prosopography and exemplarity, and specifically how Fawwaz draws on both the form and the content of this tradition and yet also draws away from it in giving emphasis to particular subjects and pursuits, highlighting women’s ambitions and achievements and minimizing their embeddedness in ancestry. It traces her use of well-known premodern sources. It considers Fawwaz’s own explication of method in her preface and the extent to which 19^th-century women could even access sources for history writing, an issue raised by what might seem the puzzling absence of certain leading premodern biographical dictionaries that feature female subjects.

This chapter begins on the paradigmatic instance of a hybrid print/digital work at the onset of the digital networked era—Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) by Dennis Ashbaugh, Kevin Begos Jr., and William Gibson (1992)—to call for a method of “network archaeology” extending media archaeology. Network archaeology facilitates understanding the sense of history in our postlinear age of digital networks—one filled with buzzing, flitting ephemeral or dynamic artifacts that make a mockery of archiving, yet that urgently requires methods not just of archiving but of open, transparent archiving. Past eras created networked artifacts and systems in their own way. The chapter braids together research on web archiving, scientific workflows (data-analysis workflows facilitating reproducible research), data provenance, and digital humanities prosopography to make the case for remembering networks through new digital archiving methods. Remembering networks, it argues, is foundational for providing our networked age with its appropriate, distinctive sense of history.