Prof Kate Cooper - Professor of History

I’m a social and cultural historian of late antiquity, the period when the Roman Empire had begun its long decline and the ‘barbarian’ kingdoms and empires had begun to take root. (In other words, roughly AD 100 to 700.) My research explores how women, children, and adolescents changed history in various ways. I’m especially interested in religious and social change, and the distinctive (and sometimes disturbing!) institutions of daily life such as marriage, asceticism, slavery, domestic exploitation, and violence.

Story-telling and memory are at the heart of my teaching and writing. How do we know what we know? What traces did the people of the past leave? What pressures or power relations led to certain stories being preserved, while others were allowed to lie untold and then forgotten? These are important questions for the history of women and children, but they are also important for any historian.

When I was growing up in Washington, DC in the 1960s, I was fascinated by the strange world of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Alabama, the world my mother came from. Some of the memories were incredibly painful – indeed, the more painful stories were the ones that lived on in memory the most vividly. It may seem like a remarkable jump from there to early Christianity and the fall of the Roman Empire, but I find that understanding the inner workings of a different place and time is in some ways just as challenging when you are studying a world close to your own as one farther away.

One of my keenest interests is in women, as the tellers of the ‘viral stories’ of the ancient world – some of which still survive – and as the heroines of many of those stories. The book I’m most proud of, Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women, explores what we know about these women, assessing what we can reasonably say we know about women’s leadership and agency, as well as the distinctive role of women as what modern social science might call ‘brand ambassadors’.

My first book, The Virgin and the Bride (1996), offered a breakthrough analysis of the changing rhetoric of gender in late antiquity, tracing how and why virginity replaced motherhood as the iconic credential of female moral authority. The second, The Fall of the Roman Household (2007), took up the problem of the Christianization of the family from a more empirical perspective, arguing for the continued importance of the married female householders who had been ‘left behind’ by the rise of the virginal ideal.

I am currently completing a book on the women of St Augustine’s Confessions, which will be published by Basic Books (USA) in 2022. You can find an episode of In Our Time in which I talk about this project under ‘Media Experience’ at the bottom of this page.

A related research, project The Family in Slavery and Freedom, explores the differing experiences of elite and enslaved women and children and the problem of domestic exploitation in the wider framework of late Roman power relations, drawing on studies of comparatively document-rich slave societies in later periods. (There is surprisingly good evidence, for example, for violence against enslaved women by female owners at this period, which resonates with what we know about the plantations of the Antebellum South.) A recently completed edited collection, Conflict and Social Control in Late Antiquity: The Violence of Small Worlds (jointly edited with Jamie Wood) surveys relations of dominance and exploitation in the small-scale social structures of the late Roman world.

More information about my research is available via PURE

Email - kate.cooper@rhul.ac.uk

Twitter - @kateantiquity