Abstract/Summary

This thesis considers the use of ‘moral communities’ for understanding social transformation at the end of the Western Roman empire. It locates this approach in the field of social and moral transformations in Late Antiquity and suggests the directions in which ‘moral communities’ can approach complex social ties predicated on behaviour and hierarchy, complementing existing work on ethnicity and identity in the late Roman world. The introductory section is concluded by an introduction to the methodological approach: a qualitative analysis of the moral language in prose inscriptions from the region of Burgundian hegemony in South-Eastern Gaul across the fourth to seventh centuries AD. Chapter 1 addresses the practitioners, recipients, and locations of epigraphic moral language in late-antique Gaul. It upholds scholarly consensus that this formed an elite practice but raises critical observations about previous methods to quantify commemorative data according to gender, ethnic and age. Chapter 2 develops this by considering epigraphic literacy, and suggests that the audience of epigraphic virtue was far larger than the social group that participated in epigraphic commemoration. Through a close analysis of selected inscriptions, Chapter 3 then demonstrates the existence of clear chronological shifts in the moral language of the corpus and shows that these cannot be explained through decreasing literacy. This is followed by Chapter 4, an analysis of moral epithets that are unique to the region, that have a unique meaning or use within the region, or that are absent from the region. This analysis indicates the use of epithets to delineate new gender and age boundaries and identifies the co-existence of local and regional trends. Chapter 5 analyses the changing narrative function of moral language vis-à-vis other shifts in epitaph content. Chapter 6 situates these findings in the context of Burgundian social and political history and Chapter 7 synthesises the thesis findings.