The End of Popular Participation? City Politics in Post-Imperial Hispania

By the sixth century, political, social, and demographic changes brought traditional popular urban participation in late antique Hispania to an end. This crisis, however, did not result in a complete abandonment of non-elite participation. While sources tend to downplay the intervention of non-elite actors and favor the view of a “universal” consensus, the written evidence occasionally betrays the political action of popular or middling groups. This talk offers different criteria to conceptualize non-elite actors in the textual and material evidence and advances some ideas on how to approach non-elite participation in post-imperial cities.

Damián Fernández is Associate Professor of History at Northern Illinois University. He has published on the social, institutional, and economic history of the Iberian Peninsula in late antiquity, including a monograph titled Aristocrats and Statehood in Western Iberia, 300-600 CE. He is currently co-authoring a translation and commentary of the seventh-century law code known as Liber Iudiciorum.

Please register here if you plan to attend.