Ambiguous Property: From Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages

In the first phase (in which our project had the title “Göttliches Eigentum”), when we looked at changes of property regimes, both the notion of changes and that of property were examined. Our analysis revealed that the emergence of (particularly private) property was heavily influenced by a religious-intellectual category that contrasted with the legal regulation of everyday practices. Heritage seemed to be one of the fundamental drivers for this reconceptualisation, along with the shift from divine agency and law (Codex Hammurabi; Torah) to human agency and the new legal frameworks of civil law (Codex Iustinianus). The novel questions that arise from the first funding phase address an increasing ambivalence among the new forms of ownership that emerged with legally secured private property concepts, as well as new agents that set and enforce new regulatory frameworks, such as the role of law, state, and church. The findings from the first phase lead to a key question for the second phase: How did forms of ambiguous divine ownership evolve through inherited and appropriated property, together with the countertendency of property and heritage renunciation? To address this, the project will specifically examine the personal, institutional, structural, and long-term consequences of the ambivalence between the appropriation and rejection of property by using the medium of writing (e.g., testaments, deeds or contracts, legal and ritual texts, and inscriptions) as a source base that can shed light on new multi-layered forms and inherent conflicts of property in pre-modern times. There are three complexes forcing us to rethink the idea of property from both the public and private perspectives. First, the constitution of subjectivity and social persona can be analysed on the basis of ambiguous and negative references to rights of disposal rather than exclusively a positive affirmation of such rights. Second, the renunciation of forms of disposition and the subsequent attribution of thing-domination to divine instances seem to lead to new temporal chains of long-term property, characterised by concealment, ambiguity, and the separation of short-term usufruct and long-lasting responsibility, adding tension to the traditional mechanisms of ownership in antiquity. Third, the emergence of new models of sharing economies, studied from a “degrowth” and gender perspective, helps in reconsidering the consequences of a successful religious asceticism and the modification of property acquisitions and renunciations or dispositions that accompany a new statehood within the changes from early imperial times to the late Roman Empire. These dynamics will be brought together in areas of investigation like the emergence of the Roman imperial cult with its new, pervasive dynamics of appropriation of public and religious spaces and the rejection of such cult forms by early Christians; the development of property chains through the donation of goods to Graeco-Roman temples and early Christian churches; the dispute about the commodification of nature, land, and goods; and the introduction of inheritance taxes to help the poor. By focusing on these research areas, the three complexes will be studied with the following aims: first, to understand ancient rights of acquisition and disposal as being formed by property chains and an evolving ownership system which cannot fully be mapped onto contemporary legal or sociological categories; second, to modify the traditional view of a strict dichotomy between radicalisation and crisis-related challenges by analysing the drastic structural changes regarding property in the Roman Empire. In fact, the historical contextualisation of divine property points to a paradox in which a discontinuous increase of private property owned by individuals, families, and institutions (churches, monasteries, states) was radicalised and legally strengthened through the development of negative processes such as rejection, renunciation, or even expropriation of the very same private property (partly via the same agents) during imperial times (1st century BCE - 3rd century CE) and even more in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.