James Robert Burns

I research the Early Middle Ages. My doctoral research is on household slavery in sixth-century Gaul, as part of the ERC-funded project on 'Domestic Slavery and Sexual Exploitation in the Households of Europe, North Africa, and the Near East, from Constantine to c. AD 900 / AH 287' (dosseproject.com). My article on banditry, sanctity and slavery in the early medieval West was the only piece dealing with a period before 1700 to be shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society early career article prize in 2025. 

I did my BA in History at the University of Oxford and my MA in Medieval Studies at the University of York. I joined Leicester in January 2023.

My doctoral project is 'Slavery in the Households of Sixth-Century Gaul'. For this, I am researching the lives of slaves as depicted in the works of Gregory of Tours and other contemporary sources; the moral economy of the Merovingian household; the relationship of slavery with hospitality and the written word; the sexual use and abuse of the enslaved; and other related issues.

I am a team member of the DoSSE project, which brings together scholars of the Frankish, Byzantine, Islamic, Syriac, and Jewish worlds to compare how different late antique communities maintained the Roman legacy of domestic slavery and reshaped attitudes towards the sexual exploitation of slaves. My colleagues and I have blogged about our research on the DoSSE website. Our work is funded by the European Research Council (grant agreement no. 101001429).

I have published on the theory and historiography of slavery. My publications have also discussed sources from early medieval Britain and Ireland as well as Merovingian and Carolingian Francia. Beyond the focus of my PhD research, I have particular interests in early medieval banditry and depictions of strange phenomena.

Articles and Chapters

'The Private Lives of Domestic Slaves and Their Owners in Early Merovingian Gaul', Medieval People (forthcoming 2026). 

'Puer, id est servus: The Conflation of Slaves and Children in Late Antique Latin', in Christian Laes (ed.), Children at Work in a Period of Transition, 400–1100 AD (Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming 2025).

'Between Theft and Treason: Latrocinium in Carolingian Capitularies', Early Medieval Europe, Early View (2025), pp. 1–24 [link].

‘The Bandit, the Holy Man, and the Slave in the Early Medieval West’, Journal of Late Antiquity, 17, no.2 (2024), pp. 395–421 [link].

‘“Slaves” and “Slave Owners” or “Enslaved People” and “Enslavers”?’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 7th series, 2 (2024), pp. 371–388 [link].

‘Dragons, Wolves and Spectral Armies: Signs of Wartime in Early Medieval Annals’, Quaestio Insularis: Selected Proceedings of the Cambridge Colloquium in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, 23 (2023), pp. 1–23 [link].

Book Reviews

In the Journal of Medieval History, 51.2 (2025), pp. 253–254: Toni Alimi, 'Slaves of God: Augustine and Other Romans on Religion and Politics' (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2024) [link].

Shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society early career article prize (2025).

Doctoral studentship, ERC-funded, at the University of Leicester (2023).

The Garmonsway Prize for the best average coursework mark among the Medieval Studies MA cohort at the University of York (2021).

Scholarship (£5,000 tuition fee waver) for the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York (2021).

The Sears Prize for the best undergraduate History dissertation by a student at Lincoln College, Oxford (2020).

I have co-organised four panels on the relationship between morality and the economy in the Middle Ages for the International Medieval Congress in Leeds (July 2025). One of these panels will be on 'The Ethics of Slaving', where I will be presenting my research.

In 2024, I presented papers about my doctoral research at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds and the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo.